Latin America’s first green-hydrogen-powered fuel cell truck has hit the road in Chile, marking a milestone for the country’s decarbonization efforts. The semitrailer truck will begin a yearlong testing phase in September 2025, loading up at Walmart Chile’s Quilicura Distribution Center and carrying out operations and deliveries throughout the greater Santiago metropolitan area. Data collected from the testing phase will provide a road map for Walmart and its partners to scale up hydrogen fuel cell trucks across Chile.
But as Walmart and the rest of the country work to meet their decarbonization goals over the next decade, the challenge lies in building the necessary infrastructure to support hydrogen-powered ground transport in a geographically challenging environment.
Green-Hydrogen Infrastructure Challenges
Though Chile’s abundant wind and solar resources make it a prime location for producing green hydrogen, the country has yet to develop the national network of technical operators and fueling stations it will need to overhaul ground transportation with fuel-cell trucks.
Two years ago, Walmart Chile’s Quilicura Distribution Center became the first distribution plant in Latin America to produce green hydrogen and operate with hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. That US $15 million initiative involved swapping 200 lead-acid battery-powered forklifts for hydrogen fuel cell versions. Now, that distribution center has the capacity to produce enough green hydrogen to refuel the new truck twice daily, says Ignacio Gómez, Walmart Chile’s supply-chain innovation and technology manager. [Editor’s note: The author conducted an interview with Gómez in Spanish and has provided translations for this story.]
The truck, manufactured by Feichi Technology, based in Foshan, China, was purchased as part of a $6.15 million public-private partnership called the Hidrohaul Technological Program. Hidrohaul launched in 2024 as a four-year project to advance hydrogen-powered fuel cell vehicles by bringing together key government and industry players. Chile’s Production Development Corporation put up $3.45 million in funding for the program. Globally, Walmart has committed to decarbonizing operations by 2040, with transportation as a major part of its sustainable distribution strategy, says Gómez.
“Hidrohaul is taking the first steps of this strategy by letting us test the country’s first green-hydrogen truck under real-life conditions,” says Gómez. “It’s allowing us to gather lessons learned in order to subsequently scale up this technology.”
The truck has an expected range of 750 kilometers and can pull 49 tonnes while holding 75 kilograms of hydrogen fuel. But “no truck is ever going to pull into the station empty,” says Lewis Fulton, the director of the Energy Futures Program of the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Davis. To be on the safe side, Fulton says long-haul truckers typically avoid dipping below a quarter tank’s worth of fuel. That puts the practical range for the Feichi truck at around 560 km.
Chile spans more than 4,200 km north to south, and Walmart operates nearly 400 stores across the country under several subsidiaries. The remote southern region of Punta Arenas is home to the company’s southernmost store in the world and is located nearly 3,000 km from Quilicura, which is currently the truck’s only refueling source. Despite the company’s plans to expand green-hydrogen production to all of its soon-to-be nine distribution centers throughout the country, most of the network, including Punta Arenas, is still out of range.
The calculus that determines where hydrogen refueling stations should go changes based on the number of trucks, the capacity of each refueling center, and how far the trucks regularly have to travel to deliver their payloads. In California, Fulton and his team of researchers determined that 15 to 20 refueling stations spread across the state would offer both the geographic coverage and quantity of hydrogen to handle 5,000 heavy-duty trucks. The state leads the United States in fuel cell vehicle deployment.
From north to south, Chile is about four times as long as the state of California. Gómez says Walmart is considering installing at least four hydrogen-fuel dispensers at its distribution centers to provide sufficient fuel capacity. At least to start, the truck will remain in central Chile to carry out its test routes.
“The plan is for the trucks to carry real merchandise loads from the Quilicura Distribution Center and supply stores within the Metropolitan, Valparaíso, and O’Higgins regions,” Gómez says.
Global Deployment of Hydrogen Trucks
Chile joins a handful of other countries who have deployed hydrogen fuel cell trucks for long-haul trucking, including the United States, China, South Korea, Japan, and several members of the European Union. China leads the pack in terms of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, with a targeted 25,000 expected on the roads by the end of this year, according to the Chinese government. That figure is still a relatively small share of the total heavy-duty vehicles operating in the Chinese market.
Globally, high costs have limited the deployment of green-hydrogen-powered fuel cell trucks at the industrial scale. While Chile may fare better on this front than the United States and other European countries, in part because of its relationship with China, the country’s mountainous and remote terrain poses a unique hurdle for truck performance.
“Hills are a big thing,” says Timothy Lipman of the University of California, Berkeley, who works with Fulton on research related to the rollout of fuel cell trucks in California. “If the topography is totally flat, you’re going to get a longer range and need less fuel than if you’re going over really steep hills.” Extreme hot and cold weather can also impact a fuel-cell truck’s battery and reduce efficiency over time, Lipman says.
Thus far, Chile has embraced local hydrogen power in its efforts to phase out sales of carbon-emitting heavy-duty vehicles by 2045. Yet as the country invests more resources into scaling up its green hydrogen market, Fulton notes that other low emissions technologies, like electric batteries, may become less feasible.
“You can only concentrate on so many technologies,” Fulton says. “So if a country or a state makes a strong commitment to one or two technologies, eventually, maybe it gets harder to think about other ones.”
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