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December 16, 2022
By Karine
Delafosse
Hyzon Truck: Texas’ first
hydrogen-powered truck arrives at Houston Roads
The first hydrogen-powered truck in Texas hits
the streets of Houston, a Hyzon truck. The drivers will drive the Lone
Star State’s first hydrogen-powered truck route and deliver plastic
resins from Mont Belvieu to the Port of Houston for Exxon Mobil as
part of a two-week pilot.
When Rodrigo Peña first climbed into the cab
of the Hyzon truck and took his foot off the brake, it wasn’t the awe
of sitting in the first hydrogen-powered truck to operate in Texas
that overwhelmed him.
It was the silence.
Rodrigo Penasaid:
I could hear stones clinking on the gravel
in the yard – I could hear people blocks away.
“It was like being in a giant golf cart.”
Peña and two other drivers from logistics
company Talke will drive the Lone Star State’s first hydrogen-powered
truck route, delivering plastic resins from Mont Belvieu to the Port
of Houston for Exxon Mobil as part of a two-week pilot.
While the pilot is temporary, citizen and
business leaders along the ship canal expect it will help spur new
investment and government incentives aimed at using hydrogen to
decarbonize the shipping and trucking sectors.
Five facilities, including the University of
Texas at Austin, Chevron, Air Liquide and the Center for Houston’s
Future, announced last month that they have applied to the US
Department of Energy to be named one of up to 10 regional clean
hydrogen centers , an award that could earn the region a share of $7
billion in federal funding for hydrogen projects.
Subsidies like these will be key to getting
hydrogen trucks off the ground, said Parker Meeks, president and
interim CEO of Hyzon Motors, based in Mendon, New York. He said
funding for the hydrogen hub would help on the fuel side, but it
doesn’t include funding for the trucks.
That changed with the Inflation Reduction Act,
which came into effect this year and will pump $400 billion into clean
energy funding, including funding to cut emissions in ports.
Parker MeeksMendon’s
President and Interim CEO said:
This transition is quite expensive in the
beginning and if we burden all this on the operators, it will take a
long time.
“We don’t expect to benefit from subsidies any
longer than necessary, but the IRA is giving us this immediate
opportunity. We always intended to bring a truck to Houston, and now
we’re getting this subsidy money to Houston.”
Houston is already the country’s largest
producer of hydrogen, which is used primarily for refining and
petrochemical processes. But the region and much of the country
outside of California lacks the infrastructure to make it feasible for
truck or cargo ship deployment.
Even the hydrogen used for the pilot at the
Port of Houston was supplied by an Air Liquide facility in North Las
Vegas, Nevada, although an Air Liquide facility produces hydrogen just
up the road in La Porte.
The Nevada facility is one of only a few
locations in the country that can liquefy hydrogen and package it at a
pressure of 7,500 pounds per square inch, said Laura Parkan, Air
Liquide’s vice president of hydrogen energy for the Americas. There
are only three hydrogen fueling stations for heavy trucks, all in the
Los Angeles metropolitan area.
Even so, it makes more sense to use hydrogen
to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from trucks than to run them on
electric batteries, which would need to be large enough to be powered,
making it difficult for the vehicles to haul much else, according to a
current study by the consulting firm McKinsey & Co.
The hydrogen fuel cells are also larger than
conventional engines, but not by as much, said Richard Heath, CEO and
president of Baytown logistics company Talke USA. Its diesel-powered
trucks normally carry 93,000 pounds, but the Hyzon truck will carry
82,000 pounds and instead of using the 40ft containers that normally
travel this route, they will switch to 20ft containers.
The Hyzon trucks can carry up to 50 kilograms
of hydrogen each, and instead of burning the liquefied gas, the fuel
cell extracts electrons from the hydrogen atoms, creating electricity
that powers the truck’s powertrain. They can go about 300 to 350 miles
on a full tank, said Cory Shumaker, Hyzon’s Americas director of
business development.
The lower load capacity hasn’t deterred
Talke’s customers, who Heath says were excited about the pilot
program.
Nevertheless, it is not economically feasible
to buy a hydrogen-powered truck. Hydrogen in California is now
expensive, priced at about $10 per kilogram, which is about 5 gallons
of gasoline. Companies are working to lower these prices as the
technology scales.
Richard HeideCEO and
President of Baytown logistics company Talke USA said:
It’s not economically feasible now, but
that’s part of the development.
“This will require the collaboration of many
different people and many different companies.”
Texas’ first hydrogen-powered truck hits
Houston Roads, December 14, 2022
Source
Green Play Ammonia™, Yielder® NFuel Energy.
Spokane, Washington. 99212
www.exactrix.com
509 995 1879 cell, Pacific.
Nathan1@greenplayammonia.com
exactrix@exactrix.com
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