A post from Team Triple H – Eric de Putter | Patrick Asmus | Cor Scholte
Last weekend the Hydrogen Challenge took place. Staff from Holthausen, Hanze Hogeschool en hmak participate as Triple H, not just to clock up miles or see the Eiffel Tower. Our mission was to learn more about and evangelize hydrogen. We would like to thank Arjan de Putter for convincing us that we learn more outside the office. As you can see below, he had a point.
We were greatly inspired by Jules Verne’s ‘Around the world in 80 days’. As we had only 24 hours, we visited the same countries, at least their embassies and we read and discussed their hydrogen plans. In Europe, the Italian case is undoubtedly the most interesting, they looked better than the rest at the barriers and allocated more funding.
We are not surprising anyone if we said that all hydrogen missions, visions and implementation strategies in those countries reflect that establishing a new infrastructure and moving various industries to hydrogen is a challenge. The real surprise is the subtle different approach that governments take, the table has the detail but those are some highlights.
1. The US’ Hydrogen Shot – how to achieve a $ 1 price for a kilo hydrogen within 10 years. We drove at less than 1 kilo hydrogen per 100 km, the US target means fuel would cost 1 ct per kilometer; substantially lower than current cost of petrol or diesel per kilometer.
2. The UK is one of the few to explicitly state that hydrogen reduces the problem of network congestion.
3. Italy’s strategy papers testified of reality checks with clarity on challenges and barriers, presumably that is why they allocated higher budgets than anyone in the EU. At least 3 countries explicitly state they want to be a leader, we believe Italy is leading by example.
From the embassies in The Hague, we traveled to Hydrogen valley (Groningen – just for those unfamiliar with the term) and visited a number of companies. We witnessed pilot projects for busses, garbage collection, we saw houses on a hydrogen network, hydrogen bikes, visited army barracks (anything more is confidential) and saw a fuel cell that was used to drive 1 Million kilometers. We also had a random conversation with a hydrogen cab driver who seemed very pleased with hydrogen as refueling took only a few minutes.
This has given us a 360 degrees view on hydrogen. Jules Verne said that water is the energy source of the future, we agree obviously subject to electrolysis. Hydrogen will be here eventually for multiple industries and then it will be here to stay.