How widely is liquid Hydrogen being used in Fuel Cells?

[Roger Penn]

Liquid hydrogen is used in most large facilities (fuel cell testing & development). For commercial vehicles Daimler, Hyzon, and Nikola have all released information about using liquid hydrogen (LH2) for their trucks. All claim 1000-1600 km range, which would be more range than current gaseous compressed hydrogen storage methods. For passenger cars LH2 is not appealing as there is boil-off when the car sits (and passenger cars sit for quite a bit of time so fuel efficiencly would be poor). With truck fleets with 3 shifts, the vehicles get used much more and with hydrogen consumption while driving the boil-off rate is acceptable. Currently the refueling infrastructure is for compressed hydrogen (350 or 700 bar) but there is some work going on to develop LH2 refueling. For marine applications, liquid hydrogen is appealing and there could be LH2 refueling at ports. As with everything concerning fuel cells, the decision of compressed H2 or liquid H2 has many trade-offs that must be considered and some applications will prefer compressed H2 and others will prefer the liquid hydrogen option.