The title of this post, Hydro­gen is used for more than you think, is per­haps too pre­sump­tu­ous. Per­haps you know all the uses of hydro­gen. But the fact is that if you take what is writ­ten in news­pa­pers and said on the radio and tele­vi­sion as any reflec­tion of the uses of hydro­gen, you are miss­ing out on sig­nif­i­cant appli­ca­tions. In this arti­cle, we go through known and less-known uses of hydro­gen. You may dis­cov­er a new area that you didn’t already know about.

Catalog of uses

To avoid this blog post degen­er­at­ing into an ency­clo­pe­dia, where every appli­ca­tion is explained in length and breadth, I must curb my desire to delve into the topic.

There­fore, this text doesn’t dis­cuss dif­fer­ent uses and appli­ca­tions, explain the pros and cons, or dis­cuss his­to­ry, tech­nol­o­gy, and exam­ples. All of which could make for many inter­est­ing blog posts in the future. (Feel free to com­ment on LinkedIn about what you want to know more about). Instead, this is an incom­plete cat­a­log of more or less known uses of hydrogen.

But…

(This is impor­tant to keep in mind.)

I only men­tion appli­ca­tion areas that are already com­mer­cial­ly viable (e.g., fer­til­iz­ers) or on the verge of com­mer­cial­iza­tion with sol­id finan­cial back­ing (e.g., e‑fuel). I omit any odd, eso­teric, or futur­is­tic uses.

Gold rush

Right now, there is a gold rush in the hydro­gen field. Every­one wants to strike gold with hydro­gen. Of course, not every­one will suc­ceed. But frankly, that’s not a threat to the ambi­tion to reduce CO₂. On the con­trary, the more peo­ple try, the more like­ly the goal of keep­ing glob­al warm­ing below 2 °C will be achieved.

Only time will tell who suc­ceeds and who fails.

But we can be sure of one thing: Just like the 19th-cen­tu­ry gold rush in the US, only com­pa­nies sell­ing the nec­es­sary equip­ment can be sure of mak­ing a for­tune. So, what equip­ment are we talk­ing about when it comes to hydrogen?

Exact­ly! PEM elec­trolyz­ers. And what do they depend on to work?

Pre­cise­ly! Irid­i­um. And what’s the prob­lem with that?

Cor­rect! Irid­i­um is scarce and can­not be extract­ed in much greater quan­ti­ties than today. So, with the demand for PEM elec­trolyz­ers sky­rock­et­ing, the avail­abil­i­ty of irid­i­um is becom­ing a headache. The only viable solu­tion is to reduce the amount of irid­i­um need­ed in PEM elec­trolyz­ers. And who has the tech­nol­o­gy for that?

Bin­go! Smoltek has both the know-how and patents for the tech­nol­o­gy, mak­ing it pos­si­ble to come down to as lit­tle as one-twen­ti­eth of today’s use of irid­i­um while main­tain­ing efficiency.

Cards on the table

This is, of course, a biased piece. I want you to under­stand that the mar­ket for Smoltek’s tech­nol­o­gy is big­ger than it first appears. Much big­ger. That’s my motive for com­pil­ing this cat­a­log of applications.

Enough about that. Let’s get down to business.

Ini­tial­ly, we’ll embark on a high-alti­tude fly­over to gain an overview of the land of clean hydro­gen. We will then descend to a low­er alti­tude to cir­cle over each of the five key areas of hydro­gen appli­ca­tions. Final­ly, we will exe­cute pre­ci­sion low-lev­el fly­bys over select­ed appli­ca­tions that stand out as par­tic­u­lar­ly intriguing.

Clean hydrogen Swiss army knife

We make our first fly­over at a real­ly high alti­tude. What do we see? A huge Swiss army knife?! Yes, it’s called the clean hydro­gen Swiss army knife. A cliché, of course. But it is an apt descrip­tion of how use­ful clean hydro­gen is. Notice the five key areas for hydro­gen appli­ca­tions: heat, pow­er sys­tems, chem­i­cals and process­es, avi­a­tion and ship­ping, and land transport.

