Up to 80 hydrogen trucks could be on the roads around Wallsend in the next five years if a bid for government funding submitted by French-owned hydrogen producer Lhyfe gets the go ahead.
The government is currently considering bids for the second Hydrogen Allocation Round (HAR) of subsidised hydrogen projects and Lhyfe is hoping its proposal for a 20MW hydrogen production plant near Neptune Energy Park – capable of producing 8 tonnes of hydrogen per day – will get the green light. It does not yet have planning permission for the project however and the economic viability of the plant depends on securing government funding.
Founded in 2017 by Matthieu Guesné, Lhyfe now has green hydrogen production plants in development across Europe from Spain to Finland, focusing on Germany and France, and Wallsend would be its first in the UK.
Boris Davis, pictured, Lhyfe UK head of business development, said the UK had a “very attractive landscape” for hydrogen development since then prime minister Boris Johnson put in place a hydrogen strategy that would see 10GW of capacity installed by 2030. The strategy was based on a series of rounds for private operators to bid for subsidies and the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero is now reviewing bids for up to 875MW of hydrogen production under HAR 2.
“The question is always ‘where do we produce green hydrogen?’ and the answer is ‘do it where there is demand’,” says Davis. “Northern Scotland has abundant wind energy but no customers. For us it’s all about customers.”
The plant would require a very large 28MVA grid connection which would be provided by the local distribution network operator Northern Power Grid. Davis would not say how much this would cost or how long it would take. “The time required for the grid connection is not on the critical path,” he said. “We aim to be up and up and running in the second half of this decade.”
If Wallsend gets the go ahead the plant would supply roughly half its output by pipeline to a neighbouring industrial user while the other half would be transported in 1-tonne tube trailers to an unnamed local haulier with 80 trucks who sees no future in battery electric vehicles for their operation.
Davis said the plan for the Wallsend plant is to use an alkaline electrolyser powered by renewable electricity supply agreements, but he added Lhyfe was “technology agnostic” and other plants in Europe were using proton exchange membrane (PEM) electrolysers. One argument against using limited renewable electricity to produce green hydrogen is the low well to wheel efficiency; although PEM electrolysers claim to be up to 80% efficient the losses from compressing and storing hydrogen gas mean far more electricity is required than for an equivalent battery electric solution.
In order to qualify for the HAR subsidy the hydrogen produced has to meet the definition of low carbon, which means its energy intensity is under 20gCO2/MJ. “So, it is close but technically not zero emissions,” said Davis. “There will be no renewable generation on the 4-acre site as it is too small so we would be relying on grid electricity sourced through renewable power purchase agreements.”
A by-product of the electrolysis is pure oxygen; while this is used in industrial processes and the water industry Lhyfe currently has no customer for the oxygen at Wallsend so it would be vented to atmosphere.
Davis would not be drawn on who the transport operator was or what hydrogen vehicles they were looking at. “We have one fleet customer who cannot electrify because they have no grid connection and their vehicles operate 24 hours a day,” he said. “We are just looking to produce the hydrogen and we’re not involved in the refuelling station.”
The refuelling station would however be based at the operator’s depot and not be publicly accessible to other operators.
Hydrogen internal combustion engines (HICE) are closer to being ready for the road as they are similar to spark-ignition gas engines powered by CNG, though like gas engines they are not considered to be truly zero emission by the DfT. JCB Power Systems in Derbyshire has built a HICE engine suitable for commercial vehicles which it has installed in a Daimler 7.5-tonne truck demonstrator.
German engineering giant Bosch is developing both HICE and fuel cells for commercial vehicles, and is investing €2.5bn (£2.1bn) in volume production of fuel cells at its Stuttgart-Feuerbach, Homburg and Bamberg factories in Germany as well as in China. A joint venture with Chinese truck maker Qingling Motors has been running a fleet of 100 fuel cell electric trucks in China since 2021 and Bosch supplies fuel cells for the Iveco heavy duty fuel cell truck developed with Nikola.
Scania is also working on a fuel cell electric truck in partnership with Cummins and aims to have trucks on UK roads by 2025 as part of the Zehid HyHaul hydrogen demonstrator project.
