About
Greenships was founded by Stas Margaronis, president of California-based Santa Maria Shipowning & Trading Inc. Stas has spent over a decade fighting to build new ships in the United States. He proposes ships powered by clean diesel fuel that will reduce long-haul trucking and cut truck carbon emissions. By law, ships operating between U.S. ports must be built in the United States, so the greenship effort will not only build greener ships, it will create new shipbuilding jobs, new mariner jobs and new cargo-handling jobs.
Stas is working with a Dutch design team to include the most fuel-efficient functions on to new ships including a diesel-electric engine that may one day deploy battery power for marine propulsion. The ships will also operate with improved hydrodynamics designs that will cut fuel and carbon emissions further. In 2009, Stas proposed to the California Air Resources Board (C.A.R.B.) that a daily container ship service carrying 300 containerized truckloads between Northern and Southern California and 300 back will cut most of the state’s goal of cutting 3.5 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions by 2020.
Stas has worked with the U.S. Coast Guard to get reduced manning permission to operate the ships in the United States as cost-efficiently as possible. He also made presentations to U.S. trucking companies about investing in ships for their long-haul trucking needs. In September, 2009 Santa Maria supported the Oregon Port of Astoria’s application for a U.S. Department of Transportation grant to operate a two ship service between Astoria and Southern California that could eliminate 100 long-haul truck trips per day.
