Underground mining (for example, gold and coal mining) is the most promising application in which fuelcell vehicles can compete strictly on economic merit. The mining industry, one of the most regulated, has an opportunity through the use of fuelcells to enhance the health and safety of underground traction power. Conventional power technologies — tethered (including trolley), diesel, and battery — are not simultaneously clean, safe, and productive. For instance, tethered vehicles are power-dense and clean, but the tether has safety risks inherent to a trailing cable or trolley, which also interferes with mobility and productivity. Diesel vehicles are more mobile and theoretically more productive, but their compliance with government-mandated emissions controls reduces actual productivity, and even their abated emissions may present a hazard to miners’ health. Regulations in the process of implementation will further increase vehicle capital and operating costs and lower mine productivity.

Other underground vehicles, such as maintenance locomotives for subway transit systems and tunneling locomotives, have analogous, but exacerbated, problems to those of underground mining vehicles.

A solution to this problem lies in using fuelcell power. A fuelcell-powered mine vehicle incorporates the best advantages of electric and diesel-powered vehicles while avoiding their disadvantages: It combines the workplace environmental benefits of a battery vehicle with the energy density and mobility of a diesel.
These benefits can provide powerful cost offsets to the fuelcell’s current high capital cost. Additionally, lower recurring costs, reduced ventilation costs, and higher vehicle productivity could make the fuelcell vehicle cost-competitive several years before surface applications.

For underground traction applications, with today’s technology, we use exclusively metal-hydride storage because of its inherent safety. Metal-hydride storage is explained in the Technology Tutorial section of the website.

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