Japanese firm to build world's greenest passenger ferry

Zero-emission passenger travel is set to go nautical, as Japanese engineering firm IHI Corp this week announced plans to launch the world's largest battery-powered ferry.

The company has completed a basic design for a 30-metre long plug-in ferry that could carry 800 passengers. It will be powered with rechargeable batteries that would enable the ferry to cruise about 120km on a charge of six to eight hours, the company said.

Total battery capacity would be about 3 megawatt hours – 300 times greater than the 10 kilowatt hours of an all-electric minicar.

Smaller battery-powered boats are already in use, but IHI's ferry would be " the world's first large plug-in vessel", an unnamed spokesman told Agence France-Presse news agency yesterday.

"It would emit no carbon dioxide or nitrogen oxide. We also aim to slash fuel costs," he said, adding that while the construction costs would be about 60 per cent higher than a conventional ferry overheads were expected to fall over time.

The company's shipbuilding subsidiary, IHI Marine United, plans to launch the plug-in ferry by 2015, when it expects high-performance rechargeable batteries to be available at a lower cost.

Japan made waves in the martime sector last year when Auriga Leader, the world's first container ship to be partly poweby solar panels, was launched from Kobe port.

Jointly developed by Japanese companies Nippon Yusen and Nippon Oil Corp, it is being used to deliver Toyota Prius hybrid cars to the US.