On request of Royal Boskalis Westminster N.V. a comprehensive research was performed regarding emission free maintenance dredging in a harbour environment. The project site is the Maasmond at the port of Rotterdam. It covers an area of almost 10 km2 and, on average, a monthly volume of 400.000 cubic meters of sediment needs to be dredged. The operations are currently performed using trailing suction hopper dredgers (TSHD). Several new fully working emission free concept work methods were designed. These were assessed using a multi-criteria analysis, where emphasis was placed on energy reduction, reliability, interference, risk and safety. Given the scope of this research, costs are not decisive. General conclusions for the solutions contain the splitting of the total process. As the energy consumption of a conventional hopper is too high to operate on a battery cell, the work method is split into three different processes being:
(i) gathering, (ii) pumping and (iii) transportation. Two work methods scored best in this research, Sloped Water Injection Dredging (SWID) and the Fully Autonomous Submerged Dredger (FASD). SWID consists of Water Injection Dredging vessels, fixed structures and autonomous barges. FASD contains the design of a submerged dredging vessel. It can be concluded that a harbour environment is suitable to perform emissions free maintenance dredging with only small alterations to the current technology.