EU Funds Six Maritime Projects Under Its €3.4 Billion Innovation Fund

The European Commission selected six maritime technology projects within a package of 77 net-zero technology schemes that will jointly receive around €3.4 billion from the EU Innovation Fund. The call, known as IF25 NZT (Net-Zero Technologies 2025), funds the initiatives with revenue from the EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) and covers 23 countries in the European Economic Area.

Within the package, transport decarbonization accounts for 27 selected projects jointly requesting €1.3 billion. Of that total, ten innovative transport technology projects are requesting around €277 million, including the six maritime schemes, while another eight low-carbon fuel projects are requesting €122 million, five of which identify shipping as a key customer.

Among the maritime initiatives is GAFF, from Norway's Færder Tankers Norway AS, for medium-sized gas carriers capable of burning ammonia, LPG or MGO, with ship-to-ship ammonia bunkering. Ammonia Carriers A/S is behind RIPPLE, which envisions retrofitting four VLACs for dual-fuel ammonia operation, while Finnlines, with its FIN-SWE-EC project, will add batteries to the vessels Finnsirius and Finncanopus to reach an installed capacity of around 30 MWh per ship. Holland Maas Scheepvaart Beheer VII is developing RETRO-EMT, which combines onboard CO2 capture and wind-assisted propulsion on a feeder containership, Stillstrom is presenting OffshoreCharge for a 7.5 MVA offshore charger intended for electric vessels, and A.P. Moller-Maersk is proposing Seatron, the conversion of a 3,500 TEU containership to electric operation on the Bremerhaven-Hamburg-Gothenburg route.

The promoters of the selected projects were invited to begin preparing grant agreements with the European Climate, Infrastructure and Environment Executive Agency (CINEA), where final amounts, timelines and legal responsibilities will be defined. The Commission expects to announce the results of those negotiations in the first quarter of 2027, and clarified that the current selection does not yet amount to signed grants.

The 77 selected projects as a whole could jointly avoid around 290 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent over their first decade of operation, according to the Commission. With this round, the Innovation Fund's total portfolio will reach around 320 projects worth nearly €17 billion in committed grants, and the next call is scheduled for early December 2026.