Hydrogen specialist hails success of dual-fuel road sweeper trial

Hydrogen expert ULEMCo said the deployment of a dual-fuelled road sweeper in Aberdeen has cut daily diesel displacement rates by almost 50%.

The optimised sweeper working for the city council has been saving the annual equivalent of around three tonnes of CO2 emissions since the start of the year.

The vehicle has been converted to run on dual-fuel, so that a quantity of hydrogen is burned in the engine in combination with diesel, cutting environmentally unfriendly exhaust emissions.

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ULEMCo said it believed refuse collection trucks, gritters and other specialist equipment are ideally suited to the use of hydrogen as a fuel.

Councillor Jenny Laing, Aberdeen City Council leader, said: “I would say to local authorities that are thinking about moving to hydrogen technology, that it not only helps you with the economic targets that you may have, but it will certainly help with the environmental targets that each and every local authority in Scotland has set themselves.”

Amanda Lyne, MD at ULEMCo, said: “A lot of attention and public funding support is focussed on looking for zero-emission solutions, but we cannot afford to wait for these to be commercially available, we must start transitioning to carbon-free energy using the full toolkit to achieve CO2 reduction immediately.”