Hydrogen van trial launched in Swansea by Wales & West

A gas emergency van powered by hydrogen is being put to work on the roads around Swansea, in a trial its operator hopes will point the way to taking diesel out of its fleet.

Wales & West Utilities is running the prototype Ford Transit for 12 weeks, with its crews using it daily across the wider Swansea and west Wales area.

Instead of an engine burning fuel, the van carries a fuel cell, which turns hydrogen gas into electricity on board. The only thing that comes out is water vapour.

The van fills up at the Hyppo Hydrogen Solutions site in Swansea, using green hydrogen produced and delivered by Protium, with refuelling equipment supplied by Fuel Cell Systems.

The gas company says the trial will test what the technology can really do in a working day: how far the van goes, how much it carries, and how often it needs to fill up.

The company runs around 1,300 vehicles across Wales and the south west of England, and says its fleet covered more than 15 million miles in 2025, using 4.3 million litres of diesel.

Electric vans are part of the answer, the company says, but cannot yet do everything its work demands, with limits on payload, range and towing, and a public charging network it says is not yet up to supporting its whole fleet.

The van refuels at 700 bar, a pressure that allows a fast fill and a full working range from a vehicle that weighs in at 4.25 tonnes fully loaded.

It is not the first hydrogen vehicle on Swansea’s streets. Hyppo ran a hydrogen car trial with estate agent Dawsons in the city last summer, and the company’s H2Bay site is intended to anchor a wider hydrogen economy in the region.

There is some local history in play too: the fuel cell principle was first demonstrated in the 1840s by Sir William Grove, a scientist born in Swansea.

Stephen Offley, transport lead in the company’s net zero and sustainability team, said the fleet was a significant part of its carbon footprint. “This is clearly an area where we can make huge carbon savings with the right technology,” he said.

“We are confident that hydrogen will have an important role to play in the decarbonisation of road transport as we move away from fossil fuels. We hope that our vehicle trials will inspire other organisations to consider hydrogen as a zero-emission solution.”

Stelios Karagiorgis, innovation project lead at Ford, said the trial showed “how zero-emission vehicles can meet the real-world demands of everyday fleet operations”.

Chris Foxall, chief executive of Hyppo, said the company was focused on “turning hydrogen from an ambition into a practical, everyday energy solution”, and was excited to showcase what was being achieved at H2Bay and across south Wales.

The trial runs under the UK’s rules for alternatively fuelled vehicles and forms part of a wider test of hydrogen vans in other parts of Great Britain. It adds to a growing hydrogen story in the region, where Swansea University research helped power a world-first hydrogen aero engine earlier this year.