Gasoline cell autos set for gains in China truck marketplace

Hydrogen gas cell cars are set to come to be a important player in China’s professional truck market place, predicts JPMorgan’s Elaine Wu.

“At the moment, the gas cell vehicles account for a lot less than 5% of the professional truck market place in China and that could develop to about a single-3rd of overall sector share in 2050,” Wu, head of Asia ex-Japan ESG and utilities exploration at the agency, advised CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia” on Monday.

Gas cell electrical automobiles operate on energy run by hydrogen, which can can be utilized to store and deliver electricity derived from other resources. Hydrogen is a clear gasoline and when eaten in a gas mobile, produces only drinking water.

A person purpose why fuel cell autos are a “really good solution” for the professional truck market is due to their refueling time of only around 10 to 15 minutes, Wu said. They also have a journey array of all-around 800 kilometers, about 50% to 100% earlier mentioned lithium battery electric motor vehicles.

Main automakers this kind of as Toyota, Honda and BMW are tapping into the hydrogen gas cell market place.

China is now pushing for the marketing of fuel cell autos, according to the JPMorgan analyst.

“The [Chinese] authorities is selling something, what we connect with ‘city clusters’ so that there could be demonstrative metropolitan areas telling profitable tales of how gasoline cell autos are carried out in several pieces of the place,” Wu mentioned.

“This is also a policy that we noticed executed about a decade in the past, when the central authorities was striving to produce lithium battery electrical vehicles. And we noticed how successful that was.”

Beijing has stated it would like 20% of new cars sold to be new energy autos by 2025. Levels of competition is fierce in the domestic electrical car room, with Tesla competing towards the likes of homegrown gamers these types of as Nio and Xpeng.

China’s local climate aims

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“In the foreseeable future, there could be advertising of green hydrogen creation whereby renewable electrical power is heading to be used to make hydrogen,” Wu added.

Hydrogen is presently developed from coal, and shifting to green output will only be attainable if renewable power fees continue on to drop, she extra.

“What we have noticed in the past 10 many years is that the charge to produce photo voltaic energy has dropped by 80% in China. The price of wind ability production has dropped by 40%,” she stated. “If this pattern continues — and we feel that it will thanks to technology development — so that implies that inexperienced hydrogen will be achievable in the future when these items arrive into play.”

— CNBC’s Anmar Frangoul and Evelyn Cheng contributed to this report.