Here’s how an off-road racing series will make its own hydrogen fuel

ANTOFAGASTA, Chile — On a picnic bench in Chile’s Atacama Desert, one of the crucial distant places on Earth, Alejandro Agag is holding courtroom.

“Welcome to the sting of the world,” he laughs, gesturing towards the huge desert round him. A gust of wind kicks a cloud of sand and mud throughout the desk. “It’s superb, this place.”

The 53-year-old Spanish entrepreneur is taking within the sights and sounds of the season 3 finale of Extreme E, the off-road electrical racing series he launched in 2021. Part of the series’ ethos is that it races solely in areas of the globe which are closely impacted by local weather change (such because the Atacama Desert—the driest, non-polar area on Earth), sometimes with no spectators current.

And whereas the competitors throughout the finale is dramatic—with 5 of the series’ 10 groups in rivalry to win the championship—racing has taken a agency backseat this weekend. Conversation as a substitute has centered on Agag’s current proclamation that Extreme E will rebrand as Extreme H in 2025, changing into the primary racing series powered absolutely by hydrogen.

“We need to be the primary to be doing it,” says Agag, holding his hand as much as protect his face from the still-swirling sand. “The problem is there, and we love challenges—the problem of working with a complete new know-how, related know-how that may have actual, enormous makes use of within the financial system typically.”

Agag isn’t any stranger to pioneering new racing know-how: He can be the founder and chairman of Formula E, which was the primary all-electric racing series when it debuted in 2014. To bolster his credibility in establishing Extreme H by 2025, Agag lately introduced that the fledgling series can be becoming a member of a working group with Formula 1 and the International Automobile Federation (FIA) to additional discover the event of hydrogen fuel. Extreme H can be slated to achieve FIA World Championship standing by 2026.

“My thought, my pitch, for Formula 1 was to say, pay attention, you do not know which know-how will be the successful one,” Agag explains. “For the second, you might be betting on artificial fuels… however hydrogen goes to be, perhaps, one know-how that might be a part of the equation. So that is all that it’s, for Formula 1 to maintain an eye on what is going on to occur right here. And what is going on to occur is we’ll have the primary—and, I believe for fairly some time, the one—pure hydrogen world championship racing.”

In some ways, the working group makes lots of sense: Five of Extreme E’s current 10 groups have direct or tangential ties to Formula 1, with the likes of McLaren, Nico Rosberg, Lewis Hamilton, and Jenson Button amongst its staff house owners. And the usage of hydrogen has turn out to be an engaging prospect for all of motorsports, partly as a result of it may be utilized in combustion engines (“They [Formula 1] like noise… and combustion makes noise!” Agag laughs).

Of course, utilizing hydrogen solely to fuel a racing series isn’t any small feat, and different hydrogen-based initiatives have been affected by setbacks and delays in current months. Most notably, the Le Mans hydrogen class has already been delayed to 2027, citing security issues.

But Extreme E believes its fashion of racing—quick sprints that final roughly 10 minutes—is completely suited to showcasing and testing the facility of hydrogen fuel cells, and the series’ management is assured that after preliminary testing final month, they will be operating their first absolutely hydrogen race by February 2025.

Getting all of the operations up and operating in solely 13 months actually will not be simple, although. “Switching that one letter to H means we’ve got to modify one million different issues,” Agag says.