Belgium’s Hydrogen Stations Have A Kilograms-Per-Day Problem

Support CleanTechnica’s work through a Substack subscription or on Stripe.

Belgium has another hydrogen refuelling announcement, and on the surface it sounds like progress. Atawey is selling three new hydrogen stations to Colruyt Group and Virya Energy for heavy-duty mobility, with a stated combined distribution capacity of more than 7 tonnes per day and deployment planned by the end of 2027. Seven tonnes sounds like an industrial number. In hydrogen mobility terms, it is more useful to say it plainly: more than 7,000 kilograms per day.

That is where the denominator problem starts. A station can have nameplate capacity. A corridor can have pins on a map. A press release can say heavy-duty mobility is scaling. But refuelling economics are not driven by tonnes printed in an announcement. They are driven by kilograms actually dispensed, vehicles actually arriving, uptime, delivered fuel cost, maintenance exposure, and repeat fleet orders when the pilot funding runs out.

The current Belgian vehicle denominator is still tiny. The Briefing analysis uses 109 hydrogen vehicles as the Belgian base, derived by combining the visible Belgian hydrogen vehicle records from public programme and fleet announcements rather than assuming the H2Benelux trial total represented Belgium. That is the number the new station capacity has to be tested against, not a future imagined fleet and not nameplate station capacity alone.

The earlier H2Benelux program is still relevant, but for a different reason. It was an infrastructure-and-trial program, not proof of a mature market. H2Benelux described 8 hydrogen refuelling stations across Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg, with 80 hydrogen vehicles participating in a real-life trial. The European Commission’s CINEA project page says the stations were distributed as 3 in Belgium, 4 in the Netherlands, and 1 in Luxembourg. The project also described station capacity up to 200 kg/day, meaning the three Belgian H2Benelux stations represented roughly 600 kg/day of Belgian nameplate capacity.

That makes the new Atawey package look even more revealing. Three new Belgian stations with more than 7,000 kg/day of stated capacity would add more than eleven times the daily capacity of the earlier three Belgian H2Benelux stations. But the Belgian vehicle base in the Briefing denominator is 109 vehicles.

Now do the arithmetic. If all 109 Belgian hydrogen vehicles used 5 kg/day, they would consume 545 kg/day. At 10 kg/day, they would consume 1,090 kg/day. That is already generous as a rough stress test, because the Belgian vehicle base is not a fleet of 109 heavy-duty trucks running full daily duty cycles. Yet Atawey’s three-station package is advertised at more than 7,000 kg/day. That is about 6.4 times the 10 kg/day scenario and almost 13 times the 5 kg/day scenario.

This is the public version of the denominator problem I worked through in the full TFIE Strategy Briefing analysis. If the denominator is stations ordered, hydrogen mobility looks busier. If the denominator is kilograms dispensed per day, vehicles per station, and delivered cost per useful kilometre, the story gets much thinner.

The usual response is that stations have to come before vehicles. There is some truth in that. Infrastructure and vehicles have to grow together, and no one should expect a new refuelling network to run at mature utilization on day one. But hydrogen refuelling has been making that argument for well over a decade. At some point, the market has to stop being explained as a chicken-and-egg problem and start being assessed as a utilization problem.

Europe’s Alternative Fuels Infrastructure Regulation makes this worse in one specific way. It pushes hydrogen refuelling into geography. Hydrogen stations are supposed to appear along the TEN-T core network and in urban nodes, creating visible corridor coverage whether or not fleets are arriving at the pumps in the required numbers. A regulation can make a map look complete long before it makes a market economically real.

That distinction matters because hydrogen stations are not just plugs in the ground. They need hydrogen supply, delivery or production, compression, storage, safety systems, dispensing hardware, maintenance, and trained support. High fixed costs can be tolerable when throughput is high. Low utilization turns the same equipment into stranded cost with a nozzle.

Battery-electric trucking has a different problem set. It still needs grid connections, depot planning, charging hardware, scheduling, and serious fleet operations work. But the infrastructure can grow closer to the fleet. A depot can add chargers as trucks arrive. The energy comes from the electricity system rather than a separate molecule supply chain. The hardware is becoming standard industrial electrical equipment, not a bespoke fuel ecosystem that needs enough kilograms per day to keep compression, storage, and dispensing economics from collapsing.

Belgium should be one of the friendlier tests for hydrogen if the heavy-duty case is real. It has dense freight corridors, ports, logistics demand, serious corporate actors, and EU policy pressure. Colruyt Group is not a random press-release partner. Virya Energy is not a garage startup. If hydrogen refuelling cannot show meaningful utilization in that setting, the problem is not hostile geography or missing industrial capability. The problem is that the vehicle-and-fuel economics are not pulling the market into existence.

The station announcement should be read with that in mind. Three heavy-duty stations with more than 7 tonnes per day of capacity are not evidence that Belgium has a hydrogen trucking market at scale. They are evidence that capital, regulation, and corporate strategy are still willing to build capacity ahead of visible demand. That can be defensible for a tightly managed industrial pilot. It is not the same thing as commercial traction.

The useful public questions are not complicated. How many trucks will use the stations every day? How many kilograms will they dispense in the first year? What is the delivered hydrogen price? How much public support is embedded in the stations, the trucks, or the fuel? What uptime will be achieved after the launch period? Will the same fleets buy more hydrogen trucks without special treatment? If those answers are vague, the station count is not the answer. It is a distraction.

Hydrogen refuelling announcements look better when the denominator is capacity. Transport decarbonization gets clearer when the denominator is utilization. Belgium’s new stations may eventually find a niche, especially in captive logistics operations where routes and refuelling can be controlled. But the numbers in the public record point to the same conclusion that keeps showing up in hydrogen mobility: capacity is easy to announce, vehicles are hard to sell, and kilograms per day are where the story either becomes real or falls apart.

The full denominator analysis is available at TFIE Strategy Briefing: Belgium Hydrogen Refuelling Stations Have A Denominator Problem. It goes deeper on the Belgian vehicle base, plausible daily hydrogen demand, station capacity, utilization risk, and the difference between infrastructure compliance and commercial traction.

For more reality-based analysis of transport decarbonization, hydrogen claims, infrastructure strategy, and climate-tech denominators, subscribe to TFIE Strategy Briefing.