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 Middle and finishing up operations and deliveries all through the higher Santiago metropolitan space. Knowledge collected from the testing section will present a street map for Walmart and its companions to scale up hydrogen gas cell vans throughout Chile.
However as Walmart and the remainder of the nation work to fulfill their decarbonization targets over the subsequent decade, the problem lies in constructing the mandatory infrastructure to assist hydrogen-powered ground transport in a geographically difficult surroundings.
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 Middle grew to become the first distribution plant in Latin America to supply 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 middle has the capability to supply sufficient inexperienced hydrogen to refuel the brand new truck twice day by 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 challenge 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 take a look at the nation’s first green-hydrogen truck underneath real-life circumstances,” says Gómez. “It’s permitting us to collect classes discovered to be able 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 facet, Fulton says long-haul truckers sometimes keep away from dipping beneath 1 / 4 tank’s value of gas. 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 positioned almost 3,000 km from Quilicura, which is at present 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 modifications based mostly on the variety of vans, the capability of every refueling middle, and the way far the vans often must journey to ship their payloads. In California, Fulton and his workforce 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 adequate gas capability. At the least 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 masses from the Quilicura Distribution Middle 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 gas cell vans for long-haul trucking, together with america, China, South Korea, Japan, and several other members of the European Union. China leads the pack by way of hydrogen gas cell automobiles, with a targeted 25,000 anticipated on the roads by the tip of this 12 months, in line with the Chinese language authorities. That determine continues to be a comparatively small share of the whole heavy-duty automobiles working within the Chinese language market.
Globally, excessive prices have restricted the deployment of green-hydrogen-powered gas cell vans on the industrial scale. Whereas Chile might fare higher on this entrance than america and different European nations, partly due to its relationship with China, the nation’s mountainous and distant terrain poses a novel 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 gas cell vans in California. “If the topography is completely flat, you’re going to get an extended vary and want much less gas than in case you’re going over actually steep hills.” Excessive cold and hot climate can even impression a fuel-cell truck’s battery and scale back effectivity over time, Lipman says.
So far, Chile has embraced native hydrogen energy in its efforts to section 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 turn into much less possible.
“You may solely consider so many applied sciences,” Fulton says. “So if a rustic or a state makes a powerful dedication to 1 or two applied sciences, finally, perhaps it will get tougher to consider different ones.”
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