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Executive Summary
The use of hydrogen and fuel-cell technology in California’s transportation sector will be crucial to achieve the zero-emission transportation goals of the State of California, along with federal goals to reduce transportation emissions.1 The following summary outlines top findings by the ARCHES Transportation Working Group, identifying the opportunities and challenges related to achieving a mature hydrogen transportation market in California with a primary focus on the medium- and heavy-duty fuel cell electric vehicle (FCEV) market.

To support ARCHES and California’s commitment to hydrogen, the UC Davis Hydrogen Program2 evaluated the requirements and costs of building a network of hydrogen stations (including delivering hydrogen to those stations), and the costs of purchasing these vehicles, including light-, medium-, and heavy-duty vehicles. This work builds upon our prior studies3 that developed two FCEV adoption scenarios through 2045: i) an ambitious but incremental Base Case scenario closely aligned with FCEV sales targets adopted by ARCHES, and ii) an even more ambitious High Case scenario that assumes robust light- duty and medium/heavy-duty vehicle markets by 2030, along with more rapid growth in refueling and hydrogen production capacities throughout the state. We used the two scenarios to estimate the level of investment and other costs for building out a hydrogen system to support road transportation (i.e., trucks, cars, buses), and examine how these investments and per-unit hydrogen costs play out over time (with 2030 and 2045 being key years) and across different types of hydrogen system components (e.g., hydrogen delivery systems and stations). We also looked at workforce and jobs impacts from the transition to hydrogen and FCEVs within the state.

To achieve California’s ambitious climate goals, a shift to hydrogen fuel for some transportation sectors may be essential. In this report, we explore the build-out of a hydrogen fuel distribution system including uptake of light-, medium-, and heavy-duty fuel cell electric vehicles. Our analysis of Base and High Case scenarios includes costs of building and operating a hydrogen vehicle and fuel system and estimates workforce impacts. We consider scenarios with about 125,000 vehicles by 2030 in the Base Case and 250,000 in the high case. This increases by an order of magnitude to 2045. Vehicle and station investment costs associated with the Base Case reach anywhere from $4 to 12 billion USD by 2030 and increase by a factor of eight by 2045. Costs per kg of hydrogen, including fuel transmission to stations and station costs delivered to vehicles, could be in the range of $4 to 8 per kg. This becomes $6 to 10/kg as a final delivered cost, if production of hydrogen were to cost $2/kg. Workforce impacts in the Base Case include 600 to 2,200 jobs created by 2030, rising rapidly thereafter. This report was prepared by the ITS-UC Davis Energy Futures Hydrogen Program in partnership with the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation.