The H2Accelerate collaboration publishes second whitepaper on expectations for the development of the hydrogen trucking sector in Europe

Following the publication of a whitepaper on the need for hydrogen trucking last month, the H2Accelerate collaboration today published the second in the series of whitepapers in support of the use of hydrogen in long-haul trucking.  In the paper, the group sets out its expectations for the stages of deployment of both fuel cell trucks and 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.

Scaling up the fuel cell truck market

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.

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.
• The ‘Industrial scale-up’ phase, where thousands of trucks are produced using series manufacturing, and refuelling networks expand along key transport corridors.
• The ‘Sustainable growth’ phase, during which tens of thousands of fuel cell trucks and hundreds of hydrogen truck refuelling stations are in operation across Europe.

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.