Sat­is­fied?

Let’s descend to a low­er alti­tude and fly a lap over each key area.

Heat

We are approach­ing the hydro­gen appli­ca­tion area of heat at a low­er altitude.

Hydro­gen both com­busts quick­ly and gives off a lot of heat in the process. This can be used every­where where heat is required: indus­try, com­mer­cial build­ings and spaces, and homes.

High-tem­per­a­ture heat, above 500 °C, is used in process­es such as steel mak­ing, glass mak­ing, and some chem­i­cal processes.

Mid-tem­per­a­ture heat, between 150 and 500 °C, is used for var­i­ous indus­tri­al process­es, includ­ing dry­ing, steam pro­duc­tion, and some chem­i­cal reactions.

Low-tem­per­a­ture heat, below 150 °C, is often used for heat­ing in build­ings and green­hous­es and for process­es such as cook­ing, pas­teur­iza­tion, and some drying.

Sim­ply put, clean hydro­gen can be used as a fos­sil-free fuel in indus­tri­al fur­naces instead of nat­ur­al gas, coal, or oil.

Power system

Our flight con­tin­ues to pow­er sys­tems, an inter­est­ing appli­ca­tion area for hydrogen.

As a Smoltek investor (or soon to be, I hope), you know that elec­tric­i­ty can be turned into hydro­gen through elec­trolyz­ers. You also prob­a­bly know that hydro­gen can be con­vert­ed back into elec­tric­i­ty. There are two main ways to do this.

The most well-known way is via fuel cells. This process essen­tial­ly revers­es what hap­pens in a PEM elec­trolyz­er. Hydro­gen gas splits at the PEM; pro­tons pass through while elec­trons are forced to take a detour through an exter­nal cir­cuit, gen­er­at­ing elec­tric­i­ty. On the oth­er side, they recom­bine with oxy­gen to form water. Pret­ty clever, right?

But there is a much sim­pler way: a reg­u­lar gas tur­bine. In sim­ple terms, a gas tur­bine can be described as a jet engine where fuel (hydro­gen in our case) is burned, and the jet stream caus­es a pow­er tur­bine to spin. The rota­tion of the tur­bine is prop­a­gat­ed via a shaft to an elec­tric gen­er­a­tor. Out comes elec­tric­i­ty. Ta-da!

The abil­i­ty to con­vert elec­tric­i­ty to hydro­gen and back to elec­tric­i­ty opens up many excit­ing appli­ca­tions. Basi­cal­ly, they all involve stor­ing elec­tri­cal ener­gy as clean hydro­gen for a short or long peri­od. Short-term stor­age can be used to bal­ance the elec­tric­i­ty grid. Longer-term stor­age can be used to cap­ture excess ener­gy from sun­ny or windy days to feed into the grid when the sun is not shin­ing and the wind is not blow­ing. Alter­na­tive­ly, hydro­gen can be used as a fos­sil-free fuel in back­up pow­er plants dur­ing cold win­ter days.

Chemicals & processes

Our flight has now reached the per­haps least known and least talked about appli­ca­tion area for clean hydro­gen: Replac­ing the dirty hydro­gen, known as gray, brown, and black hydro­gen, with clean hydro­gen, known as green hydro­gen. (Won­der­ing about the col­ors? See our tech­ni­cal brief on the col­ors of hydro­gen.)

Chem­i­cal and process indus­tries use huge amounts of hydro­gen every day. One of the biggest uses is the pro­duc­tion of life-sav­ing fer­til­iz­er, but there are many more.

More than 95 per­cent of the hydro­gen used in the indus­try comes from nat­ur­al gas con­vert­ed into hydro­gen with huge amounts of CO₂ as a by-prod­uct. A small frac­tion of this CO₂ is cap­tured and tucked away in the ground or used for some­thing bet­ter. How­ev­er, an over­whelm­ing amount is emit­ted direct­ly into the atmos­phere, where it con­tributes to the green­house effect.

