Network-Based Planning of Refuelling Infrastructure for the Maritime Transition to Clean Fuels

This thesis studies the economic coordination barriers that constrain the decarbonisation of maritime transport. Ships powered by alternative fuels lack refuelling infrastructure, creating a coordination failure that locks the sector into carbon dependence. We develop a spatial framework integrating a constrained optimisation problem with global vessel movement data to quantify the minimum infrastructure required to sustain existing trade flows under alternative-fuel adoption. Using AIS observations, tanker and cargo movements are reconstructed into directed networks, each coarsened into roughly 100 high-traffic hubs, and subsequently merged into a unified network for optimisation. The model is solved under two rollout strategies: an optimal rollout, which minimises infrastructure at each adoption level, and a monotone rollout, which captures the irreversibility of infrastructure investments by enforcing cumulative path dependence. Results show (1) geographically uneven adoption, with the earliest hub activations concentrated in East Asia and later entry elsewhere ; (2) cargo vessels transition to alternative fuels earlier than tankers ; and (3) outcomes are consistent across rollout strategies