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Home to thousands of athletes for several weeks, the Olympic Village is one demonstration of how this technology can be used in practice. Built as a miniature hydrogen city, it shows the potential of a first full-scale hydrogen infrastructure. The hydrogen will also fuel athlete buses and heat water in the cafeterias, dormitories and training facilities. After the Games, underground pipes will take hydrogen from a production station to residential blocks. Organisers hope the Olympic Village, as Japan’s first full-scale hydrogen infrastructure, will leave an impression on future generations.
 

Worldwide Olympic Partner Toyota, which also produced the world’s first hydrogen-powered cars in 2014, will supply approximately 500 Mirai fuel cell vehicles to the Games to help transport staff and officials. Toyota will also deliver 100 hydrogen fuel cell buses (FCBs) to ferry athletes around. Each bus has 10 hydrogen tanks to carry a total of 600 litres.

The MOU provides the framework for Chevron and Cummins to initially collaborate on four main objectives: advancing public policy that promotes hydrogen as a decarbonizing solution for transportation and industry; building market demand for commercial vehicles and industrial applications powered by hydrogen; developing infrastructure to support the use of hydrogen for industry and fuel cell vehicles; and exploring opportunities to leverage Cummins electrolyzer and fuel cell technologies at one or more of Chevron’s domestic refineries.

And many of those technologies developed in the Midwest are already being deployed. The region has some of the highest wind, solar and carbon-free nuclear generation in the nation. Illinois, for instance, has the most nuclear capacity of any other state with 11 nuclear reactors, which account for more than half of its electricity generation. These carbon-free technologies combined with abundant water supplies from the Great Lakes are the major resources required to produce hydrogen, making the region an ideal production, distribution, and storage center for this technology that can help decarbonize the transportation, industrial, and power generation sectors. Last month, Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm launched the Department of Energy’s “Energy Earthshots” Initiative, to accelerate breakthroughs of more abundant, affordable, and reliable clean energy solutions within the decade. The first Energy Earthshot—Hydrogen Shot—seeks to reduce the cost of clean hydrogen by 80% to $1 per kilogram (note: a kilogram of hydrogen contains about the same energy as a gallon of gasoline).

• Amazon expects hydrogen fuel-cell electric vehicles to be lighter, fuel faster and have longer range than battery-electric vehicles, Middle Mile Fleet Leader Tiffany Nida said during a webinar hosted by the Bipartisan Policy Coalition. "But the technology and the proof points against that are further out," she said.

• "Hydrogen is ... very much part of the future," Thomas F. Jensen, senior vice president for transportation policy at UPS, said during the webinar. "But that future is yet to be defined, frankly."

• Nida and Jensen said their respective employers do foresee hydrogen trucks as part of their fleet mixture. UPS views them as an option for OTR operations in the long term. For Amazon, "the details of that probably [are] further in the future," Nida said.

The plant will produce green fuels within a European Union-funded consortium which is already setting sights on a facility of 100 MW at the site near Cologne to scale up its commercial operations.

The strategy’s immediate priorities include scaling up production of renewable hydrogen, establishing regional hydrogen hubs and deploying medium- and heavy-duty fuel-cell vehicles.

The B.C. Hydrogen Strategy will advance and provide support only for low-carbon hydrogen pathways, with carbon-intensity thresholds established in regulation.