Latin America’s first green-hydrogen-powered fuel 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 part 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 part will present a highway map for Walmart and its companions to scale up hydrogen gasoline 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 mandatory infrastructure to help hydrogen-powered ground transport in a geographically difficult atmosphere.
Inexperienced-Hydrogen Infrastructure Challenges
Although Chile’s abundant wind and photo voltaic sources make it a chief location for producing green 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 turned the first distribution plant in Latin America to provide green hydrogen and function with hydrogen fuel cell automobiles. That US $15 million initiative concerned swapping 200 lead-acid battery-powered forklifts for hydrogen fuel cell variations. Now, that distribution heart has the capability to provide sufficient inexperienced hydrogen to refuel the brand new truck twice each day, says Ignacio Gómez, Walmart Chile’s supply-chain innovation and expertise supervisor. [Editor’s note: The author conducted an interview with Gómez in Spanish and has provided translations for this story.]
The truck, manufactured by Feichi Technology, primarily 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 mission to advance hydrogen-powered fuel cell vehicles by bringing collectively key authorities and trade gamers. Chile’s Production Development Corporation 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 take a look at the nation’s first green-hydrogen truck below 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 expected range of 750 kilometers and can pull 49 tonnes while holding 75 kilograms of hydrogen fuel. But “no truck is ever going to pull into the station empty,” says Lewis Fulton, the director of the Vitality Futures Program of the Institute of Transportation Research on the College of California, Davis. To be on the secure facet, Fulton says long-haul truckers sometimes keep away from dipping beneath 1 / 4 tank’s value of gasoline. 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 below 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 presently the truck’s solely refueling supply. Regardless of the corporate’s plans to broaden green-hydrogen manufacturing to all of its soon-to-be nine distribution facilities all through the nation, many 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 modifications primarily based on the variety of vans, the capability of every refueling heart, and the way far the vans repeatedly 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 supply each the geographic protection and amount of hydrogen to deal with 5,000 heavy-duty vans. The state leads the United States in fuel cell vehicle deployment.
From north to south, Chile is about 4 instances so long as the state of California. Gómez says Walmart is contemplating putting in at the very least 4 hydrogen-fuel dispensers at its distribution facilities to offer ample gasoline capability. No less than to begin, the truck will stay in central Chile to hold out its take a look at routes.
“The plan is for the vans to hold actual merchandise hundreds from the Quilicura Distribution Heart and provide shops throughout the Metropolitan, Valparaíso, and O’Higgins areas,” Gómez says.
World Deployment of Hydrogen Vans
Chile joins a handful of different nations who’ve deployed hydrogen gasoline cell vans for long-haul trucking, together with the US, China, South Korea, Japan, and several other members of the European Union. China leads the pack by way of hydrogen gasoline cell automobiles, with a targeted 25,000 anticipated on the roads by the tip of this yr, in keeping with the Chinese language authorities. That determine continues to be a comparatively small share of the entire heavy-duty automobiles working within the Chinese language market.
Globally, excessive prices have restricted the deployment of green-hydrogen-powered gasoline cell vans on the industrial scale. Whereas Chile might fare higher on this entrance than the US and different European nations, partly due to its relationship with China, the 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 gasoline cell vans in California. “If the topography is completely flat, you’re going to get an extended vary and want much less gasoline than in case you’re going over actually steep hills.” Excessive cold and hot climate may impression a fuel-cell truck’s battery and cut back effectivity over time, Lipman says.
Up to now, Chile has embraced native hydrogen energy in its efforts to part 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, might grow to be much less possible.
“You may solely focus on so many applied sciences,” Fulton says. “So if a rustic or a state makes a robust dedication to 1 or two applied sciences, ultimately, possibly it will get more durable to consider different ones.”
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