Grundfos helps fuelling the hydrogen car

Grundfos won the role as supplier when the company H2 Logic sought a partner to deliver pumps to their hydrogen fuelling stations, which they have built and installed around Denmark. With a new station opened in Aarhus, Denmark now has eight hydrogen stations. In the transport sector, hydrogen is a new, promising technology, and by delivering pumps to the stations, Grundfos can help making the Danish car fleet greener.

A market with a big potential
CEO at H2 Logic Jacob Krogsgaard sees great opportunities in the technology, even though it is fairly new and not commercially popular yet:

- There are 2,000 fossil fuel-based gas stations in Denmark. Globally the number is 300,000, so if we could build hydrogen stations in connection with those, even with just some of them, it has the potential to become a very profitable business.

Jesper Seier Nielsen, sales engineer at Grundfos, who has been a key person in
the partnership with H2 Logic, also sees good market opportunities in the technology:

- It can become a very lucrative market for us if the demand for hydrogen stations increases. However, we have still a long way to go, as just eight stations have been built so far, he tells.

According to Susanne Krawach, chief consultant at the green think tank Concito,
politicians need to help the technology on its way as well, so the prices on the hydrogen technology can be lowered to a level where the hydrogen car can compete with conventional cars.

A demanding job for a pump
When H2 Logic sought a partner they quickly found out that it was not an easy task. It was hard to find a partner, whose pumps could operate in the extreme conditions in the stations, where the hydrogen has to be cooled down to minus 40 degrees Celsius to be in liquid form.

- In the beginning, we faced problems with the CRN-pumps freezing, says Jesper Seier Pedersen and continues:

- But we ended up finding a solution by using a version of the CRN-pump build for very warm environments. As it turned out, it could also handle the extremely cold temperatures, he tells.

A competitor for the electric car
At the inauguration of the eight hydrogen station in the Danish city Aarhus, there was wide agreement among the many professionals attending the ceremony, that the race to find a competitive, green fuel for the transportation sector has begun.

The electric car is the main competitor of the hydrogen car. It has the advantage, that its infrastructure with electrical charging stations is better developed than the still small network of hydrogen fueling stations. On the other hand, it takes a long time to charge electric cars. Sometimes several hours, if there are no high voltage chargers available.

Here, the hydrogen car has the advantage that it can get its tank filled completely
in only three minutes. However, it requires that the hydrogen is cold and at the same times kept under a pressure of 700 bar – equivalent to the pressure below 7.1 kilometers of water.

Even though it is possible to refuel a hydrogen car like a conventional car running on fossil fuels, the exhaust is very clean, as hydrogen car only emits water.

So far, Hyundai and Toyota are the only car manufacturers offering hydrogen cars in Denmark.

[The copyrights of the photo used in the article belong to Toyota]