Harnessing hydrogen’s potential to address long-haul trucking emissions

MIT researchers work to transform truck powertrain design, with support from the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium. Close The transportation of goods forms the basis of today's globally distributed supply chains, and long-haul trucking is a central and critical link in this complex system. To meet climate goals around the world, it is necessary to develop decarbonized solutions to replace diesel powertrains, but given trucking's indispensable and vast role, these solutions must be both economically viable and practical to implement. While hydrogen-based options, as an alternative to diesel, have the potential to become a promising decarbonization strategy, hydrogen has significant limitations when it comes to delivery and refueling. These roadblocks, combined with hydrogen's compelling decarbonization potential, are what motivated a team of MIT researchers led by William H. Green , the Hoyt Hottel Professor in Chemical Engineering, to explore a cost-effective way to transport and store hydrogen using liquid organic hydrogen carriers (LOHCs). The team is developing a disruptive technology that allows LOHCs to not only deliver the hydrogen to the trucks, but also store the hydrogen onboard. Their findings were recently published in Energy and Fuels , a peer-reviewed journal of the American Chemical Society, in a paper titled - Perspective on Decarbonizing Long-Haul Trucks Using Onboard Dehydrogenation of Liquid Organic Hydrogen Carriers.