Italy: Toyota and Eni to speed up expansion of hydrogen mobility

Toyota and Eni announce a collaborative agreement to speed up the expansion of fuelling stations and widespread use of hydrogen cars in Italy.

Toyota Motor Italia and Eni took the opportunity on the last stage of the Giro d'Italia bike race to announce their collaboration to speed up the spread of hydrogen mobility in Italy.

The first phase of the project involves opening a hydrogen refuelling point at Eni's new service station in San Donato Milanese. Eni is awaiting permissions to start work on the new station. It will be a multi-purpose facility that integrates seamlessly with the architecture of the new Eni Management Headquarters, currently under construction.

The station will sell premium petroleum products, along with advanced fuels like biomethane, hydrogen and electricity. Furthermore, the zero emission hydrogen available at the station will be produced with renewable energy by the station itself through electrolysis of water.

Toyota will take part in the project, providing its expertise and putting a fleet of ten Mirai cars on the road that will refuel at the Eni station. The users will be chosen in the coming months. If the San Donato project is successful, Eni will make hydrogen available at other stations in its network in the next few years.

“In our opinion, the path towards zero emissions will inevitably pass also through a mobility based on hydrogen, a fundamental energy vector to allow a deeper diffusion of renewable energy sources. Time to take action came also for Italy, to start creating a hydrogen distribution network for cars”, says Mauro Caruccio, CEO of Toyota Motor Italy.

“Achieving sustainable mobility requires a concerted approach where all technologies contribute. Through its hydrogen stations, Eni plans to further expand its range of fuels with low environmental impact”, says Giuseppe Ricci, Chief Refining & Marketing Officer of Eni.

Out of an overall network of 4,400 Eni service stations, 3,500 supply Eni Diesel+, the diesel that contains waste vegetable and frying oil and animal fats transformed into biofuel at Eni's bio-refineries in Venice and Gela. Two hundred service stations supply methane (two of them LNG) and soon biomethane as well.