Life-Cycle Assessment for Sustainable Inland Shipping on South Holland’s Waterways

There are currently only 16 inland cargo vessels with batteries installed listed in the MBF ShipRegister. Although there is still a long way to go to decarbonize the inland waterways around the world, it is becoming clear that batteries will play an important role in this.

Quan van der Knokke, a student at the Delft University of Technology and the Leiden University in the Netherlands, performed a Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA) for sustainable shipping on South Holland’s waterways to obtain his MSc degree. The results from this LCA show that a battery-electric propulsion system has the lowest climate change, acidification, photochemical oxidant formation, and particulate matter formation impacts on the selected case study barge, and that this advantage increases further in the future.

You can read more about the results from this LCA in the report available below.