Mercedes-Benz parent company Daimler AG and Linde team up for more hydrogen refuelling facilities

A consortium of companies including Daimler AG and gas supplier Linde has announced plans to establish 13 new hydrogen refuelling facilities before the end of 2015.

Benz and strategic partner Renault Nissan have been recently joined by Ford in a project to design, build and promote fuel cell vehicles in Europe. Other companies heavily committed to the hydrogen-fuelled cars include Honda, Hyundai and Toyota. Benz’s arch enemy, BMW, is known to be working with General Motors on fuel cell technology as well.

But a long-standing challenge associated with hydrogen fuel cells has been one of where to refuel them. In the USA the race is on to build hydrogen resupply facilities, and Germany is following suit. It’s not just a question of changing a pump over from diesel or LPG to hydrogen either; the light, highly volatile gas requires plenty of infrastructure to support it. Sustainable production (with renewable energy resources, ideally) is difficult enough on an industrial scale, but transporting the gas adds another wrinkle to the problem.

Daimler and Linde between them have invested €10 million so far, and have been joined in the joint venture by fuel wholesale and retail partners Total, OMV, Avia and Hoyer. At the end of last month a Total station officially opened a hydrogen facility in Berlin-Charlottenburg. Total plans to open more facilities in Bavaria, Fellbach (Stuttgart), Ulm, Karlsruhe, Neuruppin (Brandenburg), Cologne-Bonn Airport and Berlin’s city centre.

OMV has outlined plans for hydrogen facilities in Munich, Nuremberg and Stuttgart. AVIA will open a facility in Stuttgart East and Hoyer’s hydrogen filling station will be located in Leipzig, in Germany’s east.

“We are pleased to be driving this expansion of Germany’s H2 fuelling network,” says Dr Andreas Opfermann, Head of Clean Energy & Innovation Management at Linde.

“We are making a valuable contribution to the successful commercialisation of fuel-cell vehicles while supporting initiatives like the Clean Energy Partnership [CEP] and ‘H2 Mobility’.”

Mercedes-Benz is one of very few car companies to have operated continuously from the early days of motoring, when petrol was a scarce commodity. It’s plainly in the interests of the company to take the ‘scarcity’ factor out of hydrogen – which is, ironically, a chemical in some abundance – as fuel cell vehicles begin to come on stream. The company anticipates that there will be as many as 10,000 fuel cell vehicles on European roads by the end of 2018.

“There is no question that fuel-cell technology is reaching maturity,” said Professor Herbert Kohler, Vice President Group Research & Sustainability and Chief Environmental Officer at Daimler AG.

“From 2017, we are planning to bring competitively priced fuel-cell vehicles to market. So now is the time to build a nationwide fuelling infrastructure. The aim is to enable motorists to reach any destination in Germany in their hydrogen-fuelled vehicles. This initiative is a huge step forward on the journey to a truly nationwide H2 network.”

To date, according to press material provided by Mercedes-Benz, Linde produces half of the hydrogen for existing fuelling stations from sustainable energy sources. The gas is obtained from crude glycerol, which is a by-product of biodiesel production. Biodiesel, as the name indicates, is a carbon-neutral fuel produced from plant life and other biological sources.

Linde also splits water molecules by passing a current through the water, with the electricity procured from wind power generation.

The 13 new stations by the end of 2015 will take the total in Germany to 50 hydrogen stations. By 2023, the network of hydrogen stations in Germany will be up around 400.

Pictured: Mercedes (B-Class) F-Cell, Honda FCX Clarity, Toyota FCV, Hyundai (ix35) Tucson Fuel Cell and Chevrolet Equinox Fuel Cell