Motor Mouth: Hydrogen vehicles are finally getting their renaissance

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This week’s Motor Mouth kicks off the fifth season of Driving into the Future’s acclaimed expert panels bringing you all the coming advancements in automotive technology.

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It was a largely unheralded announcement at an exposition that, frankly, even I’ve never heard of. As if it couldn’t get any less “viral,” it had to do with trucks, long-haul trucks to more specific, that absolutely essential portion of the mobility industry that we all depend on yet completely ignore. Despite all that, said announcement — by Cummins, at the recent ConExpo 2023 show in Las Vegas — of a completely “fuel-agnostic” engine is sure to have wide-ranging repercussions beyond the heavy-duty segment.

“Agnosticism,” at least as defined by Cummins, means the company’s new engines will run on the fuel of your choice, be it diesel, gasoline, propane, natural gas, or, of course, the topic of this discussion, hydrogen. Indeed, the American trucking giant may well have engineered the ultimate in internal-combustion modularity, Srikanth Padmanabhan, president of the company’s Engine Business division, saying last year that all of these variously-fuelled engines will be identical from the head gasket down. Only the cylinder head and fuelling apparatus need be changed so that they can run on said multiplicity of fuels. For even more specificity, the engine’s block, crankshaft, connecting rods, etc., not to mention external ancillaries such as alternators, oil pumps et al, will all be shared common parts.

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This interchangeability is a game-changer. Not only does it promise truckers future emissions compliance — buy a diesel today and then upgrade to hydrogen some time in the future, when CO2 emissions get stricter — but it also dramatically reduces the cost of going green. The electrification of trucks, be they battery- or fuel-cell-powered, is going to be enormously expensive for an industry that has long operated on the tightest of profit margins. Having a familiar low-cost powertrain that differs only in its fuel delivery system may be just the prompt that haulage firms need to start taking carbon reduction seriously.

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Said familiarity has other benefits. Pierre Steffen, business development manager for KEYOU, a German company that “converts existing diesel commercial vehicles to zero-CO2 hydrogen vehicles,” told Automotive World’s Future Truck North America Symposium that the trucking industry is already well-squeezed in finding qualified drivers and mechanics. Driving, not to mention working on, “what they already know” will be a huge boon to an industry already struggling for manpower. And as a measure of how far along the development already is, Steffen says that current hydrogen-ICE engines are already running at about 45-per-cent efficiency (for context, the best of gasoline engines, Toyota’s Atkinson-cycle fours, manage about 41 per cent, and the best of diesels hover in the region of 46 to 47 per cent).

Nor are KEYOU and Cummins the only ones preparing for a hydrogen-fuelled, piston-powered trucking future. Hyundai’s Doosan Infracore is, says Ward’s Auto, “gearing up to produce hydrogen internal-combustion engines for construction and commercial vehicles for 2025.” According to Ward’s, Hyundai’s hydrogen-ICEs already meet the hyper-stringent Euro7 emissions regulations and produce about 0.1 gram of CO2 per kilowatt-hour. Indeed, says Steffen, other than “delivering the molecules to the gas tank,” hydrogen-ICEs are pretty much a fait accompli. 

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He may be getting some help in that arena. From Autocar in England comes the just-as-recent news that a start-up, Element 2, plans on having 30 hydrogen refuelling stations “operational or under construction” by the end of this year. According to Brendan Bilton, chief technology officer at Element 2, that would mean a maximum of 100 miles — 160 kilometres — between service stations, more than ample to service a burgeoning hydrogen-fuelled fleet.

North America is also likely to see an equally sudden splurge in such stations thanks to U.S. President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. Motor Mouth has frequently commented on the generous incentives the IRA heaps on EVs, especially the US$7,500 consumer credit; and the $45 paid to manufacturers for every kilowatt-hour of battery they build in the U.S. over the next 10 years. But production of hydrogen is similarly subsidized, the manufacture of clean, “green” H2 funded to the tune of $3.00 per kilogram. Current pricing sees CO2-free hydrogen costing more than US$10 a kilo, but by 2030, US$5/kg is possible, and PwC sees it dropping to just US$1 a kilo by 2050. In other words, hydrogen-fuelled trucks will be economically feasible over the long haul.

