Coregas opens first hydrogen refuelling station for trucks

Industrial gas company Coregas has installed a hydrogen refuelling station for heavy trucks in Port Kembla to fuel up to 10 trucks per day.

The company says it will be the first heavy vehicle hydrogen refuelling station in Australia, and is operational now for the one fuel cell truck currently operating in the area.

The station is on the Bluescope Steel corner of the port and is available for Coregas’ future fuel cell vehicles to fill up and any company which signs up to be a partner.

The $2 million refuelling station was partly funded with a $500,000 grant from the New South Wales government.

The company will start to switch its fleet from diesel to Hyzon Motors trucks this year, for which it has an order in for two.

The hydrogen in the station is currently ‘grey’, meaning it’s made from fossil gases, and greened-up using biomethane offsets, when these become available.

Grey hydrogen can reduce truck and bus emissions by 15 per cent to 33 per cent compared to diesel, according to a white paper by the International Council on Clean Transportation this year.

The company says that from the second half of 2023, bio-methane will be captured from wastewater treatment plants, landfill, and agriculture to produce green hydrogen which will be used in the station.

Gas from the existing Coregas plant is compressed up to 500bar, enabling supply into the 350bar fuel cells in a 15-20 minute time frame.

Although a number of miners, led by BHP and Fortescue Metals, are shifting to electric vehicles over fuel cells, NSW regional minister Tara Moriarty said the Port Kembla project would demonstrate the feasibility of using hydrogen-powered heavy vehicles more broadly in regional NSW.

Trucks and buses accounted for about 4 per cent of Australia’s total emissions in 2020, or 19.7 million tonnes, says the Climate Change Authority.  But decarbonisation efforts in this sector are already split between electric and fuel cell.

Already heavy vehicle users like those miners are realising the efficiency problems of current fuel cell technology, which creates fuel-to-wheel loses of 70 per cent — the same as for diesel — compared to losses of 20 per cent for an electric vehicle.