Mobility: First solar-powered 'green' hydrogen production and refueling facility in central Italy

The first hydrogen production and refueling facility in the Lazio Region is being set up thanks to a collaboration between ENEA and the Interuniversity Research Center for Sustainable Development (CIRPS) as part of the project 3Emotion, promoted by the European Platform for hydrogen and fuel cells (FCHJU) funded by the European Union and, for Italy, by the Lazio Region with about 2 million euro.

The refueling station, to be set up near the international Airport Leonardo da Vinci, will serve five hydrogen buses deployed in Rome.

“ENEA will deal with hydrogen production systems, consolidated technologies to be nevertheless adequately selected and integrated withone another to ensure the quantity and quality of hydrogen required for operating the buses, approximately 400 kg/week”, Giulia Monteleone at ENEA pointed out.

“On the basis of their technical features-the ENEA researcher concluded- we have already put in place the design of the electrolyzers, which will be partly supplied by the electricity grid and partly by a field of photovoltaic panels yet to be built. But the demand for “fuel” for the buses could be integrated with compressed hydrogen purchased by suppliers of technical gases”

The project 3Emotion (Environmentally Friendly Efficient Electric Motion) will involve for three years and a half five other European cities (Aalborg in Denmark, Versailles and Pau in France, Rotterdam in Holland and London in England), which will experiment, together with Rome, a zero-emission public transport system based on fuel cell buses and hydrogen refueling stations. The Italian capital would then become the second city in Italy to have a production and refueling facility for hydrogen vehicles after the one in Bolzano, Trentino Alto Adige, where the “fuel” is produced by means of photovoltaic panels generating the electric power needed by electrolyzers for producing hydrogen from water.

The cost of hydrogen in Europe is €9,50/kg but the objective is to bring it to €5/kg by 2025. “In order to achieve this result-Monteleone continued- an infrastructure for sustainable mobility is needed at the national and european level, such as the hydrogen one, for which Italy has launched a strategic plan by 2050, which was accepted and included in legislative decree 257/2016 for the creation of a distribution network for alternative fuels”.

Scientists, scholars, politicians and entrepreneurs met in Naples at the 7th edition of the international event dedicated to research on fuel cell and hydrogen “European Fuel Cell Technology & Applications”,  organized by ENEA, Consortium Atena, the University of Naples Parthenope and the University of Perugia, to discuss about the implementation of the infrastructure supporting the diffusion of this form of sustainable transport. The European platform FCH JU provided for this event two hydrogen–fuelled vehicles, a Toyota Mirai and a Hyundai IX35, with an autonomy of approximately 600 km. The two vehicles, one driven by an ENEA researcher from the Energy Technologies Department, toured Europe from Brussels to Naples, stopping in Bolzano, Florence and Rome, with the aim of promoting an increasingly green mobility, since the two cars (among the few hydrogen-fuelled vehicles currently on the market) are zero-emissions and the only exhaust they produce is water vapor.

For more information please contact:

Giulia Monteleone, ENEA – Head “Laboratory for the Development of Chemical and Thermofluidynamic Processes for Energy”, giulia.monteleone@enea.it