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The demand for clean hydrogen has arrived, and the list of places you'll find it keeps growing by the week. This week, it turned up in an unexpected storage spot, got packed into a BMW headed for production, and got loaded onto a freight truck in Germany. Hi, I'm Steve Hill, CEO of NewHydrogen with this week's top hydrogen news. Before we get into the news, here's a quick update on our own progress.
Our ThermoLoop engineering test unit is under construction, and we're working with NuCube Energy to evaluate using heat from their next-generation nuclear reactor to power ThermoLoop and lower the cost of producing clean hydrogen.
Be sure to subscribe if you'd like to follow our progress. First up, researchers at Durham University set out to answer one of the biggest questions about a clean energy grid. Where do you actually store the hydrogen? Their study mapped the storage capacity of depleted North Sea oil and gas fields, and they found they could store enough hydrogen to meet the UK's entire electricity demand for 7 years, a total capacity of 3,659 terawatt hours. These aren't new holes in the ground. They're existing caverns that held fossil fuels for decades and are now empty.
A major challenge with wind and solar isn't generation, it's storage. Batteries work for hours. Hydrogen stored underground can work for seasons. Researchers concluded that storage at this scale could eliminate the need for gas power plants by 2040 using infrastructure that already exists.
Next, BMW has confirmed production specs for its iX5 hydrogen SUV, and they hold up. Seven carbon fiber tanks store 7 kg of hydrogen, refueling takes under 5 minutes, and pairing the fuel cell with a high-voltage battery gets you a combined range of 466 miles.
The fuel cell itself, co-developed with Toyota, is 25% more compact than the last generation, and BMW says the packaging costs nothing in cabin space compared to the fully electric iX5. Production is confirmed for 2028. When a major automaker puts this much engineering detail behind a hydrogen SUV, that's not a science project. That's a product.
Last story for today. Dachser, one of Europe's largest logistics companies, has taken delivery of Daimler's first next-gen H2 liquid hydrogen trucks, and will begin putting them on scheduled freight service out of a logistics hub in Germany starting this December. These aren't prototype vehicles doing controlled runs. They're built for commercial operation moving real freight. Range is over 1,000 km, and refueling takes 10 to 15 minutes.
Daimler has 100 trucks in this first small series going to select customers. The significant word here is scheduled. Hydrogen trucks have been tested, demonstrated, and piloted. Dachser and Daimler are about to run them like diesel trucks, and that's a different claim. None of these applications reach full scale sustainably if clean hydrogen is too expensive to produce. That's the problem. Our patent-pending ThermoLoop technology is being built to solve, using heat and water instead of expensive electricity to produce the world's cheapest clean hydrogen. To follow our progress, learn more about our technology, how to invest, or watch our short explainer video, please visit us at newhydrogen.com. We trade under the symbol NEWH. Thanks for watching, and we'll see you again next week.