Geospatial distribution of hydrogen demand and refueling infrastructure for long-haul trucks in Europe

Journal article, 2025

Using hydrogen as a fuel is one option to reduce impact on climate and environment from heavy-duty road transportation. However, the deployment of a hydrogen refueling network is a major bottleneck. To facilitate this development, it is crucial to better understand appropriate location and sizing of hydrogen refueling stations (HRS). We present a bottom-up, geographically detailed model for simulating energy demand from long-haul hydrogen trucks and determining locations and sizes of HRSs, across all of Europe under different scenarios in 2050. The model, called SVENG, calculates weighted energy demand for network links, considering specific local conditions on each link along the route. These are used by a search algorithm for distributing demand along individual routes and simulate HRS locations and sizes. The model scales linearly, supporting large networks; for this study using 0.6 million rows of origin-destination cargo flow data on a network of 17,000 nodes. We show that the model's novel functionality for calculating dynamic vehicle power requirements has a large impact on the distribution of fuel demand and required refueling infrastructure. Results are compared to the Alternative Fuels Infrastructure Regulation (AFIR) for 2030, showing that this legislation might require more HRS than necessary even in 2050 in some countries, unless vehicle sales increase rapidly. Other countries may need to deploy more capacity by 2050 even at lower rates of adoption.