The visit to Eagles’ stadium was the culmination of a long and fruitful collaboration between DOE and the minds behind SimpleFuel. It began in 2017, when three companies, including PDC, hatched an idea for a simple, small-scale hydrogen fueler that uses only water and electricity to produce hydrogen. In 2017, the SimpleFuel concept claimed the $1 million prize in DOE’s H2 Refuel H-Prize Competition. On the strength of this new funding and the validation of DOE experts, SimpleFuel made the leap from concept to commercialization. In the intervening seven years, PDC has brought SimpleFuel to both domestic and international markets, growing from a small business to an important player in the clean hydrogen technology industry.
The success of SimpleFuel is the latest indication that clean hydrogen infrastructure is catching up to recent advances in clean hydrogen applications. Lately, the United States has massively increased its stock of electrolyzers—the devices that produce hydrogen from water and electricity. Today, there are 4.5 gigawatts of planned or installed electrolyzer capacity in the U.S., roughly 25 times more than our capacity in 2021. As a result, hydrogen has a growing role in our transportation system—especially in heavy duty transportation and niche markets like material-handling applications. More than 70,000 hydrogen-powered forklifts are already moving consumer goods in America’s warehouses, and we’ve seen increased investment in clean hydrogen for heavy-duty transportation, such as long-haul trucks and transit buses. As this market expands, DOE’s Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technologies Office continues to find opportunities to stimulate technical innovation in a field that can drastically reduce emissions from transportation and other hard-to-decarbonize sectors, including heavy industries like steel and aluminum.
The process that brought on-site hydrogen fueling to Lincoln Financial Field had all the hallmarks of a well-drawn play: ingenuity, collaboration, and a bit of patience. It might not compare to the action on the field, but the SimpleFuel unit marks the spot where DOE and its private-sector partners completed their version of a Hail Mary pass.