DEVELOPMENT OF A 430 TONNE PILOT SHIP FOR OPERATION MID-2020’S

The Company is pleased to advise shareholders it has made the appointments of Capilano Maritime, C-FER Technologies, Tekkara Project Services and American Bureau of Shipping for the engineering, design and safety analysis required to achieve Class Approvals. The development of a 430-tonne capacity C-H2 Ship will leverage the successful design and approvals received for the 2,000-tonne capacity ship in March 2021.

Whilst the achievement of AIP remains a rigorous process to satisfy engineering, regulatory and safety requirements for this new vessel, the Company will benefit from a reduction in the amount of time and cost to the schedule in order to target AIP for the end of Q3 2021, and to ultimately target Full Class Approvals by late 2022.

The work program which commenced on June 1, 2021, will also focus on material selection, welding specifications and prototype design for the required ABS testing program, which will occur in 2022. Refer to Figure 1 below for an indicative timeline for the 430-tonne C-H2 ship.

Strategical reasons to move forward with a pilot-scale C-H2 ship, include:

1. GEV’s analysis of the near-term supply and demand for green hydrogen in the 2025-2030 timeframe, making this a world first for the marine transport of green hydrogen at scale.
2. The 430-tonne containment system fits within a Handymax sized vessel envelope which reduces the development time and cost, maintains a practical ship draft of 9 metres, whilst also optimising the scale of the ship to match hydrogen production volumes.
3. A smaller capacity ship aligns with opportunities under review for European and Asia Pacific demand centres for downstream applications such as grid injection (blending) and fuel cells.
4. Aligns with GEV’s own renewable energy and hydrogen export project of up to 1.5 GW of renewable energy, matched with a scaled production and delivery of green hydrogen from Northern Australia to Asia.

Timeline for GEV’s C-H2 Ship Development

THE KEY SPECIFICATIONS OF THE 430 TONNE C-H2 SHIP

The proprietary design for the containment system is made up of two large circular 12m diameter tanks, contained within the hull of the ship, that will store ambient temperature hydrogen at an operating pressure of 250 bar and will have a combined containment capacity of 430 tonnes of hydrogen.

One of the key considerations in designing a steel tank for storing hydrogen, is that the hydrogen molecule is so small it can enter the steel’s molecular structure and over time can cause the steel to suffer from embrittlement. Embrittlement is managed in our design by providing a liner such as stainless steel that prevents the steel structure from becoming damaged by the hydrogen.

The cargo tanks will be constructed with a liner of stainless steel surrounded by multiple high-strength steel layers. This layered approach has several advantages:

• The individual layers are capable of being economically produced with the appropriate mechanical properties (the wall thickness of a single layer tank of this dimension would be outside the normal range of steel plate production).
• Each layer can be formed easily to shape at the shipyard.
• The inner liner protects against hydrogen embrittlement.
• Should a fatigue crack initiate it cannot grow beyond the layer in which it originated.These features create a large tank that is economic to produce and has large safety margins.Propulsion will be electric drive supported by the rapid advancements in hydrogen blended generation and hydrogen fuel cells. GEV intends to fuel the ship with hydrogen from the storage tanks, providing a ‘zero-carbon’ shipping solution. The C-H2 ship will be equipped with dynamic positioning for rapid connect and disconnect of near-shore buoys.