Latin America’s first green-hydrogen-powered fuel cell truck has hit the street 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 better Santiago metropolitan space. Knowledge collected from the testing part will present a street 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 satisfy their decarbonization objectives over the subsequent decade, the problem lies in constructing the required infrastructure to help hydrogen-powered ground transport in a geographically difficult setting.
Inexperienced-Hydrogen Infrastructure Challenges
Although Chile’s abundant wind and photo voltaic sources make it a main 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 supply green hydrogen and function with hydrogen fuel cell autos. That US $15 million initiative concerned swapping 200 lead-acid battery-powered forklifts for hydrogen fuel cell variations. Now, that distribution middle has the capability to supply sufficient inexperienced hydrogen to refuel the brand new truck twice each day, says Ignacio Gómez, Walmart Chile’s supply-chain innovation and know-how 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, based mostly 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 check the nation’s first green-hydrogen truck below real-life situations,” says Gómez. “It’s permitting us to collect classes realized with a purpose to subsequently scale up this know-how.”
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 Power 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 usually 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 practically 400 shops throughout the nation below a number of subsidiaries. The distant southern area of Punta Arenas is residence to the corporate’s southernmost retailer on the planet and is positioned practically 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 nine 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 based mostly on the variety of vans, the capability of every refueling middle, and the way far the vans often should journey to ship their payloads. In California, Fulton and his crew 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 occasions so long as the state of California. Gómez says Walmart is contemplating putting in not less than 4 hydrogen-fuel dispensers at its distribution facilities to offer ample gasoline capability. No 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.
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 USA, China, South Korea, Japan, and a number of other members of the European Union. China leads the pack when it comes to hydrogen gasoline cell autos, with a targeted 25,000 anticipated on the roads by the top of this 12 months, in accordance with the Chinese language authorities. That determine continues to be a comparatively small share of the overall heavy-duty autos 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 could fare higher on this entrance than the USA and different European nations, partially due to its relationship with China, the nation’s mountainous and distant terrain poses a novel hurdle for truck efficiency.
“Hills are a giant 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 wish much less gasoline than in case you’re going over actually steep hills.” Excessive cold and hot climate also can impression a fuel-cell truck’s battery and cut back effectivity over time, Lipman says.
So far, Chile has embraced native hydrogen energy in its efforts to part out gross sales of carbon-emitting heavy-duty autos 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 may solely think about so many applied sciences,” Fulton says. “So if a rustic or a state makes a powerful dedication to at least one or two applied sciences, finally, possibly it will get tougher to consider different ones.”
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