By Cheryl Jahn

Hydra Energy moves closer to hydrogen fuelling station

Aug 10, 2022 | 3:49 PM

PRINCE GEORGE – It doesn’t look like much right now. Just an empty lot. But with Council passing amendments to the Official Community Plan recently, it will soon be home to a Hydrogen service station.

“So being able to do 65 trucks a day. That’s 3,250 kilograms of hydrogen. That’s be produced a day at that site,” explains Jessica Verhagen, CEO of Hydra Energy.

It will be the only hydro refueling station in Northern BC and Jessica Verhagen says there’s a reason for choosing Prince George.

“It’s the nexus of trucking for the North. So if you want to get to the Port on Highway 16, you gotta go through Prince George. There’s a number of hubs in terms of pulp and paper, mining other industries that make trucking really important for the region. So there’s a lot of traffic that we can capitalize on to retrofit to our technology.”

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And now Hydra has a new partner in town.

First Truck Centre in the BCR industrial site will serve as the hub for converting trucks to use hydrogen and then serving them subsequently.

“From a net zero perspective, I take a look at Northern British Columbia as a beautiful microcosim of what could happen,” explains Rod Graham, President of Frist Truck Centre. “You’ve got clean electricity being developed at Site C in Fort St. John, you’ve got the export of liquified natural gas coming out of Kitimat. And if you were to take a look at it drawing a map, right in the centre of that is Prince George.”

Prince George was first introduced to the idea of hydrogen-fuelled trucks in 2021, when this truck was converted and the owner, Lodgewood planned to convert many more, courtesy Hydra Energy.

“Across BC there’s not a lot of infrastructure at the moment. But starting those ‘Return to Base’ trucks, and as infrastructure builds out, we’re doing another station in Edmonton, for example, and others are building stations across the province,” explains Verhagen. “And there’s a lot more incentives from government to support the industries interests in these initiatives.”

“There’s lots of folks working on the fuelling suide, but there’s really nothing on the service and support side,” says Graham.

But as he noted, it is a journey of a thousand steps and this is the first.