To meet the goal of stop­ping glob­al warm­ing at 2° C, vir­tu­al­ly all of this hydro­gen must be pro­duced by elec­trolyz­ers fed with fos­sil-free elec­tric­i­ty. This is a huge but often for­got­ten mar­ket for clean hydrogen.

The icing on the cake, if the expres­sion is allowed in this dire con­text, is the emer­gence of new indus­tri­al appli­ca­tions for clean hydro­gen. Most notable are steel mills, whose pol­lut­ing process­es can be replaced by new­er and clean­er ones using green hydrogen.

Aviation & shipping

With a sense of hope, we leave the indus­try behind and approach our own air­space: trans­porta­tion by air and sea.

When it comes to light air­craft and small boats, bat­ter­ies may have a future. But as soon as we talk about planes for more than one or two peo­ple and boats that trans­port peo­ple and goods over long dis­tances, bat­ter­ies become imprac­ti­cal. These appli­ca­tions would require bat­ter­ies that take up far too much valu­able space and weigh way too much.

Since I am singing the prais­es of hydro­gen (obvi­ous­ly), you now antic­i­pate that I will say that clean hydro­gen is the solu­tion to all pol­lu­tion from avi­a­tion and ship­ping. Right?

Gotcha!

Clean hydro­gen is not the solu­tion. Not direct­ly, that is.

Although hydro­gen has a very high ener­gy den­si­ty by weight (approx­i­mate­ly three times the ener­gy of jet fuel or diesel), it has a very low ener­gy den­si­ty by vol­ume (approx­i­mate­ly one-sixth the ener­gy of jet fuel or diesel at 200 bar pres­sure). This means that gas tanks to pro­pel air­planes and ships would take up far too much space.

The vol­ume can be reduced by cool­ing the hydro­gen to a liq­uid state. How­ev­er, hydro­gen only becomes liq­uid at −253 °C. That’s only 20 °C above absolute zero! Safe­ly keep­ing the gas that cold is tricky. More­over, it would require a lot of ener­gy, which means that even more fuel would have to be trans­port­ed. In the end, the reward for all the trou­ble is lim­it­ed. Liq­uid hydro­gen still has a very low ener­gy den­si­ty per vol­ume (about a quar­ter of the ener­gy in jet fuel or diesel).

So, what’s the solution?

Marine engines are tough bug­gers that can run on almost any­thing that burns. So, the best solu­tion for them is to replace diesel or crude oil with e‑fuel or clean ammo­nia. As you can read in the arti­cle on e‑fuel and fer­til­iz­ers, these fuels can be pro­duced from clean hydrogen.

Air­craft engines are more del­i­cate crea­tures. But again, e‑fuel is the solu­tion in the form of e‑jetfuel.

Land transportation

Final­ly, we have arrived at the last appli­ca­tion area for clean hydro­gen: land transportation.

It is a vast field span­ning every­thing from exca­va­tors, bull­doz­ers, and back­hoe load­ers through taxis, par­cel deliv­ery, and ser­vice vans to bus­es, trains, and trucks. But none of this is like­ly to be what the Jone­ses think of when talk­ing about uses of hydro­gen for land transportation.

Ask any­one around you, and the chances are pret­ty good that they will men­tion hydro­gen-fueled cars. If they can spec­i­fy what they mean, they are almost cer­tain­ly talk­ing about fuel-cell cars. I think it’s safe to say that the fuel cell car is the poster child for hydro­gen. Don’t you agree?

A fuel cell con­verts hydro­gen from a tank and oxy­gen from an air intake into elec­tric­i­ty and water. In a fuel cell car, this elec­tric­i­ty pow­ers elec­tric motors. So, a fuel cell car is actu­al­ly an elec­tric car where the bat­tery has been replaced by fuel cells. The biggest pro­po­nents of this approach are Toy­ota, BMW, Hyundai, Hon­da, Jaguar Land Rover, Pin­in­fa­ri­na, River­sim­ple, and Hype­r­i­on Motors. (I hope I didn’t for­get anyone.)

