California is now h0me to a brand new hydrogen fueling station, the first publicly accessible station of its kind in the San Francisco Bay Area. Located in Emeryville, the station will provide power to 12 fuel cell municipal buses and up to 20 passenger cars every day. It is just one of two to be designed and installed for AC Transit, which operates transit buses for 13 cities in the East Bay, including Oakland and Berkeley.

Linde North America, the company responsible for the hydrogen vehicle fueling systems, says its design moves from demonstration project to providing a real commercial solution for a real market and real customers. “This station is proving the viability of the hydrogen fuel cell market, for both buses and cars, while offering AC Transit the easiest, fastest and most reliable hydrogen fueling experience available anywhere,” said Pat Murphy, president of Linde North America. Ultimately both stations will be part of AC Transit’s HyRoad project, which seeks to demonstrate the commercial viability of hydrogen fuel cell technology for the public transport industry.

image via AC Transit

For those unfamiliar with the technology, hydrogen fuel cell buses are clean, quiet, electrically propelled vehicles that emit only water vapor from the tailpipe. The HyRoad project began back in 2006, when AC Transit began operating three fuel cell buses, logging over 270,000 miles and carrying over 700,000 passengers, all while achieving significantly greater overall energy efficiency than diesel buses.

Now, the project has expanded to include 12 new, third-generation fuel cell buses that are 5,000 pounds lighter than their predecessors. Each new bus is powered by a 120-kilowatt fuel cell power system, built by UTC Power of Connecticut, and an advanced lithium ion energy storage system by Enerdel of Indiana.

The California Air Resources Board estimates that fuel cell buses will deliver a net reduction of 2.7 pounds of carbon dioxide per mile using hydrogen reformed from methane, and 6.3 pounds per mile using hydrogen derived from solar, wind, or other renewable sources. Each bus in the HyRoad project is expected to travel 36,000 miles per year, reducing carbon emissions by 44 metric tons per year when using methane as a source of fuel, or 103 metric tons using renewables.