At California hydrogen stations, boil-off losses are significant, but a new Bosch cryogenic pump aims to fix the problem. Hydrogen is expensive to produce, and renewably produced “green” hydrogen even costlier (averaging, at retail, $32 per kilogram, which is roughly the energy equivalent of a gallon of gas). So it was a bit of a shock to learn that, with some of the older mobile hydrogen pumps now in use in the hydrogen hotbed of California, as much as 50 percent of this important energy carrier is currently being lost.
Bosch held a Hydrogen Technology Day March 17 at its Farmington Hills, Michigan, US headquarters and announced that it was installing an electrolyzer there using a 1.25-megawatt Hybrion proton exchange membrane-based stack. Peter Tadros, Bosch’s president of power solutions in North America, said the electrolyzer is capable of producing 23 kilograms of hydrogen per hour and has been available to US and Canadian customers since 2025.
Although Bosch doesn’t maintain a fleet of fuel-cell cars or trucks in Michigan, it does use hydrogen for dyno testing of hydrogen engines and other engineering purposes. “And it’s a demonstrator to show what we can do,” Tadros said. “We plan to integrate the electrolyzer into the grid to help utilities handle peak loads.”
This hydrogen electrolyzer, capable of producing 23 kilograms per hour, was installed at Bosch headquarters in Farmington Hills, Michigan. It will soon be publicly available.
Bosch also showed another important innovation—a low-loss cryogenic hydrogen pump capable of transferring super-cold liquid hydrogen (at -420 degrees Fahrenheit) with, at most, a 5% loss. The CryoPump Module was installed at the FirstElement hydrogen station servicing a fleet of 30 Hyundai XCIENT fuel-cell trucks at the Port of Oakland in the fall of 2025.
According to Dave Hull of Bosch Rexroth, the direct-fill pump resulted from “clean sheet of paper” research and occupies a much smaller footprint than previous cryopumps, as well as doing away with costly, bulky, and potentially leaky high-pressure storage vessels, chillers ,and valve panels.
Full story Why Hydrogen Stations Lose up to 50% of Their Fuel
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