Hydrogen: the quiet revolution for Europe's cities

Hydrogen is quietly revolutionising heavy urban mobility and energy storage across the continent. It presents a crucial path to decarbonization, highlights Luigi Crema, President of Hydrogen Europe Research. Yet, he calls for immediate action to secure this future: "We now have the technological leadership. Let's defend it and not repeat the mistake of the battery market, which is already lost to China".

It's like a forest growing—quiet, steady, but unstoppable. We are talking of the hydrogen revolution, happening all over Europe without people even being aware of it. While the public conversation frequently centres on battery electric vehicles, hydrogen offers unique and complementary solutions for sectors like heavy urban mobility. Castilla y Leon Hydrogen Valley in Spain's Castilla y León region, a large-scale project co-funded by the European Union's Clean Hydrogen Partnership, is only one of the initiatives that have started to materialise all over the continent.

To unpack this complex yet promising future, we sat down with Luigi Crema, a leading voice in the field. As director of the Sustainable Energy Centre at Fondazione Bruno Kessler and president of Hydrogen Europe Research, an association representing over 160 universities and research centres in the hydrogen value chain, Crema has solid expertise in European hydrogen policy. We asked him to shed light on the current barriers facing its widespread adoption, and the strategic European efforts to accelerate the large-scale integration of hydrogen solutions, ensuring Europe maintains its technological leadership.

Hydrogen is frequently highlighted as crucial for decarbonisation in various sectors, including aviation and maritime, but what are the specific benefits for our urban environments beyond simple emission reduction?

First of all, an essential element to consider is the fact that throughout the energy transition, with the support of renewable sources, we have entered a path of deep electrification of final energy consumption across all sectors, including residential, industrial, and mobility. However, we know that renewables are variable and intermittent. The sun or the wind are not always available at the exact moment that I need to use this energy. One of the solutions is to convert electricity during times of excess production into a green, renewable molecule that can then be effectively stored and used when energy is needed but not available from solar or wind. One of these forms of conversion and storage is the production of renewable hydrogen through the electrolysis process, which means producing hydrogen from water using renewable electricity.

So, what are the benefits for urban mobility?

For hydrogen, the primary sectors of use have been identified as the so-called hard-to-abate sectors, meaning those difficult to decarbonise, specifically heavy industry and heavy mobility. Heavy mobility includes categories such as aeronautics or maritime, but also forms of heavy mobility related to urban areas or freight transport. Concerning urban mobility, the greater the daily mileage, the more advantageous the use of hydrogen-powered fuel cell electric vehicles becomes. This is because they offer more mileage per hydrogen refuelling compared to a battery charge for analogous battery-powered vehicles.

So, to recap, the first benefit is obviously decarbonisation. The second is that it is more advantageous compared to battery-electric vehicles.

What about the logistical and economic benefits?

Having a hydrogen bus avoids the need for a battery bus to stop and recharge its batteries multiple times. For service continuity, a public transport operator might need to equip itself with ultra-fast charging stations, which involve a very high-power draw from the grid. The availability of power for ultra-fast charging, especially if it needs to be made available for numerous services (for cars and citizens, as well as buses), becomes a very significant investment for city grids. Hydrogen would avoid the need to rewire city electricity grids, effectively decoupling this element of high-power electrical availability from the grid. Instead, you could have hydrogen that can refuel a bus in a few minutes, allowing for a driving range up to twice that of battery-electric buses.

Does this mean we will save more money?

Regarding the economic benefit, there are various points of view and various evaluations. A few years ago, a study compared the cost of the market introduction of two million battery-electric cars with that of the introduction of two million fuel cell cars powered by hydrogen. The results showed that, substantially, we are within the same cost range for the entire upstream infrastructure dedicated to the vehicle. This analysis was based on rapid charging stations at 20 kW for battery-electric cars and, analogously, hydrogen refuelling stations to meet the needs of these two million vehicles. Beyond specific values, however, what emerges is that hydrogen is not in conflict with batteries and battery-electrics, but instead they are complementary and synergistic for market development and the provision of services or vehicles to end-users. Some elements to consider, for example, are that a hydrogen refuelling station with four dispensers (like those for diesel and gasoline) is equivalent to approximately sixty 20 kW charging stations. So, the space required for a hydrogen refuelling station with four dispensers compared to a platform with 60 rapid charging stations is an important element to keep in mind in the overall cost model for the necessary infrastructure for one form of mobility versus the other.

However, barriers to hydrogen remain. What are they?

One of the primary barriers is linked to production, the availability of hydrogen. The main issue is the cost of producing hydrogen with infrastructure located in a specific member state instead of another, where the cost of hydrogen production is mainly influenced by two parameters: the cost of the technology and the cost of electricity to produce hydrogen. And why is this context complicated? Because in Europe, the cost of electricity varies across member states. As reported by the European Commission's Hydrogen Observatory, in Portugal or Finland, the cost of hydrogen production at the electrolyser output is just over €4 per kilogram, while in Italy, it is more than €10 per kg, which is 2.5 times higher. Another element concerns a marginal improvement in the technology currently on the market. Today, we might have fuel cells (i.e., the technologies on board the vehicle that take hydrogen from a tank and convert it into electricity for the vehicle's electric motor) with a lifespan of between 5,000 and 8,000 hours for cars, and 20,000 and 30,000 hours for buses. To reduce costs, particularly in vehicle maintenance, it would be essential to increase these levels of fuel cell autonomy slightly, so that fuel cells are replaced rarely, perhaps once during the entire life of the vehicle, or one or two times.