But why over­com­pli­cate things? Why not direct­ly fuel the good old inter­nal com­bus­tion engine, found in all gaso­line and diesel vehi­cles, with hydro­gen? After all, hydro­gen is high­ly com­bustible, as evi­denced by the infa­mous Hin­den­burg dis­as­ter. The only thing that needs to be done is to make the engine more resis­tant to high­er tem­per­a­tures and greater forces. Some car man­u­fac­tur­ers seem to agree. Hon­da, Kawasa­ki, Suzu­ki, Toy­ota, and Yama­ha are all explor­ing this route.

Circling back

We have now com­plet­ed two over­flights of the land­scape with clean hydro­gen appli­ca­tions. The first was a quick overview at a high alti­tude. The sec­ond flight was at a low­er alti­tude and gave us a good oppor­tu­ni­ty to see all pos­si­ble areas of use for clean hydro­gen. Now it’s time for some fly­bys. We can’t take a clos­er look at all the appli­ca­tions; there are too many. But we’ll have time for a few any­way. So let’s begin one last lap to fly­by some of the more intrigu­ing appli­ca­tion areas.

Cement

We start with the cement indus­try, which is an exam­ple of high-tem­per­a­ture indus­tri­al heat.

To pro­duce cement, the cement indus­try heats lime­stone, clay, and min­er­als in rotary kilns to 1,450 °C. The result­ing clink­er is then ground into a fine pow­der and mixed with gypsum.

The heat­ing comes at a high cli­mate toll. Approx­i­mate­ly 1 bil­lion tons of CO₂ are emit­ted annu­al­ly when the kilns are heat­ed with coal, oil, and nat­ur­al gas. On top of that, comes addi­tion­al 1.5 bil­lion tons of car­bon diox­ide inevitably pro­duced by the chem­i­cal reac­tion that occurs when lime­stone (CaCO₃) is reduced to cal­ci­um oxide (CaO) in the kilns. Togeth­er, the cement indus­try’s car­bon foot­print accounts for almost 7% of the world’s car­bon emissions.

Clean hydro­gen can be used togeth­er with bio­mass to com­plete­ly decar­bonize the heat­ing. The rea­son why they want to mix bio­mass has some­thing to do with the shape of the flames. Don’t ask.

But what to do with 1.5 bil­lion cap­tured CO₂? One idea the cement indus­try is con­sid­er­ing is to use it in the pro­duc­tion of e‑fuel – which, as you know, also requires clean hydrogen.

Grid balancing

As we head towards the next fly­by, we ask our­selves how dif­fi­cult it can be to main­tain a pow­er sys­tem? Damn hard if you ask any­one with knowl­edge about it. The dif­fi­cul­ty lies in ensur­ing that elec­tric pow­er plants feed into the grid exact­ly as many elec­trons as busi­ness­es and house­holds take out of the grid – at any giv­en moment, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Keep­ing this bal­ance is called grid balancing.

If there is an imbal­ance between sup­ply and demand, gen­er­a­tors absorb extra ener­gy by spin­ning faster or pro­duce more ener­gy by spin­ning slow­er. How­ev­er, since the rota­tion speed also con­trols the fre­quen­cy of the grid (ide­al­ly 50 HZ or 60 Hz), this reg­u­la­tion leads to an increase or decrease in frequency.

Only minor devi­a­tions are allowed to pro­tect elec­tri­cal equip­ment from being dam­aged. There­fore, elec­tric­i­ty pro­duc­tion must also be planned so that more elec­tric­i­ty is pro­duced when demand is expect­ed to be high (for instance, dur­ing the day), and less elec­tric­i­ty is pro­duced when demand is expect­ed to be low (for instance, at night).

But renew­able elec­tric­i­ty is not so easy to plan.

