Decarbonizing Medium & Heavy-Duty Fleets | Episode 32

September 17, 2021

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by John Eichberger and Kimberly Okafor (Fuels Institute and Trillium/Love's respectively) As the world works to decarbonize the transportation energy sector, headlines tend to focus on the light-duty vehicle market. In reality, medium and heavy-duty trucks represent less than 10% of the global vehicle market, but contribute a significant share of greenhouse gas emissions to the sector's overall emissions total. John Eichberger, Executive Director of the Fuels Institute, sat down with Kimberly Okafor, Strategic Business Development Manager at Trillium, to learn how they are working to meet the challenge of decarbonizing the heavy-duty sector while maintaining the needs of today's customers.

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Kimberly Okafor: ... Everyone's familiar with Love's. We have almost 600 truck stops across the country. We build somewhere between 40 and 50 trucks stops a year, which kind of pans out to a truck stop a week, across the country. Our focus, our target market is the class seven, eight truck, over the road trucking that keeps the backbone of our country up and running every day. So we're excited to do that. We are a fueling company, so we don't focus or we don't push any one fuel. We are customer focused. So if our customer needs biodiesel, diesel, DEF, hydrogen, electric vehicle charging, whatever it is, we make sure to serve our customers.

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About five years ago, Love's purchased Trillium, and Trillium was in the CNG business and has been in the CNG business for about 25 years. Trillium's target market is the transit customer. I would say about 60 to 70% of our customer base is transit customers, but in general, we serve fleets, and those are usually return to base fleets, but we do also serve over the road, class seven and eight types of fleets as well. I would say about three years ago, we noticed that our customers started asking questions about zero emission, so electric vehicle charging and hydrogen fueling.

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So we are building hydrogen fueling stations, electric vehicle charging stations for ourselves and our customers. So we built two hydrogen fueling stations, one for the Orange County Transportation Authority. The second one is for Champaign-Urbana Mass Transit District.

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The two stations that we built are two different sorts of stations. The first station for OCTA, the Orange County Transportation Authority, is a liquid hydrogen station. We actually partnered up with Air Products on that station, so it is an Air Products molecule that's being used there. So that's your typical liquid hydrogen station, a tank with some pumps and some high pressure storage vessels and vaporizers and things like that.

On the Champaign-Urbana station, that is a little different. For them, they're producing hydrogen on-site. We're utilizing a [inaudible] electrolyzer, a one megawatt electrolyzer at their site.

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"It depends." It depends on the electrical tariff. It depends on how much land we have next to our truck stop. It depends if we have ways to get liquid or gaseous hydrogen to our stations. It depends on, can we get a natural gas pipeline to our truck stop? We're not saying all of the hydrogen stations at every Love's is going to look exactly like this. We're open to whatever makes the most economic sense in specific regions.

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So I manage both our electric vehicle charging business and our hydrogen business, and we're taking those businesses in two kind of different ways. So electric vehicle charging, there are a lot of grants throughout the country to put in light duty, to put in chargers, period. You can work with the utility. You can get a federal grant. You can get a state grant. You can get all of this. You can get a grant from the Air Quality Management Districts. There's all this money that's out there. And I don't want to trivialize it, but it's easier to put in one or two charges at a truck stop than it is to put in a hydrogen fueling station at a truck stop. That costs millions of dollars in order to put in that sort of infrastructure.

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Not only are we learning how to build it, we're learning how to operate it. We're learning about tariffs. We're learning how to price this stuff. We're learning how these things work. We're learning how to really operate a business in the light duty space, so whenever we have to move it to the heavy duty space, we can do so quickly because we've already learned it.

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John Eichberger: ... (T)here's this lack of awareness that you can't make money on EV chargers right now. We've put together the spreadsheets. We've done the analyses. We've done all the calculations. It just does not make economic sense. We need to build it if we're going to have electric vehicles.

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But if we start electrifying the commercial vehicles that frequent Love's, we're not talking about a 150 kilowatt charger. We're talking about megawatt chargers and the infrastructure to support that and the economics behind that.

