During the premier gathering for the global hydrogen community in the Americas region at the #H2Americas2023 Summit & Exhibition, we spoke to global and regional #hydrogen and #energy leaders about the future outlook for the hydrogen industry, including an interview with Thiemo Schalk, BMW Group Representative from BMW of North America.
“Well BMW has incorporated sustainability into our corporate strategy and that does not only mean that we want to cut out the GHG emissions from our vehicles, from the operations of the vehicles, from the production of the vehicles, but it does also mean that we take the whole thing into account, and that means we need to focus on for example materials that go into those batteries, namely lithium, cobalt, namely other materials that are hard to get hold of and we do think fuel cell vehicles in the future also in the light duty segment can contribute to achieving that goal, because a fuel cell vehicle (because of the way it’s built) will require not so many of those materials but being emission free at the same time.
We need to I think take into account that we as a company that sell products to end customers, we need to create some excitement of choices, so right now we do have a very efficient combustion engine at the same time as we have battery electric vehicles and plugin hybrid electric vehicles but in the future it’s got to be all electric. The only question for us as a company is it battery electric only or is it also to a certain extent a fuel cell and hydrogen, and as a company we do think that it’s a smart strategy to mitigate your risk, we’ve seen the supply chain being very under pressure for the past couple of years and so we do think we need to mitigate that risk and cannot just rely on one technology.
Well certainly it’s always good to come together to convene and to bring all parties together because this is in the end what we need to do, it’s not that we can do and we can act in silos and everybody just does what they think is the best, but we need to talk, we need to build up the infrastructure for having the hydrogen being produced, we need to talk about logistics behind that, we need to talk about supply and demand, and this is actually a great place, and kudos to the SEC and to the DOE, it’s a great place to come together.”
Join us at #H2Americas2024
Co-hosted by the U.S. Department of Energy, join global and regional #hydrogen and #energy leaders at #H2Americas2024 Summit & Exhibition taking place 11-12 June 2024 in Washington D.C. The event welcomes 4000 industry professionals, 200+ Speakers, 100+ Exhibitors and 40+ sponsors to share the latest news, establish key connections and sign business deals to accelerate the deployment of the hydrogen economy. Register your place among hydrogen pioneers.
