Collaboration with Maritime Battery Forum

There is increased interest in low and zero emission technologies within the maritime sector. Batteries and hydrogen are examples of such technologies. With an increased interest in new and more environmentally friendly technology, comes new initiatives to help decrease uncertainties, gain experience and knowledge, and boost technology uptake.

The Ocean Hyway Cluster (OHC) is a Norwegian Hydrogen Cluster with the ambition to realize maritime use of hydrogen. The Maritime Battery Forum (MBF) was established in April 2014 with the ambition to make maritime batteries a global success.

Background
It is important to try and avoid unnecessary competition between similar initiatives. For a long time, the Maritime Battery Forum considered including other technologies like hydrogen that promote low emissions and are relevant to battery technology. In 2018 and early 2019, the OHC and MBF had a dialog discussing a potential merge between the two groups. The dialog concluded in initiating a collaboration, since OHC was allocated funding from Norwegian Innovation Clusters and was awarded arena status that made a merge of the two groups challenging.

Purpose and activities
The purpose of the collaboration between OHC and MBF is to make it easier for the members to gain experience and knowledge about hydrogen and battery technologies, to the extent possible within one platform instead of having many similar initiatives. Hydrogen and batteries are for a large part complimentary rather then competing technologies. Collaboration is important to reduce uncertainty and increase the market uptake of the two technologies.

For questions or comments, please contact:
The Maritime Battery Forum: Andrea Aarseth Langli, Managing Director, +47 993 52 693
The Ocean Hyway Cluster: Stein Kvalsund, CEO, + 47 976 98 785