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Kimberly Okafor: ... I'll repeat it, it doesn't make very much economic sense to put in these chargers. We're not making very much money off of them. We suspect that we will over a certain time, and we hope that whenever the adoption of EV vehicles happens in a pretty big way, we hope that we're not stuck with an iPod Nano while everyone else is on the iPhone 24.

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To your question specifically, which is a loaded one, what does charging look like in the heavy duty atmosphere? It's not 150 kilowatts, it's up to 500 kilowatts, and I've even heard people say megawatt chargers. And we're talking about truck stops that don't really use that much power today. And we're also talking about truck stops that aren't in downtown Houston, Texas, downtown Chicago. It's middle of nowhere, Ohio. So it's places where it's hard to get a lot of power out to, and it takes a significant amount of time to get a lot of power out there.

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So whenever we are putting in new truck stops across the country, we're thinking about ways and we're putting in ways to make sure that we are able to move quickly whenever it is time to put in those chargers. If that means conduits, if that means assessing where the transformer would need to be, if that means when we're talking to the utility company, instead of asking for just a 240 volt transformer, at this point, we ask for a 480 volt just to be prepared for the future.

Maybe that means getting a 12kV type of transformer, things like that, understanding the hazardous area that has to do... If we have a CNG station there, where can we put these chargers? Would we want to put these chargers in the truck parking spots? Would we want to put them in lanes? Same thing with hydrogen dispensers. Would we want to put them in lanes? Would we need chillers next to that dispenser? Now we need more room for that chiller. So we have started thinking about, how do we make sure that we're retrofitting the new truck stops that we're putting in today in certain regions of the country so that we're prepared to move quickly in the future? Really, what it comes down to for us is, does it make economic sense today. Probably not, but how do we set ourselves up so that we can move quickly whenever it does make economic sense?

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What we're calling is a truck stop of the future where you have diesel, biodiesel, renewable diesel, CNG, EV charging, hydrogen fueling. You're going to have a truck stop that has all kinds of different fuels. We recognize that that's happening. We just want to do it in a way that makes economic sense and recognize the challenges that are going to come as we get there. If we put in 10 chargers, each one one megawatt, that's a 10 megawatt station. Can you imagine the power.

John Eichberger: You'd need your own generator.

Kimberly Okafor: Yeah. It's absolutely insane. And I just wish that we would think through that and understand that there are challenges that come along with that, and kind of come together as an industry and say, "Okay, utility company, how are you going to get that much power out there?" Because I want it. If I need to put the chargers out there and my customers say they have electric trucks, I'll put them out there, but how are you going to make sure that you get that power to me? That's really the conversation that should be happening.

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John Eichberger: Yeah. There's so many opportunities out there to reduce the carbon footprint of transportation, and the biggest concern I have is the headlines, the announcements, the policy statements are basically robbing the volume from all these other immediate options, natural gas, renewable diesel, biodiesel. All these things have the ability to reduce our carbon footprint now, but if we're not going to have them part of the equation, they're not going to get the opportunity to be a contributor to a lower carbon market because we're focused on that white horse down the road.

And I've been telling people for the last several months, "If you believe that reducing carbon from the transportation space is necessary to save the planet and you're waiting for the white knight of electric vehicles ubiquitously across the world, we've already lost." We're going to have combustion engines on the market for decades. We're going to have electric vehicles on the market. We're going to have hydrogen vehicles. We're going to have them all. And we can reduce the carbon footprint of all of them if we keep our eyes open. I love what you guys are doing because you're exploring and you're leveraging all the opportunities that are before you, and I hope more and more companies do the same thing.

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Kimberly Okafor: Sometimes folks, whether it be policy makers or legislators or whatever, put hydrogen in kind of a bucket to where it needs to be green on day one.

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Well, there's ways to make renewable hydrogen that isn't just through solar and wind power. You can use renewable natural gas through an SMR, and now you have a low carbon intensity, a low carbon intense hydrogen.

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... but electric vehicle charging doesn't really get that rap as much. No one's saying, "All chargers need to have green power tomorrow." Everyone's saying, "Okay, let's go to the utility and get the power." And not all utility power is green. READ MORE/WATCH VIDEO