Air Liquide and Faurecia have signed a joint development agreement to design and produce on-board liquid hydrogen storage systems for the automotive industry.
Through the technology partnership, the companies will accelerate the deployment of zero-emission heavy-duty mobility.
The French supplier maintains liquid hydrogen storage for fuel cell vehicles has a key role to accelerate the transition towards carbon neutrality.
With the technology, the amount of hydrogen stored is double that of gaseous hydrogen. As a consequence, heavy duty trucks operating on liquid hydrogen have twice the autonomy of those operating on gaseous hydrogen and benefit from a short refuelling time.
The partnership will leverage the companies’ complementary competencies from their respective core businesses, which will be fundamental to accelerate the technology’s time-to-market.
Air Liquide will bring its experience across the liquid hydrogen value chain, including extreme cryogenics, storage technology, refuelling interface and infrastructure know-how. On the other side, Faurecia will bring its architecture and systems integration experience, as well as its work in automotive testing and simulation.
“Momentum is building around hydrogen, generating worldwide interest,”said Air Liquide chairman and CEO, Benoît Potier.
“In this context, players from many different sectors are joining forces to unlock the potential of hydrogen. Our partnership with Faurecia aims to accelerate development of hydrogen mobility focusing on the heavy-duty market, for which hydrogen is particularly suited. Air Liquide is contributing to the development of hydrogen ecosystems on the entire hydrogen value chain.”
For his part, Faurecia CEO, Patrick Koller, added: “This partnership is the first milestone of a journey with Air Liquide, a partner in the field of hydrogen. Teaming up these two complementary hydrogen specialists will enable the development of liquid hydrogen storage technologies for heavy mobility with a rapid time-to-market.”
By 2030, fuel cell vehicle production could represent 2.5m vehicles, notes Faurecia, of which 20% might potentially be commercial trucks.
Due to intensive usage, by 2030, heavy-duty vehicles could represent close to 60% of hydrogen consumption for mobility markets.