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?