TMB’s commitment to sustainable mobility has gone a step further with the addition of seven hydrogen vehicles to the X1 line, four of which will arrive next Monday and three more during the month of June.
All of them will board the city’s first hydrogen bus, which runs on the same XPRESBus route that connects the city center to the intermodal nodes of Francesc Macià and Glorias. TMB will also include up to 60 vehicles with this zero-emission technology until 2025. TMB’s president, Laia Bonet, made the announcement today at the conference Sustainable Mobility with Hydrogen, which was hosted in Barcelona.
TMB has prioritized the procurement of more environmentally friendly vehicles as part of its 2025 Strategic Plan to reduce the environmental effect of diver transportation. This is now a reality, with 210 natural gas hybrid cars, 154 electric vehicles, and 46 hydrogen vehicles in the fleet between 2021 and 2024. To demonstrate its commitment to sustainable transportation, TMB has committed to investing over 410 million euros in the purchasing of clean energy cars between now and 2026. It is also projected that the cost of these purchases would decrease over time, converting hydrogen into a more sustainable energy source.
Synergies in the deployment of hydrogen
To carry out this hydrogen deployment, TMB has built synergies and collaborations with many institutions and enterprises, beginning with the backing of the European Union’s JIVE 2 initiative for the promotion of fuel cell cars with zero emissions.
It’s also worth mentioning the hydro-generator that Iberdrola installed in the Free Zone in less than a year, thanks to funding from the European Executive Agency for Climate, Infrastructure and the Environment’s Connecting Europe Facilities for Transport initiative (CINEA).
This hydrogen plant, which was selected through a TMB tender, would enable the establishment of a green hydrogen hub in one of the country’s most significant industrial zones. It is also a facility that will enable other fleets and industries to adopt this vector as an energy solution, with the goal of creating a tractor effect on everything that surrounds this technology, in accordance with the principles of the European Hydrogen Strategy and the Ministry for the Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge’s Hydrogen Roadmap.
The most abundant element in the universe, hydrogen, is a highly adaptable energy vector that is relied upon to play a key role in the transportation, storage, and immediate conversion of numerous kinds of energy into useable energy. The use of hydrogen for transportation is progressing because to advancements in fuel cell technology.
The hydrogen in the fuel cell interacts with oxygen in a process known as reverse electrolysis. The hydrogen is obtained from one or more of the vehicle’s tanks, while the oxygen is obtained from the surrounding air. The electrical energy created, as well as heat and water, are the sole derivatives of this reaction, which are ejected as steam through the exhaust pipe.
