Abstract
Keywords: Introduction, Demonstration, Energy Supply Infrastructure, Hydrogen.
A key prerequisite for any fuel that is to be used in transportation is the necessity to create sufficient distribution infrastructure. Without a reasonable confidence that refuelling is possible, the alternative may never gain the acceptance of users. However, if there are no vehicles to use the fuel, why should we invest in building any refuelling network? Traditionally, this situation has been known as the "chicken-and-egg" syndrome.
Furthermore, there is reasonable consensus that this syndrome is best solved by starting with the fuel availability, and creating "pull". This ought to signal vehicle industry to start the development and consumers to consider buying such vehicles. But developing fuel infrastructure is not an easy task, if it has to be made from a "clean sheet of paper", i.e. without support from the existing infrastructures, which more or less is the case with hydrogen. Various liquid alternative fuels can use the existing fuel distribution infrastructure, because they can be blended with current fuels. Even natural gas has the distribution grid already in place amongst the populated areas. However, with hydrogen there are no similar stepping stones, but the infrastructure must be created more or less from scratch.
Therefore, as the needs for the required investments bringing up a hydrogen fuel infrastructure are rather special, not necessarily attractive to normal business venture investors, many public or public/private-partnerships has been created to help this upbringing effort. Each of these initiatives has their own targets and they have developed "roadmaps", how the task should be undertaken. Also other roadmaps have been crafted outside these consortiums by various research projects and even by some private companies.
The paper describes an update on present status of hydrogen refuelling infrastructure development projects as well as public/private type of partnerships initiated for demonstrating the viability of hydrogen as transportation fuel as well as to collect user data from operations in real-world conditions.
Basic considerations for hydrogen infrastructure build-up, general views on financing the H2 infrastructure, as well as the need for public/private partnerships has previously been discussed in [1]. Therefore, those issues are not any more touched upon here, but this paper deals more with recent update on the progress in availability of hydrogen as a fuel for transportation vehicles.