British Columbia Pays HTEC Millions For Another Hydrogen Station Nobody Needs

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HTEC just opened another hydrogen fueling station in British Columbia. It sits gleaming and underused in the Lower Mainland, one more high-cost monument to a transportation future that never arrived. It’s an infrastructure project aimed at a market that doesn’t exist, serving vehicles that aren’t being driven, with fuel no one’s buying—subsidized by public money from governments apparently committed to propping up a dream long after the dreamers have woken up.

In 2024, there are around 200 light-duty hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicles registered across the entire province of British Columbia. Not 200,000. Not even 2,000. Just two hundred. Of those, roughly three-quarters are in the Lower Mainland—home to now five of the province’s seven hydrogen stations. That means about 150 cars might, on occasion, have pulled into one of HTEC’s four stations in the region in 2024. Might. Because even that low number is deceiving. A good portion of those cars belong to government agencies or commercial fleets, many of which have been quietly parked for most of their service lives, contributing little to emissions reductions and even less to hydrogen demand.

Let’s do the math. At 15,000 kilometers per year, the average light-duty vehicle in BC would use about 150 kilograms of hydrogen. For fleet vehicles doing 30,000 kilometers a year, the demand doubles. If you assume perfect utilization—which nobody in this business should—HTEC’s four Lower Mainland stations might have dispensed just under 10,000 kilograms of hydrogen in 2024. At HTEC’s retail price of $14.70 per kilogram, that would amount to about $138,000 in revenue per station. Not profit. Revenue. That’s the best-case scenario.

But here’s the thing: real-world hydrogen usage doesn’t come anywhere near those figures. Quebec’s hydrogen experiment was another taxpayer-funded lesson in what happens when hype overrides pragmatism. The provincial government acquired 46 Toyota Mirai sedans for its fleet and paid HTEC $5.2 million to build a dedicated hydrogen station with an onsite electrolyser in Quebec City to serve them. Four years later, the results were unequivocal: the fleet racked up less than 500,000 kilometers total, averaging just 2,700 kilometers per vehicle per year. That’s about 13% of what government fleet vehicles typically do. These weren’t private citizens forgetting to plug in their cars—these were government employees explicitly told to use the vehicles, and they still didn’t. The station, built to support them, could only refuel one car at a time and was down roughly one-third of the time, so governmental employees avoided the cars except as last resorts. Yes, a full third of the hours over all four years, over a year in total. The net result? A per-kilogram subsidy approaching $500. Eventually, the whole fleet was quietly decommissioned, the cars returned, and the station is now servicing the roughly 20 private fuel cell vehicles still on the roads of Quebec City, likely seeing the $7,500 a year in revenues that Kelowna and Victoria stations see.

California didn’t fare much better. The state with the most hydrogen cars, the biggest hydrogen station network, and the deepest well of policy support has been stumbling over the same logistical rocks for years. Analysis of NREL data shows that in the first half of 2021, hydrogen stations in the state spent more time offline than online—roughly 11,700 hours in maintenance versus 9,677 hours actually dispensing fuel. That’s not a reliability issue; that’s a fundamental system failure. Maintenance costs averaged over $10,000 per station per quarter. For stations meant to deliver high throughput, that pencils out to nearly 30% of their capital cost annually—when industry models typically assume 4%. The average station pumped 54 kilograms of hydrogen a day, enough for around 18 cars. The math says that California’s hydrogen cars are being driven about 40% as many miles as the US average. And this is in a state with millions in ongoing support and a concentrated vehicle base of about 12,000 fuel cell cars. If hydrogen can’t function in the most favorable environment in North America, it’s not going to function anywhere else.

Apply those same usage rates to BC’s fleet and the numbers collapse. A 40% utilization rate for private cars brings annual consumption down to 60 kilograms per vehicle. For fleet vehicles, the 10% utilization seen in Quebec equates to a mere 30 kilograms. That means HTEC’s Lower Mainland stations, in the most optimistic version of the realistic scenario, might have dispensed just 2,600 kilograms in 2024—about two cars per day. Revenue in that case? Roughly $39,000 for the year. In Victoria and Kelowna, the numbers are even worse. The single stations in those cities might have seen a car every two or three days and $7,500 in revenue.

Building a hydrogen station costs anywhere from $1 million to $4 million, depending on compression systems, storage capacity, and permitting complexity. That’s before maintenance, staffing, and electricity bills. These stations are capital-intensive, low-throughput operations, burning taxpayer cash for each kilogram dispensed. The stations aren’t breaking even, not remotely.

Remember that 30% cost of capital for maintenance? Let’s halve that to 15%, and assume HTEC can manage to build a station for $1 million (even though their Quebec station, which included an electrolyser, cost $5.2 million). That’s still $150,000 per station to keep it running. Their hydrogen revenues aren’t even paying for maintenance, never mind operations. The Vancouver-area stations likely have $3,000 in annual electricity bills for compression, cooling, and dispensing systems. The hydrogen itself likely costs HTEC as much or more than it sells it for to manufacture and truck to the sites.

There is absolutely no way for any of these stations to be anything except bright red ink on HTEC’s balance sheet.

HTEC isn’t a public company, which means it doesn’t have to answer to retail investors or file quarterly earnings that reveal the yawning chasm between station costs and actual demand. Instead, it’s backed by a mix of institutional capital and private equity optimism. Chart Industries holds 25%—a company with real engineering chops but also a long-standing interest in propping up any fuel that isn’t electricity. Apparently 22% of its pipeline of big opportunities for the next three years is hydrogen-related, so that’s not going to end well. I Squared Capital owns 35%, a private equity firm with whose energy portfolio is 79% in fossil fuels, rather belying their claims to be focused on sustainable growth. The remaining 40% of HTEC is held by original shareholders and employees.

So here’s the real question: what exactly do they think they’re investing in? Because right now, it looks a lot less like a growth market and a lot more like a science fair project that the government accidentally overfunded. That’s not a sustainable business model, which is why, like Ballard Power, Plug Power and FuelCell Energies, all of which have never turned a profit and in fact lost billions each, HTEC is ranked as a high-risk to fail completely and disappear on my deathwatch list of hydrogen for transportation plays.

The governmental funding keeps coming, however. HTEC’s latest expansion is backed by a multi-source blend of government support. Natural Resources Canada, through its Zero Emission Vehicle Infrastructure Program, has issued funding for HTEC stations before. The Province of British Columbia, through its CleanBC Go Electric programs, continues to finance hydrogen infrastructure in parallel with its more successful EV initiatives. The federal-provincial H2 Gateway project, with a projected price tag of $900 million, exists explicitly to subsidize production, distribution, and fueling for a fuel that has failed to find market traction in the light-duty sector. Vancouver-area municipalities have also offered zoning advantages and policy support, treating hydrogen like a magic bullet for clean transportation despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

So the serious question is this: what exactly did we just pay for? Who benefits from the existence of another underused, overbuilt fueling station in a region with fewer than 200 hydrogen cars and dwindling public interest in owning one? If hydrogen had a place in light-duty transport, it would have shown up by now. Instead, we’re left with the infrastructure equivalent of a ghost mall—empty parking spaces, shiny pumps, and no one coming.