CSU, New Day Hydrogen awarded nearly $9M to build and operate hydrogen fueling stations

Colorado State University and New Day Hydrogen were awarded nearly $9 million from the U.S. Department of Transportation to build three public hydrogen fueling stations that could be up and running in two to three years.

The goal, CSU research associate Andrew Zdanowicz said, is to provide owners of medium-duty vehicles like box trucks and delivery vans with a place to refuel in an effort to get them to add clean-energy hydrogen fuel cell-powered vehicles to their fleets.

The fueling stations, the first of their kind in Colorado, will be built on CSU campuses in Fort Collins, Denver and Pueblo — providing reasonable coverage along the Interstate 25 corridor. The hydrogen will be produced on-site employing the same electrolysis process — using high-voltage electricity to split liquid water molecules into streams of high-purity hydrogen and oxygen — that CSU has been using in other research at its Powerhouse campus in Fort Collins, Zdanowicz said.

The grant money will be used to design and build the public fueling stations, he said, and pay for their operation until there are enough hydrogen vehicles paying to fill up to cover the operating costs.

“It’s the chicken and the egg,” Zdanowicz said. “There are no hydrogen vehicles in Colorado, so no one’s going to build a refueling network. That would just be a crazy business model.

“What’s coming from the DOT is kind of this kick-starter.”

The $8.99 million award is part of a $13.8 million DOT grant that also includes support for similar work in Boulder County around electrical vehicle adoption, CSU officials said in Source, an online publication of the university’s marketing and communications team.

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CSU's Energy Institute has a "considerable vested interest in research centered on hydrogen end-use technologies," he said, and has been seeking to commission its donated electrolyzers for hydrogen production since receiving its first one in late 2020. The grant funding will also support hydrogen production to fuel other research at the Powerhouse campus, Zdanowicz said.

Funding comes from the Infrastructure and Investment Jobs Act, a bipartisan bill passed in Congress in 2021 providing $550 billion in new federal investment in fiscal years 2022-2026 in infrastructure, including roads, bridges, mass transit, water infrastructure, resilience and broadband, the DOT’s Federal Highway Administration explained on its website.

There are more than 70,000 hydrogen fuel cell-powered vehicles in use across the globe, according to Information Trends. About half of those are registered in South Korea, according to HydrogenInsight.com, an online industry publication.

California is building an extensive network of public hydrogen fueling stations as part of its clean-energy efforts, with 55 up and running as of Jan. 10 and 42 others planned, under construction, awaiting permits or waiting to reopen to customers, according to the Hydrogen Fuel Cell Partnership.

How does hydrogen fueling work?

Hydrogen gas is pumped into the vehicles at the fueling stations and combined with oxygen from the air coming through an intake system on the front grill. It undergoes an electrochemical reaction inside the fuel cell that strips off an electron to create an electric current that drives the motor, with the only direct emissions from the vehicle being water vapor, explained Buford Barr, chief operating officer of New Day Hydrogen. So, the vehicle is an electric vehicle — one that is simply powered by hydrogen instead of a heavy battery pack.

Unlike a standard electrical vehicle, with a heavy battery pack that can take anywhere from 30 minutes to several hours to recharge, hydrogen vehicles with a range of up to 400 miles per tank could be filled in about five minutes from pumps operating much like those that dispense the gasoline and diesel that power most of the world’s vehicles while also emitting harmful emissions, Barr said.

“For bigger fleets, it’s all about time on the road; that’s how they make their money,” Barr said. “So we can do things that keep them on the road longer, that helps.”

Who will use these hydrogen fueling stations in Colorado?

Letters of intent from a handful of companies operating fleets of medium- and light-duty vehicles in Colorado were included with the grant proposal, Barr said. They included Fluid Truck, an on-demand commercial vehicle rental service; Boulder-based Via Mobility Services; AAA Colorado; Colorado CarShare; and CSU. Delivery services, such as Amazon Prime, UPS, FedEx and Walmart, are also potential customers, he said.

The idea isn’t to convert an entire fleet of vehicles to hydrogen fuel right away but to add some as new vehicles are brought online, much as some companies are already doing with vehicles running on propane, natural gas and electric batteries.

While California’s hydrogen fueling stations are primarily serving passenger vehicles, including the Toyota Mirai, Honda Clarity and Hyundai Nexo, the goal with the new grant in Colorado is to “target medium-sized trucking, even bus fleets, that kind of a thing, to get us over the hump of initial adoption,” Zdanowicz said.

When will the hydrogen fueling stations open?

Once the final guidelines come out on how the grant money can be spent and contracts are signed, Barr said it will take 2-3 years to get the three stations up and running.

In the meantime, New Day Hydrogen plans to introduce the three communities to hydrogen fuel-cell technology and safety through a series of “Hydrogen 101” classes, designed to get people more comfortable with it “before we bring it into their neighborhood.”

The Englewood-based startup company will build and operate the fueling stations on CSU’s Powerhouse campus in Fort Collins, Spur campus in Denver and at CSU-Pueblo. CSU will oversee the project and also be involved in its continuing research with hydrogen power at the Powerhouse campus and workforce development, primarily through the Pueblo campus, said Bret Windom, an associate professor of mechanical engineering with CSU’s Chemical Energy Conversion Laboratory.

Is hydrogen fueling safe?

Safety is a concern, Zdanowicz and Barr said. But fueling vehicles with hydrogen isn’t really any more dangerous than pumping gasoline or diesel into gas tanks, as we do now. The only difference, they said, is we’ve been doing that for so long that we understand the dangers and mitigate the risks by turning off the engine while you’re filling the tank and not smoking near the pumps.

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In fact, Barr said, hydrogen is probably safer if a vehicle running on it is involved in a crash. As the lightest element, 14 times lighter than oxygen, hydrogen that leaks from a vehicle’s tank will mostly rise harmlessly into the air. In a recent experiment with a Toyota Mirai, a hole was drilled through the hydrogen tank of the vehicle and ignited. The fire dissipated quickly, he said, and the temperature in the passenger compartment only rose by 1 degree Fahrenheit.

“We’ve all seen what happens with gasoline and diesel in that type of situation, and the fire definitely burns longer and hotter than it would with hydrogen,” Barr said.

How will this build our workforce?

CSU’s role in developing a workforce of people who can not only run the fueling stations but also provide maintenance and repairs of hydrogen-powered vehicles will be important to more widespread adoption.

Barr envisions a clean-energy future where vehicles consist primarily of battery electric and hydrogen fuel-cell powered models, much like we have today with vehicles running on gasoline and diesel.

Will this help with our carbon-neutral goals?

Because CSU’s power comes from the local utilities where its campuses are located, the shift to hydrogen fuel cell-powered vehicles is not yet carbon neutral, Zdanowicz said. But it could be if the electrical power used in the electrolysis process is provided entirely through clean, renewable sources, as local utilities in all three communities are striving toward.

CSU, he said, could also remove the stations from the grid in the future and power the electrolysis process with solar panels.

“It’s kind of one step at a time, but this is a significant step towards lowering emissions,” Zdanowicz said.

Reporter Kelly Lyell covers education, breaking news, some sports and other topics of interest for the Coloradoan. Contact him at kellylyell@coloradoan.com, twitter.com/KellyLyell or facebook.com/KellyLyell.news. 

This article originally appeared on Fort Collins Coloradoan: CSU, New Day awarded nearly $9M to build hydrogen fueling stations