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Malaga will join Spain's map of natural gas and hydrogen filling stations with its first filling station that will be able to supply all currently viable fuels for road transport vehicles.
At the full committee meeting of Urbanismo planning department, held on Monday in city hall, it approved the urban plan to implement this service station on a plot of 2,987 square metres located at number 37 on the Azucarera-Intelhorce road in the Guadalhorce industrial estate.
According to the councillor in charge of Urbanismo, Carmen Casero, it will be the first public hydrogen filling station in Malaga, involving an investment of 1,182,000 euros. Located on urban land set aside for industrial use, it will have a storage area for petroleum products and another for liquefied gas, as well as a space of 236 square metres in size for a natural gas plant and the installation of a photovoltaic panel. The different types of fuel will be supplied at four refuelling points.
The technology platform Gasnam-Neutral Transport reports on its website that there are currently 248 natural gas refuelling points in operation in Spain and 28 in Portugal. In Spain there are only eight publicly-owned hydrogen stations, 12 private ones and 12 more under construction, so the hydrogen station in Malaga will be adding to the first few public ones, supported by the company Estación de Servicio La Peñita that began the process of getting this urban plan approved for development way back in 2020.
In the last four years the project proposal has been subjected to an environmental assessment by the Junta de Andalucía, as well as to reports by the Consejería de Fomento (another department within the Junta responsible for development), the Dirección General de Aviación Civil assessing the risk to low-flying aircraft on approach to Malaga Airport and the Consejería de Agricultura, Pesca, Agua y Desarrollo Rural, the latter in relation to the risk of flooding of the land, as in the southern area of the plot there is a "slight tendency" towards this risk.
The urban development plan for this unique refuelling station was approved with six positive votes from the PP's councillors (Partido Popular), four votes against from PSOE and Con Málaga, and one abstention from Vox. The left-wing groups within the municipal opposition have expressed their reservations about this project. PSOE councillor Mariano Ruiz said that this action is "clearly detrimental" to its surroundings, even though it is in an industrial area. "We are missing a report on the impact on health," he said. Casero, as the councillor for planning, pointed out that the council is limited only to approving the project from an urban planning point of view, and that the business activity licence for the station must undergo other different procedures.
The refuelling process at a hydrogen station is not very different from that of a conventional petrol station, although it does have some peculiarities. The hydrogen is supplied at high pressure and, as it is an extremely volatile gas, the connection between the vehicle's receptacle or connection point and the dispenser must be failsafe. The hydrogen goes into the vehicle's tank, which feeds the fuel cell that generates the electricity needed to make the vehicle move. The only waste product produced is water vapour that is expelled through the exhaust pipe.
However, hydrogen vehicles are still a nascent transport system with several years of development still to come. The advantages of a hydrogen-powered car, of which there are still few models on the market, are that it does not need to be plugged in, it has a long range (similar to that of a conventionally-powered car), can be refuelled in five minutes, is eligible for subsidies, and is not subject to the restrictions imposed for future low-emission zones in major cities.
The disadvantages are the limited number of hydrogen filling stations in Spain and the cost of these cars, which is around 75,000 euros. The European Commission's Climate Change and Energy Transition Law (2021) foresees that, by 2050, only electric or hydrogen cars will be marketed throughout the European Union. For Spain, from 2040.
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