Since steel price and delivery became a huge challenge for the whole newbuild maritime industry, Aurelia has focused on retrofit solutions studying the potential of existing vessels and converting them for low emission sailing.
They believe that retrofitting is one of the most impactful solutions to quickly reduce CO2 emissions in the maritime business. Together with Aloft Shipping and Nepa Group. They introduced the Wind Propulsion Container Vessel.
It consists of retrofitting the design of an old container vessel to be primarily wind-driven.
* The vessel is optimized to minimize CO2 emissions and uses hybrid electric/diesel propulsion when in port or when there is not enough wind to sail.
* The innovative integration of sails into the design of the container ship reduces the vessel’s footprint and ensures good integration with container operations. On the North Atlantic route, the CO2 emissions compared to similar-sized fuel-powered vessels are reduced 8 times.
* The vessel sails 86% of the time, consuming about 50% less fuel than before retrofitting
On the other hand, During the 2017 Maritime Convention at SNAME , Raffaele Frontera was impressed by the tremendous talent of a group of student winners of the Dr. James A. lisnyk student ship design Competition, which has been won three years in a row by the same group.
During these years a beautiful friendship was born between Raffaele Frontera and the Argentinean group, which made Raffaele think of protecting and further developing this talent
Therefore Raffaele Frontera decided to found this company based on the talent of these guys in developing zero-emission designs with the signature of Ton Bos, who will guarantee the maximum operational efficiency of such innovative vessels based on his 37 years of experience in the maritime field.
The team has won the first award on 3 consecutive occasions, all of them with at least one member of the Aurelia team participating. In 2017 two designs were carried out simultaneously, an AHTS, in 2018 a Fisheries Research Vessel (FRV), and in 2019 MY and an ALV.
