New Hydrogen Alliance Outlines Plans – But Only a Little

At the IAA Transportation, Daimler Truck, the Volvo Group, Toyota, Bosch, Air Liquide, TotalEnergies, TEAL Mobility, and MB Energy presented their plans to accelerate the ramp-up of hydrogen-powered vehicles in Europe. The details remain vague, but the goal is to scale hydrogen trucks by 2030.

New alliance for hydrogen in freight transport

Image: Daimler Truck

A few days ago, the eight companies had already announced their intention to unveil their new hydrogen alliance at the IAA Transportation in Hanover. This has now happened. The goal is to create a German ecosystem that meets all the prerequisites for the scalable deployment of hydrogen trucks by 2030. This ecosystem is to be supported by political backing and European industry leaders across the entire value chain.

However, the plans presented are somewhat vague and partly old news—but the IAA Transportation naturally provided an excellent stage to attract Germany’s Federal Transport Minister Steffen Bilger (CDU) to the opening event. After all, without the political support, hydrogen trucks in Germany and Europe would likely already be dead in the water. The ranges of fully electric trucks are now excellent, raising the question of whether a hydrogen mobility ecosystem—whose green production is still barely scalable—is truly necessary.

But let’s look at what the various partners in the hydrogen alliance for commercial vehicles plan to do:

• Daimler Truck aims to deploy a small series of 100 units of a hydrogen-powered tractor unit, the Mercedes-Benz NextGenH2 Truck, in customer operations by the end of 2026—this has been known since January—and has secured funding of 226 million euros from the federal government and the states of Rhineland-Palatinate and Baden-Württemberg. In parallel, the first trucks with hydrogen combustion engines are to be prepared for market launch next year. Overall, Daimler Truck intends to invest a mid-three-digit million-euro amount in hydrogen trucks by the end of the decade.
• The Volvo Group is advancing its hydrogen portfolio and investing significant sums in hydrogen powertrains for market introduction by 2030, including both fuel cell trucks and trucks with hydrogen combustion engines.
• Toyota, which recently joined the fuel cell joint venture Cellcentric formed by Daimler Truck and Volvo Group, will participate as a technology partner in expanding hydrogen mobility, drawing on more than 30 years of experience in developing fuel cell systems.
• Bosch supplies central vehicle components for gaseous hydrogen as well as advanced refuelling technologies for liquid and gaseous hydrogen.
• On the infrastructure side, Volvo Group and Daimler Truck are collaborating with energy companies and hydrogen suppliers such as Air Liquide, TotalEnergies, and MB Energy, as well as with fuel station operators like MB Energy and TEAL Mobility, a 50:50 joint venture between TotalEnergies and Air Liquide operating under the TotalEnergies brand. The companies are pooling their respective capacities to scale supply chains for both liquid and gaseous hydrogen.

One of the alliance’s goals is to launch hydrogen refuelling stations capable of fuelling up to 100 hydrogen trucks per day. The partners also benefit from the European Union’s Alternative Fuels Infrastructure Regulation (AFIR), which mandates hydrogen refuelling stations at key transport routes. To comply with AFIR requirements, the German federal government published a funding call in January, under which the construction of hydrogen refuelling stations and trucks with fuel cell or hydrogen combustion engines will be supported with 220 million euros.

The aforementioned funding for this “hydrogen initial network” was oversubscribed, with a requested funding volume of 455 million euros, as reported. A total of 71 applications were submitted for hydrogen refuelling stations and 455 for vehicles and vehicle fleets. The new hydrogen alliance sees this as confirmation of the “strong commercial demand from the logistics industry”. Project selection will now take place subsequently “in a competitive procedure based on pre-defined criteria,” as stated. Applicants with approved requests will be notified in the second half of the year.