JINNAN Steel Group to Deploy 10,000 Hydrogen Heavy-duty Truck by 2025
SHANXI JINNAN Iron and Steel Group recently announced that the company will deploy 10,000 hydrogen fuel cell heavy-duty trucks (HDTs) by 2025, and it also provided specific deployment target for each year-1,000 HDT for 2023, 2,000 HDT for 2024, and 7,000 HDT for 2025.
SHANXI JINNAN Iron and Steel Group, located in Quwo city, Shanxi province, China, is a major iron and steel producer in China which produced 10 million tons steel in 2021. To reduce its carbon emissions and become an environmentally friendly company, it determined to deploy a huge hydrogen HDT fleet which could replace current diesel HDT fleet and it could reduce the carbon emissions substantially by 2025.
Image: hydrogen HDT fleet of JINNAN Steel Group
The transportation industry is under pressure to rapidly decarbonize. Regulatory changes, as well as customers’ demands for greener transportation value chains, are prompting the industry to adapt. In short-haul and light to medium freight, battery electric vehicles (BEVs)—namely trucks and vans—are already reaching total cost of ownership (TCO) parity, however, the picture is quite different for long-haul and heavy-duty trucking. Long distances, unpredictable routes, high uptime requirements, strict driving-time regulations, and the importance of high payloads have made this sector particularly hard to decarbonize. With current energy densities, batteries are too heavy, charging speeds are too slow, and infrastructure is not yet available to directly electrify trucks on particularly challenging routes.
As a result, long-haul and heavy-duty trucking has focused on hydrogen-powered fuel and hydrogen combustion, which are attractive for two reasons. For one, faster refueling and greater range can increase the uptime potential for trucks; furthermore, their lower weight compared with batteries can increase payload capacity. Together, these factors improve hydrogen trucks’ TCO, which is the KPI that the highly competitive transportation industry needs to manage.
The hydrogen opportunity for steel company
Iron and steel producers have an excellent endowment to develop heavy-duty road transportation- they have cheap by-product hydrogen. Previously, without the demand from hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, hydrogen is burned as fuel to provide heat for metallurgy procedure, while it could also be purified to provide quite affordable hydrogen energy to heavy-duty transportation now.
According to latest industry survey, hydrogen is sold at or even below 25 Rmb/kg ($3.6/kg) without government subsidy in the hydrogen refilling stations within or near the iron and steel plants in Shanxi province which could provide cheap by-product hydrogen continuously.
Image: the hydrogen refilling station in the plant of HBIS Group
Currently, a wave of hydrogen HDT deployment seems sweeping China, on April 10th HBIS Group (the 2nd largest steel company in China and 4th globally) announced to purchase 500 hydrogen HDT this year. BAOWU Steel, ROCKCHECK Steel and DELONG Steel also announced their target to deploy hydrogen HDT.