The sun ris­es and sets every day and plays peek-a-boo behind clouds in between. And the only con­stant about the wind is that its strength is ever-chang­ing. That’s why it’s com­mon for wind farm own­ers, for exam­ple, to be paid to shut down their wind tur­bines when the wind blows. Not what you expect­ed, huh?

A more effi­cient approach is to have solar pan­els, or wind tur­bines gen­er­ate elec­tric­i­ty when pos­si­ble and use any excess elec­tric­i­ty to cre­ate hydro­gen using a PEM elec­trolyz­er. This hydro­gen is stored until there’s a high­er demand for elec­tric­i­ty than what the solar or wind farm can sup­ply. At that point, the stored hydro­gen is turned back into elec­tric­i­ty using fuel cells or gas turbines.

A relat­ed use for clean hydro­gen is as fuel for peak­ing pow­er plants. You know, the ones that are dor­mant most of the time but are start­ed up on peak demand, like cold win­ter morn­ings, for exam­ple. These plants often run on coal, oil, or nat­ur­al gas, lead­ing to car­bon diox­ide emis­sions. An alter­na­tive is to use clean hydro­gen as fuel. This hydro­gen can be pro­duced by an on-site PEM elec­trolyz­er that gets its elec­tric­i­ty from solar cells or a wind tur­bine on the roof.

Steel

Next, we set the course for areas of appli­ca­tion in chem­i­cals and process­es, where one of the more notable and promis­ing appli­ca­tions is steel production.

Glob­al steel pro­duc­tion results in the release of 3.7 bil­lion tons of car­bon diox­ide into the atmos­phere. This is more than 10% of all car­bon diox­ide emit­ted by human activ­i­ty. A fig­ure that def­i­nite­ly needs to come down if we are to meet the 2 °C cli­mate target.

Car­bon diox­ide emis­sions in steel pro­duc­tion main­ly come from two sources. First, coal, oil, and nat­ur­al gas are used to heat blast fur­naces. Sec­ond, and more sig­nif­i­cant­ly, coal is added to the fur­naces to cre­ate car­bon monox­ide, which reacts with iron ore, specif­i­cal­ly hematite (Fe₂O₃) and mag­netite (Fe₃O₄), con­vert­ing it into pig iron.

The good news is that hydro­gen can replace coal in the process of reduc­ing iron ore to pig iron. It’s cur­rent­ly being test­ed in sev­er­al sites inSwe­den, Ger­many, Spain, South Korea, UK, Nor­way, and Austria.

By using clean hydro­gen both to heat­en the fur­naces and to replace coal in the reduc­tion process, it is pos­si­ble to com­plete­ly reduce the car­bon diox­ide emis­sions from steel mak­ing and thus pro­duce green steel.

Long-distance cargo shipping

We steer our flight towards the ocean. On the hori­zon, we see car­go ships with sooty diesel exhaust trail­ing behind them like long, dirty tails. The mar­itime indus­try is a sig­nif­i­cant con­trib­u­tor to car­bon emis­sions, with long-dis­tance car­go ships releas­ing about 1 bil­lion tons of CO₂ annu­al­ly. For these ves­sels, bat­ter­ies are imprac­ti­cal due to their size and weight, mak­ing green hydro­gen a key part of the solution.

How­ev­er, using hydro­gen direct­ly in inter­nal com­bus­tion engines pos­es chal­lenges due to its low vol­u­met­ric ener­gy den­si­ty, mean­ing it requires too much space. This makes it unlike­ly for large ocean-going ships to adopt hydro­gen com­bus­tion engines or fuel cell-pow­ered elec­tric motors. The most promis­ing alter­na­tives are syn­thet­ic fuels. The con­tenders are e‑methanol, e‑methane, and clean ammonia.

E‑methanol and e‑methane, on the one hand, are pro­duced by com­bin­ing car­bon diox­ide and clean hydro­gen. In the best case, the car­bon diox­ide is cap­tured from the air, which is cli­mate neu­tral; in the worst case, car­bon diox­ide is cap­tured on its way to be released, which only post­pones the release.