And then, clearly, there are also other gaps, such as some aspects related to safety regulations. I must say that a lot of work has been done in recent years to ensure safety comparable to other forms of mobility for hydrogen vehicles. Often, the hydrogen vehicle wins the safety ranking compared to other forms of mobility. Recently, an SUV of East Asian production won the Euro NCAP Test award as the safest SUV on the market. And clearly, the end-user must also embrace the use of hydrogen vehicles, beyond the cost issue. I must say that questionnaires conducted at a local and European level showed that hydrogen is the most appreciated form of energy carrier/energy after photovoltaic and wind energy.

So, at the very level of urban mobility, what infrastructure would be indispensable?

At the urban mobility level, it is necessary to develop locally what is then defined, at a regional scale, as a "Hydrogen Valley" project, which encompasses the entire hydrogen ecosystem, the entire value chain. So, I must have a guaranteed quantity of produced hydrogen, which can be produced locally or also transferred from other areas; but in any case, the city must source a certain amount of hydrogen. There must be a logistical site where the hydrogen is stored, and from which I can then refuel my fleet of vehicles through a hydrogen refuelling station. And then, I must have a fleet of fuel cell vehicles, clearly, with all the necessary equipment and services for operating and maintaining the fleet. And then, with all the guarantees and vehicle supply associated with a maintenance contract for them. An experiment of this type has been carried out for several years in Bolzano, where the city has adopted a bus fleet powered by hydrogen. This fleet has progressively increased in recent years. It has been a very positive and successful experience, which showed that a hydrogen bus fleet can be managed in an urban context across the entire value chain. Indeed, it ranges from the production of hydrogen itself (which takes place directly in South Bolzano), to the storage of hydrogen, and the refuelling of hydrogen on city vehicles, which in recent years have accumulated several million kilometres of travel along the city streets.

So, how feasible and plausible is it that hydrogen mobility will become the norm in Europe in the long term?

Well, let's say that European policy plans are pushing in this direction, not so much for hydrogen to become the only viable solution, but to allow hydrogen to become one solution among others that will be part of the decarbonisation process, including the use of battery-electric vehicles. Europe, with its various national actors and gas network operators, has, for example, set up the European Hydrogen Backbone, which is a hydrogen transport network. In the coming years, hydrogen could start flowing through gas pipelines instead of natural gas. The first sections of this network will begin providing service with 100% hydrogen, probably as early as 2030 or a few years later. By 2040, there is talk of finished sections covering, for example, the entire southern corridor, meaning from the import of hydrogen from North Africa (Tunisia, Algeria), transit along the entire peninsula, and delivery of hydrogen to the section that will cover Italy, Austria, Germany, Switzerland, and some Eastern European countries, with an hypothesis of 4 million tonnes of hydrogen transferred annually along this network.

What role do European policies, public funding, and cross-border collaborations play in accelerating the large-scale adoption of hydrogen solutions in urban transport?

To simplify the Commission's approach to developing the hydrogen value chain, we have a top-down direction that starts from the European Commission and provides strategic guidance, rules, policies, and continental-scale infrastructures like the network of hydrogen refuelling stations or the hydrogen transport network; a mediation role by member states that introduce specific elements to be developed for the hydrogen value chain into national policies; a regional role that looks at a bottom-up approach, meaning developing the so-called Hydrogen Valleys within a regional context. This involves the development of an entire ecosystem, initially even self-contained, for the hydrogen value chain. Ideally, the hydrogen value chain would develop simultaneously across all of Europe, but this is very difficult. Therefore, Hydrogen Valleys are the initial points from which the value chain begins to develop, while the top-down programme I mentioned earlier proceeds in parallel.

This bottom-up approach by the European Commission will, over several years, help set up the local infrastructure for the development of the hydrogen market across most of Europe.

By what year do you think hydrogen will be the norm for urban mobility across Europe?

Rollout will be step by step, assuming that a series of problems can be resolved along the way. I would say that around 2040, we should see the hydrogen sector developed in Europe. And an important point I wanted to emphasise is that today, I think between 7 and 8 out of 10 batteries produced worldwide are made in China or East Asian countries. And Europe tries to divide that marginal market share with the United States. That market is now lost; even figures at the top of the European Commission and member states say so. This then leads to a risk of losing markets like the automotive industry, because whoever controls the production of a component for a final product like an automobile will eventually control the final product itself. It would, perhaps, have been more far-sighted for Europe to say, we have control over some technological areas today, as is the case with the hydrogen sector. Europe must adopt slightly different policies to defend the technologies in which it has an advantage. What I'm trying to say is that Europe has been funding technological leadership in hydrogen for many years. It is trying to develop markets for hydrogen. When public funds are used to develop markets, we should give European technologies an edge and make sure European products are sold first in European markets. It is important to activate these virtuous loops to strengthen European industry, not only for Europe, but also in a context of global markets.

Provided by iCube Programme