Ballard's Nicolas Pocard shares his views on the hydrogen internal combustion engine as an enabler for hydrogen mobility and its potential as mature tech
There’s an appealing logic to the idea that putting hydrogen into an internal combustion engine (ICE) could be a quick way to get cleaner trucks on the road - it reuses familiar manufacturing, service, and vehicle architectures, and it creates immediate hydrogen demand to grow refuelling networks. It points to the urgency everyone shares to scale hydrogen supply and get emissions down.
But if the objective is sustainable decarbonization at the lowest lifetime cost, the physics and economics pull in a different direction. The distinction that matters isn’t familiar or new technology; it’s how many kilograms of hydrogen are consumed to move a ton of freight per kilometer, what that means for operating cost and logistics, and how resilient the solution is to tightening emissions legislation and rising utilization expectations.
Fuel cell systems convert chemical energy to electrical power with far higher conversion efficiency than combustion engines. Typical proton-exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cell stack systems operate with stack efficiencies in the high forties to mid-fifties, and – when integrated into an electric drivetrain – they benefit from regenerative braking and far fewer mechanical losses than ICE architecture. This results in materially lower hydrogen consumption for the same duty cycle.
Transitional — or a distraction?
It’s common to frame hydrogen combustion as a pragmatic bridge: something to pull hydrogen demand forward while fuel cell manufacturing and infrastructure scale. However, it can obscure a critical risk - transitional choices that look economical in the short term can become a false economy and a distraction if they delay the investments that serve to make the more efficient solution mainstream. (....)