Clean ammo­nia, on the oth­er hand, is pro­duced by com­bin­ing nitro­gen tak­en direct­ly from the air with clean hydrogen.

So far, e‑methanol has tak­en the lead. Both e‑methanol pro­duc­tion facil­i­ties are being built, such as Flag­shipONE, which I talked about in the post on e‑fuel, and e‑methanol-pow­ered ships, such as the Lau­ra Maer­sk, which will be launched in 2023.

How­ev­er, clean ammo­nia is the new and cool kid on the block. It has recent­ly gained a lot of trac­tion in mar­itime cir­cles and is being active­ly pro­mot­ed around the globe.

The con­struc­tion of clean ammo­nia pro­duc­tion facil­i­ties is under­way in sev­er­al coun­tries, includ­ing Nor­way, the Nether­lands, South Korea, Chile, and Japan. Com­pa­nies like MAN Ener­gy Solu­tions and Mit­subishi Heavy Indus­tries are lead­ing the devel­op­ment of inno­v­a­tive ammo­nia-pow­ered engines. In Nor­way, the first con­tain­er ship pow­ered by clean ammo­nia, Yara Eyde, will be launched in 2026.

Coastal and river shipping

E‑methanol, e‑methane, and clean ammo­nia can all be used by fer­ries, coastal freighters, river­boats, tugs, barges, and oth­er ves­sels oper­at­ing over short­er dis­tances and time. But for these ves­sels, it’s per­fect­ly rea­son­able to use hydro­gen direct­ly to pro­pel them. The pre­dom­i­nant approach is fuel cells that con­vert hydro­gen into elec­tric­i­ty to pow­er elec­tric motors.

An exam­ple of this approach is HEAVENN in the North­ern Nether­lands, which aims to build a ded­i­cat­ed hydro­gen trans­port infra­struc­ture includ­ing pipelines, stor­age facil­i­ties, and refueling/​bunkering points for var­i­ous appli­ca­tions, includ­ing mar­itime shipping.

On the ves­sel side, MF Hydra serves as a notable exam­ple, being the world’s first fer­ry pow­ered by hydro­gen. Deliv­ered in 2021, this 82.4‑meter-long fer­ry can car­ry up to 80 vehi­cles and 300 pas­sen­gers, cruis­ing at a speed of 9 knots. It’s oper­at­ed by the Nor­we­gian com­pa­ny Norled.

Public transport buses

We fly in over land again and come to the last appli­ca­tion area for hydro­gen: land trans­porta­tion and non-road mobile machin­ery. There are var­i­ous appli­ca­tions here. Let’s fly­by some of them.

Hydro­gen-pow­ered bus­es, main­ly dri­ven by elec­tric motors using elec­tric­i­ty from fuel cells but also inter­nal com­bus­tion engines run­ning on hydro­gen, have been on the agen­da for decades. Many cities, includ­ing Lon­don, Tokyo, and Los Ange­les, have inte­grat­ed hydro­gen-pow­ered bus­es for pub­lic trans­porta­tion into their fleets. The appeal lies in their zero emis­sions, longer range, and quick refu­el­ing times com­pared to bat­tery elec­tric buses.

Passenger trains

The French train man­u­fac­tur­er Alstom is invest­ing heav­i­ly in hydro­gen trains. They devel­op, man­u­fac­ture, and sell hydro­gen-pow­ered trains for inter­ci­ty and region­al ser­vice. The trains are called Cora­dia iLint and have been eval­u­at­ed in sev­er­al countries.

Alstrom is far from alone. Close behind are Siemens, CRRC, Toy­ota, Hyundai Rotem, Bal­lard Pow­er Sys­tems, and Stadler Rail.

There are sev­er­al coun­tries and rail­way com­pa­nies that are hot on their heels, includ­ing the USA, Japan, Unit­ed King­dom, Japan, and India, and even more are think­ing about get­ting hydro­gen-pow­ered trains.

