Andreas Malm Justad, Bjørn Børresen, Erik Ferdinand Jebsen Vinje, Ingeranne Strøm Nakstad, Ola Gundersen Skåre, and Tone Alexandra Dale designed a ship for efficiently transporting hydrogen over large distances, while at the same time keeping costs and emissions down.

With Hydrogen playing a crucial role in the transition to a society less dependent on fossil fuel, it is imperative to find efficient ways of transporting it from where the hydrogen is produced, to the place where the energy is needed.   

As of today, there are few reliable ways to use ships for this purpose, mostly because of the difficulty of keeping the hydrogen at temperatures at -253 degrees celsuius. However, the design that the students came up with, solves this problem, and allows for long-range ship-transportation with minimal loss of energy. This will again allow nations, who want to transit to hydrogen, to get their Hydrogen from the most environmentally friendly source available, such as Norwegian hydroelectric energy.

One of the designers, Erik Ferdinand Jebsen Vinje, thinks that being a student confers certain advantages to the whole design process.

– Being a student, there are no boundaries, no limits set by anyone. This gave us the liberty to explore new ways to take the challenges head on. The project has been challenging, but also very rewarding. It has been very interesting trying to find new solutions to problems with no explicit answers, says Vinje.

The Lisnyk Student Ship Design Competition challenges groups of young people to design theoretical but practical cutting-edge vessels. The competition is Open to the world's colleges and universities supporting maritime careers, and the program is meant to foster teamwork and learning through competition. You can read more about the competition here.