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 section in September 2025, loading up at Walmart Chile’s Quilicura Distribution Heart and finishing up operations and deliveries all through the larger Santiago metropolitan space. Knowledge collected from the testing section will present a street map for Walmart and its companions to scale up hydrogen gasoline cell vehicles throughout Chile.
However as Walmart and the remainder of the nation work to satisfy their decarbonization objectives over the following decade, the problem lies in constructing the mandatory infrastructure to assist 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 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 vehicles.
Two years in the past, Walmart Chile’s Quilicura Distribution Heart grew to become the first distribution plant in Latin America to provide 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 provide 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 known as the Hidrohaul Technological Program. Hidrohaul launched in 2024 as a four-year venture to advance hydrogen-powered fuel cell vehicles by bringing collectively key authorities and business 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 underneath real-life circumstances,” says Gómez. “It’s permitting us to collect classes realized so as 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 protected aspect, Fulton says long-haul truckers sometimes keep away from dipping under 1 / 4 tank’s price 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 underneath a number of subsidiaries. The distant southern area of Punta Arenas is house to the corporate’s southernmost retailer on this planet and is situated almost 3,000 km from Quilicura, which is presently 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, 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 based mostly on the variety of vehicles, the capability of every refueling middle, and the way far the vehicles frequently must 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 vehicles. 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 at the least 4 hydrogen-fuel dispensers at its distribution facilities to supply enough 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 vehicles 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 Vehicles
Chile joins a handful of different nations who’ve deployed hydrogen gasoline cell vehicles 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 tip of this 12 months, in keeping with the Chinese language authorities. That determine continues to be a comparatively small share of the whole heavy-duty autos working within the Chinese language market.
Globally, excessive prices have restricted the deployment of green-hydrogen-powered gasoline cell vehicles 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 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 vehicles 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 also impression a fuel-cell truck’s battery and cut back effectivity over time, Lipman says.
To date, Chile has embraced native hydrogen energy in its efforts to section 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 out to be 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 at least one or two applied sciences, finally, possibly it will get tougher to consider different ones.”
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