But when it comes to adopt­ing hydro­gen-pow­ered trains, Ger­many has tak­en the lead. In Sep­tem­ber 2018, Germany’s Low­er Sax­ony launched the world’s first hydro­gen-pow­ered pas­sen­ger train for com­mer­cial use. Then, in August 2022, Low­er Sax­ony intro­duced the first rail­way line run entire­ly by hydro­gen-pow­ered trains in Bremervörde.

Taxi

Dri­ving a car in Paris requires a Crit’Air vignette – a wind­shield stick­er show­ing how envi­ron­men­tal­ly friend­ly the car is with num­bers from 0 (zero emis­sions) to 5 (most pol­lut­ing). From 2024, only vehi­cles with Crit’Air 0 or 1 vignettes are allowed in Paris. From 2030, Crit’Air 0 will be required. These tough require­ments have spurred the Parisian taxi sector’s inter­est in hydro­gen cars.

Hype describes itself as the first zero-emis­sion mobil­i­ty plat­form. We mere mor­tals call them a taxi com­pa­ny. In 2023, they had 550 hydro­gen taxis oper­at­ing in Paris. By the end of 2024, they plan to have 1,500 hydro­gen taxis.

In 2019, Hype, Toy­ota, Air Liq­uide, and Idex joined forces to form Hyst­Co with the aim of build­ing a net­work of fill­ing sta­tions for hydro­gen and mobil­i­ty-relat­ed appli­ca­tions. The lat­ter has so far man­i­fest­ed itself in the pos­si­bil­i­ty of pro­fes­sion­als leas­ing a car or van run­ning on hydro­gen. Since its cre­ation, more com­pa­nies have joined and pumped mil­lions of euros into the com­pa­ny. By the end of 2023, Hyset­Co will dis­trib­ute more than 23 tons of hydro­gen per month to its cus­tomers and man­age a fleet of more than 550 hydro­gen vehicles.

Both Hype and Hyset­Co have ambi­tions to rapid­ly expand their oper­a­tions through­out France.

Parcel delivery pickups and service vans

From taxis to par­cel deliv­ery, it’s a short step. From an oper­a­tional per­spec­tive, they are very sim­i­lar. In both cas­es, the vehi­cles typ­i­cal­ly dri­ve 400–600 kilo­me­ters per day and need to count the time to refu­el in min­utes instead of hours. There­fore, hydro­gen is an inter­est­ing alter­na­tive to bat­ter­ies as these sec­tors move away from gaso­line and diesel to car­bon-free alternatives.

But unlike taxis, which are well on their way, most par­cel deliv­ery com­pa­nies are still in the park­ing lot, with only a few small-scale pilots run­ning in the field. One exam­ple is FedEx, which has start­ed a tri­al of a hydro­gen-pow­ered vehi­cle in its pick­up and deliv­ery oper­a­tions in Utrecht, the Netherlands.

The same is true for ser­vice vans. But it is only a mat­ter of time before green hydro­gen fuels every van or light com­mer­cial vehi­cle (LCV), as it is called in indus­try lin­go. At least that’s the belief of First Hydro­gen – a Cana­di­an-British start-up that is devel­op­ing and man­u­fac­tur­ing its own light com­mer­cial vehi­cle and set­ting up a net­work of refu­el­ing stations.

Line-haul and long-haul transport

From the many but short dis­tances cov­ered by par­cel deliv­ery pick­ups, we enter the realm of heavy trucks. They can be divid­ed into line-haul and long-haul. The dif­fer­ence lies in how far they dri­ve. Line-haul refers to trans­port to des­ti­na­tions such as ports or logis­tics cen­ters, usu­al­ly with­in one day, while long-haul refers to longer trans­ports that take days or weeks to com­plete. For both appli­ca­tions, hydro­gen is on the rise.

