The Multimodal Hydrogen Transport Refuelling Network Study will evaluate the potential for hydrogen's use in transport across the North of England. It will create a joined-up, regional strategy to cost-effectively kick-start the hydrogen economy in the North and directly support the growth of zero-emission transport options. The project will begin by selecting hydrogen vehicle types with promising use cases: high utilisations, challenging duty cycles, heavy loads etc. We will then map centres of concentration for these vehicles such as bus and truck depots, ports, airports and rail stations. Having engaged with both large, local fleet operators and fuel cell electric vehicle OEMs, we will model localised vehicle up- take scenarios. By combining information on fuel cell vehicle efficiencies and standard vehicle mileages, we will convert the vehicle deployments into regionalised hydrogen demands. We will analyse vehicle routes on road, rail and otherwise to identify hydrogen demand hot-spots. We will overlay this data with information on the location of existing fuel stations, and gas and electricity grids to identify a number of sites that would be prime, future-proofed locations for hydrogen refuelling stations. We will investigate the hydrogen production and supply options to supply the stations and will model the expected hydrogen production from each of these through time. This will take into account any available information on near- and medium-term Northern hydrogen production projects e.g. large-scale electrolysers and reformers with carbon-capture facilities as well as likely sites for new hydrogen production projects like large wind farms and biomethane plants. This will also include an analysis of how hydrogen can be delivered to the stations with a focus on evaluating the potential of the gas grid to deliver hydrogen to high- capacity hydrogen stations compared to incumbent technologies. The initial findings of these analyses will be worked up into a document that will be shared with key stakeholders, such as local governments, vehicle operators and technology providers for review and feedback, letters of support from some key stakeholders are in the appendix. This report will be submitted at the end of the Discovery process with conclusions on more detailed work to be done in the Alpha and Beta phases which will culminate in the deployment of several fleets in strategic use cases and locations to evidence the strategy and pave the way for a wider vehicle roll-out in the north.

Problem Bring Solved

The UK has made a commitment to become Net Zero carbon by 2050 which will require almost all sectors to entirely decarbonise. The government is making its aspirations towards the heavy-duty sector increasingly clear with announcements to end the sale of diesel lorries, buses and trains by 2040. Transport, as a sector, accounts for more GHG emissions in the North than another other sector, and nearly 20% of those surface transport emissions are generated by the heaviest HGVs. However, the heavy-duty transport sector has so far proven one of the most difficult sectors to decarbonise. The UK government had promised a 'world leading' and comprehensive strategy for decarbonisation of transport and has often referenced hydrogen as a key component of that. However, both the Hydrogen and Transport Decarbonisation documents released in the Summer of 2021 lacked clear and integrated strategy for how this can be done. This has left almost all participants in the heavy transport sector without a clear, overarching strategy to achieve complete fleet decarbonisation within 20 years. To date, the cost of hydrogen vehicles and refuelling infrastructure has been prohibitively expensive to achieve large scale deployment. However, hydrogen transport scales up extremely cost-effectively and reliably with larger stations retailing lower cost hydrogen and having higher reliability due to multiple component redundancy. Hydrogen refuelling infrastructure reflects diesel in its ability to quickly refuel a wide range of vehicle types from the same station which allows all modes of hydrogen transport to benefit from the scale derived by multimodal deployments. Achieving the benefits from this requires an overarching regional vehicle and infrastructure deployment strategy which is currently lacking. This project will create an integrated, multimodal hydrogen vehicle and infrastructure deployment strategy for the north of England. It will take advantage of the inherently multimodal characteristics of hydrogen refuelling for vehicle technologies as well as the potential which hydrogen presents for the integration and decarbonisation of the electricity, gas and transport sectors. This strategy will provide confidence to heavy-duty vehicle operators and local government about the potential for hydrogen to contribute to their fleet decarbonisation and the steps required to begin a transition to zero-carbon technologies. The project will evidence the drafted strategy created in the Discovery and Alpha phases with the first commercial fleet deployments in the Beta phase.