Fuelling the hydrogen economy

Hydrogen Sussex is a Greater Brighton initiative to promote and support the development of the hydrogen economy across Sussex. It’s led by Brighton and Hove City Council in partnership with a range of other organisations.

Hydrogen is at an early stage of development, yet there’s a huge amount of interest in its potential as a clean fuel. The team at Hydrogen Sussex needed research carried out to assess how it could be deployed across heavy freight and the public sector transport most effectively – including buses, refuse trucks and emergency services’ vehicles.

The University of Brighton’s Environmental Masters Student placement scheme provided the perfect solution.

GIS expertise

The placement student worked with the organisation for 3 months to research existing transport routes for buses and public sector heavy vehicles that had the potential to make the switch to hydrogen.

The student used expertise in GIS to map types of vehicles, typical mileage, routes and fuel usage across Sussex, to predict where the demand for hydrogen could be.

A big impact

Kirsten Firth of Hydrogen Sussex said:

“The work has had a big impact and it’s something we wouldn’t otherwise have had the time or expertise to do.

It’s helped us get a visual idea of where we expect demand to be concentrated, which then helps in terms of development of infrastructure, such as locating refuelling depots.

It also helps people who are thinking of decarbonising fleets, to see how they could make it work and link up with others doing the same thing.

The work generated a lot of interest from all the partners at Hydrogen Sussex, because it’s really good intelligence. We’ve taken it to the Greater Brighton Economic Board, with the intention that the work could form part of a regional hydrogen strategy.

We were very impressed. The student was very good in terms of adapting to the brief as it evolved, as well as presenting the outputs to us. They delivered a report, a summary and a 15 minute presentation to the whole partnership.

We would definitely recommend the scheme to other organisations that need resource and technical expertise to get a job done.”