Niko Dalpis: Emigreen

It was either find something interesting “or take up Soduku” admitted Niko Dalpis, the man behind Emigreen, a company responsible for the ‘greening’ of a truly huge range of high profile workboats that cover everything from Dutch harbour craft to Norwegian polar exploration vessels.

He’d been working on the noise control of large industrial engines but the end of the interesting developmental phase left him searching for another diversion: it’s probably to the marine industry’s advantage that the puzzles weren’t particularly engaging. So, he turned his mind to the next issue he saw coming under the spotlight: emissions.

Even though back in the 90s there were no customers for the technology, the ideas that sprang from his ‘Sudoku replacement’ propelled him into launching the solutions company that later became Emigreen.

At the time, the response wasn’t overwhelming and he admitted “nothing much happened for quite a while”. However, in the early 2000s a new market segment emerged that was not so much interested in global issues but very local ones: “Luxury yachts tend to want clean decks,” he explained, “and they were willing to spend money to find a solution.”

By then the company, with its SCR-NOx and soot abatement technology, had its fingers in a lot of cross-sector pies and Mr Dalpis was aware that when emissions legislation started to catch up with cars, “it would only be a matter of time before it reached the rest of the marine industry”.

Then in 2007 a big catamaran project for the port of Rotterdam, the Nieuwe Maze, gave the company something to get its teeth into. But Emigreen soon found that while ‘clean’ commands cash outlay, most customers would rather it didn’t also demand extra room. “They wanted the project to be as green as possible,” said Mr Dalpis but the emissions cleaning system still had to be fitted inside the existing design’s footprint: “Like many customers, they didn’t want to sacrifice much space.”

Have things changed since then? “Well, no... we still often hear the same story about the requirements,” said Mr Dalpis. However, the apparent stumbling block has turned into a strength: “We now look to supply added-value, customised solutions where the system needs to be as small or as light as possible.”

But of course, greening a vessel can’t be at the cost of its reliability, or for that matter adding to the burden of onboard maintenance. “People often underestimate how challenging the hard engineering is... for example, with soot you collect it, then you have to find a way to clean the filters in situ without taking the system apart,” he explained. “To do this you need to add heat, which means you are quite literally playing with fire.”

However, to his satisfaction the Emigreen system on the MCS Anda waterways barge now has 25,000 hours under its belt and is “still running beautifully”. This more than proves the point: “We’ve managed to show the systems keep going, with a minimum of attention by engineers or operators... that’s good performance.”