The first truck of green hydrogen fuel pile from Latin America has taken the road to Chile, marking an important step for the country Decarbonization efforts. The semi-trailer truck will start a one-year test phase in September 2025, loading at Walmart Chile’s Quilicura distribution center and carry out operations and deliveries in the large metropolitan region of Santiago. The data collected from the test phase will provide a roadmap for Walmart and its partners To develop hydrogen fuel cell trucks across Chile.
But while Walmart and the rest of the country work to achieve their decarbonization objectives during the next decade, the challenge is to build the infrastructure necessary to support land transport fueled by hydrogen in a geographically difficult environment.
Green-hydrogen infrastructure challenges
Although Chile abundant Wind and solar resources make it a privileged location to produce green hydrogenThe country has not yet developed the national network of technical operators and the refueling stations which will be necessary to revise land transport with fuel cell trucks.
Two years ago, the Walmart Chile Quilicura distribution center became the First distribution plant In Latin America to produce green hydrogen and operate with hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. This US $ 15 million initiative involved exchanging 200 lead battery levels for the hydrogen fuel cell versions. Now, this distribution center has the capacity to produce enough green hydrogen to fill up on the new truck twice a day, says Ignacio GómezWalmart Chile’s Supply-Chain Innovation and Technology Manager. [Editor’s note: The author conducted an interview with Gómez in Spanish and has provided translations for this story.]
The truck, made by TechnologyBased in Foshan, China, was bought as part of a public-private partnership of $ 6.15 million called the Hidrohaul technological program. Hidrohaul was launched in 2024 as a four -year project to advance fuel cell vehicles powered by hydrogen by bringing together the main players in government and industry. Chile Production development company Put $ 3.45 million in funding for the program. Globally, Walmart is committed to decarbonizing operations by 2040, with transport as an important part of its sustainable distribution strategy, explains Gómez.
“Hidrohaul takes the first stages of this strategy by letting us test the first green hydrogen truck in the country in real conditions,” explains Gómez. “This allows us to bring together the lessons learned in order to later extend this technology.”
The truck has an expected range of 750 kilometers and can draw 49 tonnes while holding 75 kilograms of hydrogen. But “no truck will never get started in the empty station,” said Lewis FultonThe director of the Futures Energy program at the Institute of Transport Studies at the University of California in Davis. To be sure, Fulton says that long-haul truckers generally avoid diving below a quarter of fuel tank. This puts the practical beach of the Feichi truck at around 560 km.
Chile covers more than 4,200 km north to the south, and Walmart operates nearly 400 stores across the country as part of several subsidiaries. The southern region distant from Punta Arenas is home to the southernmost store in the world in the world and is located nearly 3,000 km from Quilicura, which is currently the only source of supply of the truck. Despite the company’s plans to extend green-hydrogen production to all its future nine Distribution centers across the country, most of the network, including Punta arenas, are always out of reach.
The calculation which determines where the hydrogen supply stations should modify according to the number of trucks, the capacity of each supply center and the distance that trucks must regularly travel to deliver their useful charges. In California, Fulton and his team of researchers determined that 15 to 20 refueling stations distributed through the state would offer both geographic coverage and the amount of hydrogen to manage 5,000 heavy trucks. The state leads the United States in Deployment of fuel cell vehicles.
From north to south, Chile is about four times longer than California. Gómez says Walmart plans to install at least four hydrogen fuel distributors in its distribution centers to provide sufficient fuel capacity. At least to start, the truck will remain in central Chile to carry out its test routes.
“The plan is that the trucks carry real freight charges of the Quilicura distribution center and supply stores in the metropolitan regions, Valparaíso and O’Higgins,” explains Gómez.
Global deployment of hydrogen trucks
Chile joins a handful of other countries that have deployed hydrogen fuel pile trucks for long-haul trucking, including the United States, China, South Korea, Japan and several members of the European Union. China leads the pack in terms of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, with a Targeted 25,000 Expected on the roads by the end of this year, according to the Chinese government. This figure is always a relatively low part of the total heavy vehicles operating on the Chinese market.
Globally, high costs have limited the deployment of fuel trucks based on green hydrogen on an industrial scale. While Chile can get out of it better on this front than the United States and other European countries, partly because of its Relationship with ChinaThe mountainous and far from the country takes a unique obstacle for truck performance.
“The hills are a great thing,” says Timothy Lipman of the University of California, Berkeley, who works with Fulton on research related to the deployment of fuel cell trucks in California. “If the topography is completely flat, you will get a longer range and you need less fuel than if you review really steep hills.” A hot and cold weather can also have an impact on the battery of a fuel cell truck and reduce efficiency over time, says Lipman.
Until now, Chile has adopted the power of local hydrogen in its efforts to eliminate sales of heavy carbon vehicles by 2045. However, as the country invests more resources to increase its green hydrogen market, Fulton notes that other low emission technologies, such as electric batteries, can become less achievable.
“You can only focus on so many technologies,” says Fulton. “So, if a country or a state is strongly committed to one or two technologies, ultimately, it may become more difficult to think of others.”
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