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Hydrogen is making a comeback in the mobility business and, if the trucking industry has anything to say about it, part of that revolution will be piston-powered

And from Australia comes some not-quite-as-recent news — as in, from last month — that a team from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology have developed a way to produce green hydrogen from seawater. Previous processes required fresh water, a resource, as the headlines scream, becoming scarcer in supply. Previous attempts at splitting seawater’s hydrogen and oxygen atoms resulted in the production of toxic chlorine gas. But, according to a study published in the scientific journal Nano Micro Small, RMIT solves the problem by using a catalyst constructed of something called nitrogen-doped NiMo₃P.

Not only is the N-NiMo₃P cheaper than catalysts used in current electrolyzers, but it decreases the amount of energy required to separate water in hydrogen and oxygen. So much so that RMIT’s lead researcher, Dr. Nasir Mahmood, said RMIT’s system could reduce the cost of green hydrogen production to $2/kilogram, “making it far more cost-effective than any green hydrogen approach currently in the market.” The process, says Mahmood, therefore solves two basic problems surrounding hydrogen production — it is “100-per-cent carbon-free across its entire production life cycle,” and does not “cut into the world’s precious freshwater reserves.” Hell, electrolyzing saltwater may even help reduce the rising sea levels caused by climate change.

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So, I hear you saying, long-haul zero-emission trucks could still be piston-powered and cost-effective. Great. But what’s that got to do with me and zero-emissions automobiles?

Well, for one thing, any near-term hydrogen-fuelling infrastructure will be built for the commercial haulage industry. Automobiles will be, at least for the time being, a niche sideline, much like diesel-fuelled cars are now. The H2 infrastructure of the near-term future will not be built to serve the scant number of Toyota Mirais and Hyundai Nexos currently on our roads. Only a vibrant, hydrogen-fuelled 18-wheeler industry will do that. 

Closer to home is the recent understanding that heavy-duty pickups — or any automobile that tows a substantial trailer — are a load too far for battery power. Driving’s recent F-150 Lightning review revealed that, despite its huge 131-kilowatt-hour battery, Ford’s much-acclaimed BEV pickup could only manage about 300 kilometres on the highway. Recent tests south of the border suggest that electric pickups, even with huge batteries, struggle to hit the 160-kilometre mark towing a large trailer. No wonder, then, that Stellantis recently announced the Heavy Duty version of its Ram pickups will be hydrogen-fuelled.

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The company didn’t say, however, how that hydrogen would be converted into propulsion. So, it might just be coincidence that the smallest of those aforementioned fuel-agnostic engines Cummins is producing is based on the B6.7, the 6.7-litre inline-six that is the powertrain of choice for Ram’s lineup of 2500/3500/4500/5500 pickups. Cummins has already demonstrated that its B6.7H can be tuned for 290 horsepower — as well as 886 pound-feet of torque — and that its 700-bar storage tanks are capable of 500 kilometres of range and quicker-than-BEV fill-ups.

Now, to be clear, no one has said future hydrogen-powered Heavy Duty Rams will be powered by anything other than a fuel cell. Indeed, the company already has FCEV commercial vans planned for Europe. Nonetheless, it’s not out of the question that Cummins’ new hydrogen-fuelled ICE might end up in a Ram pickup near you.

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Whatever happens with ZEV automobiles, hydrogen is making a comeback in the mobility business and, if the trucking industry has anything to say about its emissions-reduced future, part of that revolution will be piston-powered.

Author’s note: The future of hydrogen is one of the featured topics in Driving into the Future’s fifth season. Other must-see-TV discussions will include Canada’s new national ZEV mandate; and the solution to the traffic congestion plaguing Canadian highways. Please join us online for:

Register for our FREE online virtual panels here

How will ZEV mandates shape our future? on Wednesday, April 5 at 11:00 AM EST

Traffic’s a mess—how do we fix it? on Wednesday, April 19 at 11:00 AM EST

The hydrogen revival on Wednesday, May 3 at 11:00 AM EST