Massive mine truck and a Baja off-road racer both find use for fuel cells

Enlarge / Anglo American and First Mode, among others, are converting a Komatsu 930E truck like this one to be powered by hydrogen fuel cells and batteries rather than diesel engines. (credit: Anglo American)

At first glance, an open-pit platinum mine in South Africa and the Baja 1000 off-road race don't have much in common other than an excess of dust. But both have been chosen by a company called First Mode to be test sites for hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEV). The sites will stress-test the technology.

"We've been finding the not-low-hanging fruit problems in decarbonization, and those are the hard-to-operate places. Your environment is harsh, it's dusty, it's thermally driven to an extreme," said Chris Voorhees, president of First Mode.

"While it might seem counterintuitive, there's interesting crossovers with the Baja part," Voorhees said. "Getting the fuel cells to operate in an environment where your boundary conditions aren't as controlled is, for us, essential [for] being able to map the technology to some of these applications that are mobile, big, dirty, and operating in places that it actually took us a while to get the internal combustion engine to do a really good job."

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