06 September 2018, Ratingen – H2 MOBILITY Deutschland and its members Shell and Air Liquide have today opened the seventh hydrogen (H2) station in North Rhine-Westphalia. The station, on Brachter Strasse 36, signifies that the partners are taking a further step towards a comprehensive H2 supply network in Germany.
The refuelling station is directly located on the Ratingen East (A44/A3) motorway junction in the Essen and Düsseldorf commuter belt. Drivers of emission-free fuel cell cars therefore now have the opportunity to refuel on the important north-west axis between Hamburg and the Ruhr area. The joint venture H2 MOBILITY is the developer and operator of the new H2 station on the Shell motorway service area. The filling station technology is produced by Air Liquide, with the hydrogen station reflecting the latest technology. Using the station is intuitive – refuelling is similar to conventional vehicles and is completed in three to five minutes. The facility contains around 200 kilogrammes of hydrogen, which is sufficient for refuelling between 40 and 50 vehicles over the day.
Over the next few months H2 stations at Shell service stations in Essen, Dortmund, Mönchengladbach, Leverkusen and Aachen will be opened in North Rhine-Westphalia. For the past two years there has already been such a Shell station in Wuppertal. There are more H2 stations in Dusseldorf, Cologne-Bonn, Kamen, Mülheim and Münster.
Hydrogen e-mobility reduces CO2 emissions
Hydrogen provides the opportunity to expand the range of fuels in the transport sector in a climate-friendly way. With the help of hydrogen, which is renewably produced, CO2 emissions which are harmful to the climate can be considerably reduced. The operation of a H2-operated fuel cell vehicle produces neither local pollutants nor carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. The range of these vehicles is between 500 and 800 kilometres per tank.
The European Commission is funding 17 facilities in all – among which the Ratingen station is one – with a total of 11 million euros in the trans-European Transport Network through the “Connecting Hydrogen Refuelling Stations” (COHRS) project.