Drivers of fuel-cell powered vehicles can now refuel at more and more gas stations: H2 MOBILITY Deutschland and its shareholders Shell and Linde today opened the city of Aachen’s first hydrogen (H2) station. The Aachen-based e-truck manufacturer StreetScooter supported the facility – the company’s future fuel-cell vehicles will be able to refuel at the Shell filling station at Prager Ring 106.
The owner/developer of the new station is the joint venture H2MOBILITY. The filling-station technology comes from the gas and technology company Linde. The decisive factor in the selection of the Shell petrol station was its convenient location at the Aachen-Zentrum exit of the BAB 4 motorway and close to the Autobahnkreuz Aachen motorway junction.
The new hydrogen station is state-of-the-art, and driver-side operation of the filling facilities is intuitive: the process is similar to refuelling conventional vehicles.
Hydrogen stations dispense the gaseous fuel at a pressure of 700 bar. The future seriesof StreetScooter vehicles will also likewise the 700 bar technology. This particular filling station also has a 350 bar filling point, so that StreetScooter’s developmental-stage vehicles can refuel here as well. The facility uses Linde’s IC90 ionic compressor, which compresses gaseous hydrogen to up to 900 bar in 5 steps.
16 stations in North Rhine-Westphalia
The expansion of the corresponding filling station network continues apace. There are now 71 H2 filling stations across Germany. At the turn of the year 2019/20 there will be 100 stations, around 40 of them in Shell’s network. There are currently 16 H2 filling stations in North Rhine-Westphalia, including in Frechen, Cologne, Leverkusen and Düsseldorf, and there will soon be one in Bonn as well.
The hydrogen station in Aachen is funded by the European Commission through the Fuel Cells and Hydrogen 2 Joint Undertaking (FCH 2 JU) in the Hydrogen Mobility Europe (H2ME) project.