The Sundarban
Latin America’s first inexperienced-hydrogen-powered gas cell truck has hit the road in Chile, marking a milestone for the country’s decarbonization efforts. The semitrailer truck will begin a yearlong testing phase in September 2025, loading up at Walmart Chile’s Quilicura Distribution Middle and carrying out operations and deliveries during the greater Santiago metropolitan area. Data detached from the testing phase will provide a road map for Walmart and its partners to scale up hydrogen gas cell trucks across Chile.
Nonetheless as Walmart and the remainder of the country work to satisfy their decarbonization goals over the next decade, the challenge lies in building the necessary infrastructure to reinforce hydrogen-powered ground transport in a geographically challenging atmosphere.
Green-Hydrogen Infrastructure Challenges
Though Chile’s abundant wind and solar resources make it a prime location for producing inexperienced hydrogen, the country has yet to accomplish the national community of technical operators and fueling stations it may perhaps have to overhaul ground transportation with gas-cell trucks.
Two years ago, Walmart Chile’s Quilicura Distribution Middle became the first distribution plant in Latin America to produce inexperienced hydrogen and operate with hydrogen gas cell automobiles. That US $15 million initiative involved swapping 200 lead-acid battery-powered forklifts for hydrogen gas cell variations. Now, that distribution center has the capacity to produce adequate inexperienced hydrogen to refuel the contemporary truck twice daily, says Ignacio Gómez, Walmart Chile’s offer-chain innovation and technology manager. [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 in Foshan, China, was purchased as part of a $6.15 million public-private partnership called the Hidrohaul Technological Program. Hidrohaul launched in 2024 as a four-year challenge to advance hydrogen-powered gas cell automobiles by bringing together key executive and industry players. Chile’s Manufacturing Trend Corporation build up $3.Forty five million in funding for the program. Globally, Walmart has committed to decarbonizing operations by 2040, with transportation as a major part of its sustainable distribution strategy, says Gómez.
“Hidrohaul is taking the first steps of this strategy by letting us take a look at the country’s first inexperienced-hydrogen truck beneath real-life situations,” says Gómez. “It’s allowing us to gather lessons learned in expose to as a consequence of this fact scale up this technology.”
The truck has an expected range of 750 kilometers and can pull 49 tonnes whereas holding 75 kilograms of hydrogen gas. Nonetheless “no truck is ever going to pull into the station empty,” says Lewis Fulton, the director of the Energy Futures Program of the Institute of Transportation Research at the College of California, Davis. To be on the safe facet, Fulton says long-haul truckers typically avoid dipping beneath a quarter tank’s value of gas. That puts the practical range for the Feichi truck at around 560 km.
Chile spans extra than 4,200 km north to south, and Walmart operates nearly 400 shops across the country beneath several subsidiaries. The far flung southern dwelling of Punta Arenas is house to the company’s southernmost store in the arena and is located nearly 3,000 km from Quilicura, which is at the moment the truck’s perfect refueling source. Regardless of the company’s plans to expand inexperienced-hydrogen manufacturing to all of its soon-to-be nine distribution centers during the country, most of the community, including Punta Arenas, is quiet out of range.
The calculus that determines where hydrogen refueling stations may quiet travel changes based on the want of trucks, the capacity of each refueling center, and how far the trucks regularly have to travel to carry their payloads. In California, Fulton and his team of researchers determined that 15 to twenty refueling stations spread across the state would offer each the geographic coverage and quantity of hydrogen to handle 5,000 heavy-accountability trucks. The state leads the United States in gas cell automobile deployment.
From north to south, Chile is about four occasions as long as the state of California. Gómez says Walmart is considering installing at least four hydrogen-gas dispensers at its distribution centers to produce adequate gas capacity. At least to start, the truck will remain in central Chile to carry out its take a look at routes.
“The plan is for the trucks to carry real merchandise loads from the Quilicura Distribution Middle and offer shops within the Metropolitan, Valparaíso, and O’Higgins areas,” Gómez says.
Global Deployment of Hydrogen Trucks
Chile joins a handful of assorted nations who have deployed hydrogen gas cell trucks for long-haul trucking, including the United States, China, South Korea, Japan, and several participants of the European Union. China leads the pack in terms of hydrogen gas cell automobiles, with a targeted 25,000 expected on the roads by the finish of this year, according to the Chinese executive. That determine is quiet a relatively small share of the total heavy-accountability automobiles operating in the Chinese market.
Globally, high prices have restricted the deployment of inexperienced-hydrogen-powered gas cell trucks at the industrial scale. Whereas Chile may fare better on this front than the United States and assorted European nations, in part because of its relationship with China, the country’s mountainous and far flung terrain poses a irregular hurdle for truck performance.
“Hills are a large thing,” says Timothy Lipman of the College of California, Berkeley, who works with Fulton on research related to the rollout of gas cell trucks in California. “If the topography is totally flat,
