JOINT INNOVATION PROGRAM
Maritime Blue facilitates strategic initiatives, Joint Innovation Projects (JIPs), business development, and teaming for grant opportunities to develop markets, implement demonstration projects, and drive early-stage technology to commercialization. Modeling other global centers of excellence, we use the collective strength of our Cluster to share resources, take advantage of funding mechanisms, and support strategic and feasibility planning.
STRATEGIC INITIATIVES
Blue Wind Supply Chain Collaborative
The Maritime Blue Wind collaborative is a nonregulatory coalition with a mission to support the strategic development and activation of Washington’s participation in the West Coast-wide floating OSW supply chain through a collaborative and community benefits approach.
Sustainable Maritime Fuels Collaborative
The Sustainable Maritime Fuels Collaborative brings together supply and demand stakeholders to accelerate production and use of sustainable maritime fuels and technologies in Washington.
JOINT INNOVATION PROJECTS
A zero-emission, clean transit concept for a high-speed hydrofoil craft using lightweight carbon fiber hull construction. Vision is to help relaunch the “Mosquito” fleet & reduce vehicle traffic. A collaborative approach is needed to address challenges & opportunities. The foil ferry can offer a safe, reliable & cost-effective option, while minimizing the environmental impact on air & water quality as well as marine life. Washington companies to develop state of the art technology & competence to support our region as a center of excellence for maritime decarbonization.
The Tacoma Tideflats area is uniquely poised to insert itself as an early adopter of private, enterprise scale 5G network and edge computing technology and set itself as a trailblazer on the path to innovation and sustainability to foster a growing maritime economy. The Tacoma Tideflats would benefit from the digitization of transportation, real time awareness of the port area, just-in-time arrival of vessels and lower carbon emissions due to shorter waiting times for port calls.
Regional collaboration to make Tacoma, WA the production and distribution nerve center for scaling up the use of clean hydrogen for port and maritime applications. Alternative fuels and energy are needed to reduce emissions from transportation and port operations. Hydrogen shows great promise, if it can be generated at scale in our region from renewable energy, as well as stored and transported in a safe manner. Tacoma Power has excess clean hydropower generation that can be utilized to make Green Hydrogen. They also need to provide energy for cold-ironing services to berthed vessels, which have large variances in power demand and timing.
Providing the technology and communications platform to allow the fishing and maritime sector to return to work safely and build a pilot that can be scaled to other sectors and regions. Every summer 10,000 plus people go to work in the Alaska based fisheries through Washington State. How do we support and enable this activity and workforce in a way that is safe and not contributing to the spread of COVID-19, threatening small communities throughout Alaska and hence, the entire fishery itself? How can we monitor and track the health of the workforce who is particularly high risk due to the nature of the work?
