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Container ships emitted 208 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) in 2015 (Olmer, Comer, Roy, Mao, & Rutherford, 2017), about as much as the entire economy of Vietnam (Global Carbon Atlas, nd). The busiest container shipping lane in the world is the transpacific corridor, and in 2015, ships moved 24 million twenty-foot-equivalent unit (TEU) containers, 46% of the world total, across the Pacific Ocean (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, 2016). Today, fossil fuels power container ships. In the future, if shipping is to decarbonize, zero-emission fuels must take their place. But long, deep-sea routes are particularly challenging to complete with zero-emission fuels, as these often contain less energy per unit volume than fossil fuels.

Hydrogen has been used to power cars, buses, trucks, and ferries, but never a large container ship (Hall, Pavlenko, & Lutsey, 2018). 1 Viking has plans for a 1,400-person (passengers plus crew) hydrogen fuel cell cruise ship, and there are small-and mediumsize hydrogen-powered container ship concepts, but none are on the water today. 2 That may change as the international shipping industry works to achieve the ambitions of the International Maritime Organization’s (IMO’s) initial greenhouse gas (GHG) strategy. Under the strategy, the IMO aims to cut international shipping’s GHG emissions by at