In Switzer­land, for exam­ple, 47 heavy trucks by Hyundai are in use by logis­tics, dis­tri­b­u­tion, and retail fleet oper­a­tors. These trucks are named XCIENT Fuel Cell. As the name sug­gests, they have elec­tric motors pow­ered by hydro­gen fuel cells.

H2Haul is an EU-fund­ed project that aims to run 16 long-haul heavy-duty fuel cell trucks for more than one mil­lion kilo­me­ters under nor­mal com­mer­cial con­di­tions to demon­strate high reli­a­bil­i­ty. The project also includes hydro­gen refu­el­ing infra­struc­ture. Users include BMW in Ger­many, Car­refour in France, Coop in Switzer­land, and Col­ruyt Group in Belgium.

HyTrucks is a con­sor­tium start­ed by Air Liq­uide, DATS 24, and the ports of Rot­ter­dam, Antwerp, and Duis­burg. Today, it con­sists of over 70 com­pa­nies and coun­tries. The con­sor­tium is based on two sim­ple ideas: First, the tran­si­tion from a diesel ecosys­tem to a hydro­gen ecosys­tem can only suc­ceed if all rel­e­vant par­ties are involved. Sec­ond, hydro­gen is very suit­able as an ener­gy car­ri­er for heavy-duty trans­porta­tion. HyTrucks wants at least a thou­sand heavy-duty hydro­gen trucks on the road by 2025. At the same time, they also want to have at least 25 oper­a­tional hydro­gen refu­el­ing sta­tions. The trucks will be deployed main­ly in the tri­an­gle between three of the major logis­tics hotspots in West­ern Europe – the ports of Rot­ter­dam, Antwerp, and Duis­burg – as well as in Ger­many, Lux­em­bourg, and France.

Non-road mobile machinery

Non-road mobile machin­ery (NRMM) is a bit of a mouth­ful. The term cov­ers all types of work machines, includ­ing exca­va­tors, cranes, fork­lifts, bull­doz­ers, har­vesters, back­hoe load­ers, trac­tors, and plow trucks.

Hydro­gen for direct com­bus­tion, fuel cells, or in the form of e‑fuel is very attrac­tive to use in NRMM for sev­er­al rea­sons. Beyond the obvi­ous one that they don’t con­tribute to the green­house effect and have quick refu­el­ing times com­pared to a bat­tery, there are two major ben­e­fits spe­cif­ic to this cat­e­go­ry of vehicles.

First of all, they don’t pol­lute where they oper­ate. This is par­tic­u­lar­ly desir­able when used in con­fined spaces, such as ware­hous­es or mines, but is also desir­able in agri­cul­ture and sen­si­tive nat­ur­al areas. (Notice that e‑fuel doesn’t have this ben­e­fit; the com­bus­tion of e‑fuel releas­es the CO₂ cap­tured dur­ing production.)

Sec­ond, with its abil­i­ty to be trans­port­ed and stored, hydro­gen is a viable option for remote and off-grid oper­a­tions where elec­tric­i­ty is not avail­able to charge batteries.

Sev­er­al well-known con­struc­tion equip­ment man­u­fac­tur­ers, includ­ing Vol­vo Con­struc­tion Equip­ment, Hyzon Motors, and Lieb­herr, are invest­ing heav­i­ly in hydro­gen, either in the form of fuel cells or hydro­gen-pow­ered inter­nal com­bus­tion engines. How­ev­er, the com­pa­ny that has made the most head­lines is JCB, one of the world’s largest man­u­fac­tur­ers of con­struc­tion equip­ment. They have devel­oped a back­hoe loader with a hydro­gen com­bus­tion engine and a fuel cell-pow­ered forklift.

Landing

Oh boy. It was a long flight, but now we have land­ed. It was excit­ing, wasn’t it? Clean hydro­gen is indeed on its way. So many appli­ca­tions! And they all need PEM elec­trolyz­ers galore. And since we’re sit­ting on a key tech­nol­o­gy to enable this growth at a rea­son­able price, it’s hard not to think that Smoltek Hydro­gen will be a suc­cess. Don’t you agree?