Johnson Matthey has joined a major new European consortium, ‘IMMORTAL’, to develop higher performance fuel cell components for heavy duty trucks with a predicted lifetime of at least 30,000 hours, enabling the company to take a step closer towards decarbonizing freight transport and a net zero future.

IMMORTAL is a €3.8 MM, three-year project supported by the European Fuel Cells and Hydrogen Joint Undertaking (FCH 2 JU), which brings together a major consortium of industry leaders and academic/research organizations coordinated by France’s CNRS, and includes Johnson Matthey, Bosch, FPT Industrial and AVL.

The project will deliver optimized management of the fuel cell powertrain with high performance and durability as critical outcomes. The industrial and academic partners will collaborate to advance materials and components that have shown considerable promise in recent European FCH 2 JU projects. The four large industrial partners of IMMORTAL are major stakeholders in Europe's fuel cell supply, OEM and end user chain, from MEA (Johnson Matthey) to stack (Bosch, AVL), and from stack and system (Bosch, FPT Industrial) to the pioneering use of the fuel cell powertrains in heavy duty long haulage trucks (FPT Industrial).

The IMMORTAL project receives funding from the FCH 2 JU under grant agreement No 101006641. This Joint Undertaking receives support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program, Hydrogen Europe and Hydrogen Europe Research.

Other companies part of the IMMORTAL project include: Bosch, FPT Industrial, AVL, CNRS Montpellier, IMTEK, and Pretexo.