“A lot of operators buy components for hydrogen refuelling, put them together and hope the system works. But we have our own fully integrated and owned technology.”
Decarbonising heavy transport is tricky. Electric buses and trucks are expensive, and they take a long time to charge.
Hydrogen could solve the problem. It’s easy to transport and can refuel a heavy vehicle in minutes. But hydrogen, the lightest of elements, has a low energy content, so it must be compressed to fit enough of the gas into a vehicle to run it. The problem: hydrogen is highly flammable, and compression heats it up.
“You need to build up the pressure very carefully, because you can’t just put highly pressurised gas into a tank,” says Herman Roose, chief financial officer at Resato Hydrogen Technology, a Dutch company that has been working on hydrogen refuelling since 2016. “Without the right approach, it will heat up to over 100 degrees, which is very dangerous.”
High pressure is what makes hydrogen a viable fuel. The light and airy gas must be compressed to 700 bars for a car and about 350 bars for a truck, although new heavy vehicle technologies may require 700 bars. The overall system needs to maintain a pressure of 950 bars, roughly equivalent to the pressure in the deepest parts of the ocean. “That’s not easy,” Roose says.
The company’s technology pressurises the gas without having the temperature rise too fast. If it does, the pumping system shuts off. Pulling up to a petrol station and seeing “out of order” on a pump isn’t a big deal when you can just drive a couple kilometres to the next station. Hydrogen refuelling stations, however, will be far and few between – about 200 kilometres apart on major roads, according to EU plans.
Resato sells its system directly to big station operators, like Total of France and Hypion of Germany. The whole process fits in a shed-like structure that sits above ground and pumps compressed hydrogen to fuelling points with specialised nozzles for cars, trucks and buses.
“A lot of operators buy components for hydrogen refuelling, put them together and hope the system works,” Roose says. “But we have our own fully integrated and owned technology.”
The European Investment Bank signed a €25 million venture debt facility with Resato Hydrogen in January. The financing was made possible by an InvestEU guarantee.
Compressing light and airy hydrogen
Based in the Netherlands town of Assen, Resato grew out of the oil and gas business. The company developed high-pressure technology for a variety of industrial applications, such as testing oil and gas pumps or precisely cutting steel and concrete with extremely strong water jets that exert 4 000 bars of pressure.
In 2021, the company split into three entities: one focused on applications for the oil and gas industry, another for water-cutting technologies and, finally, the hydrogen business. Resato has been working on hydrogen refuelling technology since 2016, and it built its first prototype station in the Hague in 2019. That station is still operating.
Resato’s refuelling process works like this:
- Hydrogen tanks connect to a series of pipes that run the gas through a compressor, shrinking the hydrogen and increasing the pressure to 100 bars
- The compressed hydrogen is piped through a cooling module that reduces the temperature to -40 degrees Celsius
- This process is repeated another two or three times, increasing the pressure to 300 bars, then 500 and sometimes to 900 bars (for trucks)
- The compressed gas flows through a special nozzle into the reservoir of a car, truck or bus at the same temperature as the surrounding air, which ensures safety.
The company monitors the whole process remotely. Its technology also makes it possible to maintain enough pressure to refuel vehicles one after the other, which is important to station owners and drivers because it reduces refuelling time. Even heavy vehicles can be filled in 10 to 20 minutes, compared with the hours it can take to charge an electric truck or bus.
Hydrogen fills green transition gaps
The hydrogen used in Resato’s refuelling stations is made through a process called electrolysis, which uses electricity to split water into separate hydrogen and oxygen molecules. For hydrogen to be “green,” however, the electricity used for electrolysis needs to come from renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power. Some stations that use Resato’s refuelling equipment, like one in Groningen, produce hydrogen on site from electricity generated by solar and wind power.
Hydrogen production is still limited in Europe. The European Union is spurring production by creating a European Hydrogen Bank to finance projects and by allowing seven EU countries to provide €6.9 billion in state aid for infrastructure projects. One of those countries is the Netherlands, which is supporting the rollout of refuelling stations through a subsidy programmed called SWIM.
“They have really good subsidies, and the number of hydrogen-fuelled trucks is increasing more than in other countries,” says Özhan Yilmaz, an engineer who works on mobility projects for the European Investment Bank.
Hydrogen is expected to remain a niche fuel. While the European Union aims to have three million charging stations for electric vehicles by 2030, the goal for hydrogen is less than 2 000 refuelling stations.
About 6.4 million trucks currently circulate in the European Union and about 300 000 new ones are sold each year. Hydrogen-fuelled vehicles make up less than 0.02% of the total European fleet, Yilmaz says.
But heavy trucks consume much more energy than passenger cars – roughly seven to ten times more per kilometre, depending on the kind of vehicle. Trucks also travel much longer distances than most passenger cars. The average passenger car does 15 000 kilometres a year, but a long-distance truck travels 150 000 kilometres. Multiply the distance per year by the consumption and, Yilmaz says, “decarbonising one truck is in fact the equivalent of decarbonising 70 to 100 passenger cars.”
Chicken and egg problem
Hydrogen’s adoption depends on solving this chicken and egg problem: Heavy vehicle manufacturers and transport companies don’t want to invest in hydrogen vehicles if the charging infrastructure isn’t there. But station operators have a hard time investing when the overall hydrogen market is still small, with only about 6 000 cars and heavy vehicles in the European Union.
“If people don’t build these stations, then transport companies won’t buy hydrogen trucks,” says Bert van der Toorn, who works on cleantech investments for the European Investment Bank and is responsible for the Resato financing. “At the same time, the market needs to expand considerably.”
In addition to subsidies and grants, the European Union is also requiring heavy vehicle manufacturers to cut the average carbon emissions of new trucks by 45% in 2030, 65% in 2035 and 90% by 2040. This will effectively phase out sales of diesel trucks in the next 15 years. Heavy duty vehicles account for 25% of EU greenhouse gas emissions from road transport, or about 6% of overall emissions.
Those initiatives should push manufacturers to build more hydrogen vehicles. Resato plans to develop and sell about 200 refuelling stations a year, creating the infrastructure needed for this new market. In the meantime, the company is focusing on municipal projects, like refuelling stations for hydrogen-powered buses.
Roose stresses that both hydrogen and electric vehicles are needed to decarbonise transport. Electrification alone isn’t enough. The Netherlands has 150 000 heavy trucks, he says, and charging them all simultaneously would require 19 gigawatts of power. Obviously, not all heavy-duty trucks will be plugged in at the same time, but even staggering the charging of those vehicles could strain the electricity grid.
“Basically, you need both – like diesel and petrol,” he says. “We’ll have electric cars for normal traffic, and hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles for long-haul transport.”
Resato Hydrogen Technology
SCARLET RESATO H2 (IEU GT2)
The Project concerns the enhancement of the Company-s hydrogen refuelling technology and production capacity in the Netherlands over a 4-year investment period (2024-2027).
