Since the early 1960s, hydrogen has been one of the holy grails of the automotive industry
they came out and said this is a viable option for the future for propulsion for cars. So
what’s left? The infrastructure, and that’s where we came in. FirstElement was developed
with the goal of building an initial network for 19 hydrogen stations throughout the state
of California. Black & Veatch has helped us with the engineering, the permitting, and
the construction — all phases of our project essentially. First Element Fuel really aims
to develop a network of stations in California that would allow a driver to drive a fuel
cell vehicle like they would a gasoline car today. And for us that meant kind of two things
in our network: one was to have hydrogen stations located in neighborhoods. The second thing
was to provide the ability to get to destinations.
create a network that demonstrates the utility of these vehicles that actually shows they can go 300 miles
between fill-ups, and if you have enough chain of these, you can drive the distance of one end of California and back without any range anxiety.
since no one had ever done this before, we were looking for experts who had built analogous
networks, whether it be telecommunication cell towers or supercharger networks for electric
vehicles, somebody that understood this kind of construction and these types of applications
that we were going to use and that’s where Black & Veatch came in.
The benefit of First Element using Black & Veatch as a
sole provider on EPC is because we have engineering, we have construction management support, and
we can provide materials.
The high and low pressure equipment that comes in, that’s got to line up with what equipment
we have, it’s got to be ready. There’s a lot of pride that comes from doing
something that we believe will change the world.