Alberta’s freight sector burns nearly 70% of the province’s diesel supply and pumps roughly 12 million tonnes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere every year — a scale of emissions that no incremental fix has managed to dent.
Now, two 64-tonne B-train tractor-trailers are preparing to haul commercial freight between Edmonton and Calgary running entirely on hydrogen. Nothing of this size and payload capacity has been attempted anywhere in the world before.
A freight sector built on diesel — and the scale of the problem
Alberta’s supply chain runs on B-trains. These double-trailer rigs carry everything from agricultural goods to industrial equipment across the province, operating almost exclusively on diesel. Freight transportation accounts for nearly 70% of diesel fuel demand in Alberta — a concentration that makes the sector one of the most carbon-intensive in the country.
The roughly 12 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions produced annually by Alberta’s freight sector represent a stubborn decarbonization challenge. Long-haul trucks can’t simply swap in a battery pack and call it solved. Heavy payloads and distances of hundreds of miles demand energy storage that batteries, at current technology levels, struggle to provide economically or practically. That’s what makes hydrogen an appealing candidate — and what makes AZETEC worth watching closely.
What the AZETEC project is actually building
The Alberta Zero-Emissions Truck Electrification Collaboration — AZETEC — is a C$15 million (US$11.2 million), industry-led initiative scheduled to run for three years through mid-2022. Its core deliverable is straightforward: put two hydrogen fuel cell electric hybrid tractor-trailers into real commercial freight service on the Edmonton–Calgary corridor and measure everything.
These aren’t prototype vehicles idling in a test yard. Each truck is rated at 64 tonnes gross vehicle weight and designed to travel up to 430 miles (700 km) between refueling stops — range comparable to diesel — hauling freight year-round under Alberta’s demanding climate conditions. By the end of the project, the two trucks are expected to have covered more than 300,000 miles (500,000 km) combined and carried approximately 12 million tonne-miles of freight. That’s a meaningful real-world dataset, not a controlled lab result.
The fuel cell technology at the heart of the trucks
Ballard Power Systems is supplying six FCmove®-HD fuel cell modules for the project, three per truck. Each module generates 70 kilowatts of power, giving every truck 210 kW of total fuel cell capacity — a combination designed to deliver the sustained high power output that heavy payloads and long-haul routes demand.
The modules use Ballard’s next-generation LCS technology, which was planned for commercial availability in 2019. Deploying it inside working freight trucks rather than a controlled environment adds another dimension to the project: a real-world stress test of hardware still moving toward full commercialization. Rob Campbell, Ballard’s Chief Commercial Officer, was direct about the significance — these are “the first Fuel Cell Electric Vehicles — or FCEVs — of this size and capacity to be built and tested anywhere globally.”
A consortium approach: who is making it happen
Projects of this complexity don’t come together through a single organization. AZETEC draws on a broad coalition of industry players, each contributing a specific piece of the puzzle.
Emissions Reduction Alberta (ERA) is the primary public funder, contributing more than C$7.3 million through its competitive BEST Challenge program, which targets technologies with demonstrated greenhouse gas reduction potential. The project is led by the Alberta Motor Transportation Association and managed day-to-day by Zen Clean Energy Solutions. Dana Inc. supplies heavy-duty electric drive axles, Nordresa handles the drivetrain, and Freightliner/Daimler provides the truck bodies.
Hydrogen supply and infrastructure involve Air Products, Praxair, and HTEC. Crucially, the trucks won’t be driven by engineers in a lab — Alberta trucking companies Trimac Transportation and Bison Transport will operate the vehicles under genuine commercial freight conditions.
What success could mean for Alberta — and beyond
AZETEC is explicitly framed as a first step toward exploring a potential “made-in-Alberta” hydrogen economy. The province has the energy resources, the industrial base, and the freight demand to anchor a hydrogen supply chain, if the economics can be made to work.
Getting the trucks to run is one challenge. Building the supply chain to keep them fueled at scale is an entirely separate problem — and this project will stress-test the refueling infrastructure and logistics systems that any broader hydrogen freight network would require.
If data from 300,000-plus miles of real hauling shows that hydrogen fuel cell trucks can match diesel on reliability, range, and operating cost, the implications extend well beyond Alberta. Other provinces and countries face the same heavy transport decarbonization problem and are watching for credible evidence that a viable alternative exists. AZETEC, when it concludes, could provide the most substantive real-world answer yet.
