London, UK: The H2Accelerate collaboration has published its second whitepaper on expectations for the development of the hydrogen trucking sector in Europe.
In the paper, the group sets out its expectations for the stages of deployment of fuel cell trucks and a hydrogen refuelling infrastructure, and the policy support mechanisms needed to enable the envisioned deployment phases.
Participants in H2Accelerate will further support policy decisions by publishing a milestone whitepaper in the autumn detailing the expected costs of operating fuel cell trucks in each deployment phase, and the required levels of policy support to allow them to achieve cost parity with diesel vehicles.
The H2Accelerate collaboration has been formed by truck manufacturers Daimler Truck, IVECO, and Volvo Group, and hydrogen infrastructure providers OMV, Shell, and TotalEnergies.
The central objective of the collaboration is to enable a commercially viable, pan-European hydrogen trucking system in the post-2030 period. This will only be achieved through joint commitments from both truck manufacturers and hydrogen infrastructure developers to scale-up the production of trucks and the hydrogen refuelling network in a rapid, but sustainable fashion.
H2Accelerate spokesperson Ben Madden said: “It has never been clearer that actions to enable the decarbonisation of road freight must be set in motion immediately if climate targets are to be achieved. The latest whitepaper from the H2Accelerate collaboration demonstrates the commitment from participants to invest in scaling up this vital sector, and support policymakers to take the necessary steps to catalyse these investments.”
Given that today, very few hydrogen trucks have been put on the road in limited demonstration projects, a significant increase in the scale of deployment is required to meet the needs of truck end users. Participants of the H2Accelerate collaboration envisage this scaling up occurring in three deployment phases over the coming decade:
The ‘Learning by deployment’ phase, which will place the first hundreds of trucks in the hands of end users, using a limited (but high reliability) refuelling network.
Each of these phases is expected to lead to new learnings that will reduce the cost of fuel cell vehicles and hydrogen fuel and allow truck and fuel providers to optimise the customer experience in subsequent phases.
Expectations for the number of trucks and refuelling stations, and green hydrogen production capacity are set out in the paper, alongside the expected learnings arising from each phase and the policy support mechanisms required to support each phase. The full whitepaper can be downloaded from the H2Accelerate website.
