Latin America’s first green-hydrogen-powered gas cell truck has hit the highway in Chile, marking a milestone for the nation’s decarbonization efforts. The semitrailer truck will start a yearlong testing section in September 2025, loading up at Walmart Chile’s Quilicura Distribution Heart and finishing up operations and deliveries all through the higher Santiago metropolitan space. Information collected from the testing section will present a highway map for Walmart and its companions to scale up hydrogen gas cell vans throughout Chile.
However as Walmart and the remainder of the nation work to fulfill their decarbonization objectives over the subsequent decade, the problem lies in constructing the required infrastructure to assist hydrogen-powered floor transport in a geographically difficult atmosphere.
Inexperienced-Hydrogen Infrastructure Challenges
Although Chile’s plentiful wind and photo voltaic sources make it a major location for producing inexperienced hydrogen, the nation has but to develop the nationwide community of technical operators and fueling stations it might want to overhaul floor transportation with fuel-cell vans.
Two years in the past, Walmart Chile’s Quilicura Distribution Heart grew to become the first distribution plant in Latin America to supply inexperienced hydrogen and function with hydrogen gas cell automobiles. That US $15 million initiative concerned swapping 200 lead-acid battery-powered forklifts for hydrogen gas cell variations. Now, that distribution middle has the capability to supply sufficient inexperienced hydrogen to refuel the brand new truck twice every day, says Ignacio GómezWalmart Chile’s supply-chain innovation and expertise supervisor. (Editor’s observe: The writer carried out an interview with Gómez in Spanish and has supplied translations for this story.)
The truck, manufactured by Know-howprimarily based in Foshan, China, was bought as a part of a $6.15 million public-private partnership referred to as the Hidrohaul Technological Program. Hidrohaul launched in 2024 as a four-year undertaking to advance hydrogen-powered gas cell automobiles by bringing collectively key authorities and business gamers. Chile’s Manufacturing Improvement Company put up $3.45 million in funding for this system. Globally, Walmart has dedicated to decarbonizing operations by 2040, with transportation as a serious a part of its sustainable distribution technique, says Gómez.
“Hidrohaul is taking the primary steps of this technique by letting us check the nation’s first green-hydrogen truck beneath real-life circumstances,” says Gómez. “It’s permitting us to collect classes realized with a view to subsequently scale up this expertise.”
The truck has an anticipated vary of 750 kilometers and might pull 49 tonnes whereas holding 75 kilograms of hydrogen gas. However “no truck is ever going to drag into the station empty,” says Lewis Fultonthe director of the Power Futures Program of the Institute of Transportation Research on the College of California, Davis. To be on the protected aspect, Fulton says long-haul truckers sometimes keep away from dipping under 1 / 4 tank’s value of gas. That places the sensible vary for the Feichi truck at round 560 km.
Chile spans greater than 4,200 km north to south, and Walmart operates almost 400 shops throughout the nation beneath a number of subsidiaries. The distant southern area of Punta Arenas is dwelling to the corporate’s southernmost retailer on the earth and is positioned almost 3,000 km from Quilicura, which is at the moment the truck’s solely refueling supply. Regardless of the corporate’s plans to develop green-hydrogen manufacturing to all of its soon-to-be 9 distribution facilities all through the nation, a lot of the community, together with Punta Arenas, continues to be out of vary.
The calculus that determines the place hydrogen refueling stations ought to go adjustments primarily based on the variety of vans, the capability of every refueling middle, and the way far the vans commonly need to journey to ship their payloads. In California, Fulton and his staff of researchers decided that 15 to twenty refueling stations unfold throughout the state would provide each the geographic protection and amount of hydrogen to deal with 5,000 heavy-duty vans. The state leads america in gas cell car deployment.
From north to south, Chile is about 4 occasions so long as the state of California. Gómez says Walmart is contemplating putting in a minimum of 4 hydrogen-fuel dispensers at its distribution facilities to offer adequate gas capability. Not less than to start out, the truck will stay in central Chile to hold out its check routes.
“The plan is for the vans to hold actual merchandise masses from the Quilicura Distribution Heart and provide shops inside the Metropolitan, Valparaíso, and O’Higgins areas,” Gómez says.
International Deployment of Hydrogen Vehicles
Chile joins a handful of different international locations who’ve deployed hydrogen gas cell vans for long-haul trucking, together with america, China, South Korea, Japan, and a number of other members of the European Union. China leads the pack when it comes to hydrogen gas cell automobiles, with a focused 25,000 anticipated on the roads by the tip of this yr, based on the Chinese language authorities. That determine continues to be a comparatively small share of the full heavy-duty automobiles working within the Chinese language market.
Globally, excessive prices have restricted the deployment of green-hydrogen-powered gas cell vans on the industrial scale. Whereas Chile could fare higher on this entrance than america and different European international locations, partially due to its relationship with Chinathe nation’s mountainous and distant terrain poses a singular hurdle for truck efficiency.
“Hills are an enormous factor,” says Timothy Lipman of the College of California, Berkeley, who works with Fulton on analysis associated to the rollout of gas cell vans in California. “If the topography is completely flat, you’re going to get an extended vary and wish much less gas than should you’re going over actually steep hills.” Excessive cold and warm climate may also impression a fuel-cell truck’s battery and scale back effectivity over time, Lipman says.
So far, Chile has embraced native hydrogen energy in its efforts to section out gross sales of carbon-emitting heavy-duty automobiles by 2045. But because the nation invests extra sources into scaling up its inexperienced hydrogen market, Fulton notes that different low emissions applied sciences, like electrical batteries, could turn into much less possible.
“You possibly can solely think about so many applied sciences,” Fulton says. “So if a rustic or a state makes a powerful dedication to 1 or two applied sciences, ultimately, possibly it will get more durable to consider different ones.”
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