Hydrogen-fuelled trucks scheme scrapped as companies reluctant to commit to vehicles

A £14m taxpayer-funded scheme to deploy a fleet of hydrogen-fuelled delivery trucks across the South East has collapsed just five months after it was launched. The Telegraph has the story.

Under the HyHaul scheme set up by Heidi Alexander, the Transport Secretary, three hydrogen refuelling stations were to be set up along the M4 – supplying a fleet of 30 lorries delivering to factories and stores.

However, millions of pounds of taxpayer cash now hang in the balance after the project was scrapped owing to reluctance among trucking companies to commit to the vehicles.

The collapse of HyHaul is just the latest of several hydrogen schemes recently abandoned as hype around the net zero fuel fades.

Other scrapped projects include H2Teesside, a project pioneered by Ed Miliband where BP planned a plant to turn natural gas into hydrogen, burying the waste CO2 from the process under the North Sea.

The oil giant shelved the plans earlier this month after it clashed with separate plans backed by Sir Keir Starmer to construct the largest data centre in Europe.

The Government has also abandoned its hydrogen towns scheme under which whole communities would have seen natural gas blended with or replaced by hydrogen.

Chris Jackson, chairman of HyHaul, said: “The problem is very clear. Customers weren’t willing to sign and weren’t willing to pay. So the question now for the Government and for the industry is, how do you solve that?

“If there is going to be a future role for hydrogen in transport, it will have to be driven by industry feeling that they need to invest in it as a zero-emission technology.

“Because with HyHaul the energy industry and government came forward with money and a product, and despite the Road Haulage Association telling us that customers wanted it, the trucking firms didn’t buy it.”

From mainstream fuel to niche status

The HyHaul scheme is part of a wider government strategy to use hydrogen to store and carry energy produced by wind, solar or from natural gas.

It dates back to 2021 when Boris Johnson’s government published its Hydrogen Strategy suggesting that wind and solar farms would eventually make so much of the gas that it would supply over a third of UK energy by 2050.

Mr Miliband was due to publish a revised version of the strategy this month, now postponed till 2026, which is expected to abandon all production targets – relegating hydrogen from mainstream fuel to niche status.

Read the full story here.