H2Haul will develop and demonstrate a total of 16 new heavy-duty (26–44t) hydrogen fuel cell trucks in real-world commercial operations. The project includes two major European truck manufacturers (IVECO and VDL), who will build on existing small-scale prototyping activities to develop new zero-emission trucks tailored to the needs of European customers, mainly in large supermarket fleets. The vehicles will be standardised as far as possible to help encourage the development of the European supply chain. New high-capacity hydrogen refuelling stations will be installed to provide reliable, low carbon hydrogen supplies to the trucks. Most of the stations will be publicly accessible and this project will thus support the uptake of a broader range of hydrogen-fuelled vehicles. The vehicles and infrastructure will be thoroughly tested via an extended trial with the high-profile end users over several years. The comprehensive data monitoring and analysis tasks will ensure that the technical, economic, and environmental performance of the hardware is assessed, and that the business case for further deployment of heavy-duty fuel cell trucks is developed. The scope and ambition of this innovative project will create a range of valuable information that will be disseminated widely amongst truck operators, representatives of the retail sector, policy makers, and the broader hydrogen industry. Hence, H2Haul will validate the ability of hydrogen fuel cell trucks to provide zero-emission mobility in heavy-duty applications and lay the foundations for commercialisation of this sector in Europe during the 2020s.

The overall aim of NewBusFuel is to resolve a significant knowledge gap around the technologies and engineering solutions required for the refuelling of a large number of buses at a single bus depot. Bus depot scale refuelling imposes significant new challenges which have not yet been tackled by the hydrogen refuelling sector: • Scale – throughputs in excess of 2,000kg/day (compared to 100kg/day for current passenger car stations) • Ultra-high reliability – to ensure close to 100% available supply for the public transport networks which will rely on hydrogen • Short refuelling window – buses need to be refuelled in a short overnight window, leading to rapid H2 throughput • Footprint – needs to be reduced to fit within busy urban bus depots • Volume of hydrogen storage – which can exceed 10 tonnes per depot and leads to new regulatory and safety constraints A large and pan-European consortium will develop solutions to these challenges. The consortium involves 10 of Europe’s leading hydrogen station providers. These partners will work with 12 bus operators in Europe, each of whom have demonstrated political support for the deployment of hydrogen bus fleets. In each location engineering studies will be produced, by collaborative design teams involving bus operators and industrial HRS experts, each defining the optimal design, hydrogen supply route, commercial arrangements and the practicalities for a hydrogen station capable of providing fuel to a fleet of fuel cell buses (75-260 buses). Public reports will be prepared based on an analysis across the studies, with an aim to provide design guidelines to bus operators considering deploying hydrogen buses, as well as to demonstrate the range of depot fuelling solutions which exist (and their economics) to a wider audience. These results will be disseminated widely to provide confidence to the whole bus sector that this potential barrier to commercialisation of hydrogen bus technology has been overcome.

This project will develop an open standard for heavy-duty fuel-cell modules in terms of size, interfaces, control and test protocols, with the objective of kickstarting the use of fuel cells and hydrogen in the heavy-duty mobility sector, where electrification with batteries is impractical. Multiple modules may be integrated in a system, similar to AA batteries; this will allow using the same modules for multiple sizes. Combined with the standardisation across several sectors (road, offroad, rail, maritime, etc.) represented by participating OEMs, the same modules will address a large pooled market. The size of the market, and the availability of multiple module suppliers (8 in this project alone) will create a fair competition environment where OEMs may choose and change vendors, driving down prices and activating a virtuous cycle through economies of scale and achieving one of the main goals of the FCH JU's Work Programme in the heavy-duty mobility sector. This project will also produce prototypes form 8 leading FC vendors, which will then be thoroughly tested by two independent institutes for compliance with the open standards produced by the project itself. The project will feature significant dissemination and outreach activities, especially towards external OEMs that may become customers of the module suppliers.