When Metallica tours Europe this summer, the legendary metal band's convoy will be rocking trucks powered by hydrogen fuel cells.
Metallica kicks off the European leg of their world tour on May 24 in Munich, Germany, and so far have 14 shows scheduled in nine different cities, covering Western and Central Europe and Scandinavia.
Some of the trucks used to carry the band's instruments and other gear will use hydrogen to trek thousands of miles during the tour, which will come to a close in Madrid, Spain, on July 14.
Iveco Group, a truck manufacturer in Italy, is designing custom trucks for the band made specifically to create as little planet-harming pollution as possible. Iveco Group CEO Gerrit Marx said, "Everywhere they have concerts, we can engage together on sustainability."
Hydrogen is still a burgeoning source of clean energy, largely because in a lot of cases, it takes natural gas to power the electrolyzers that produce the hydrogen by separating hydrogen molecules from oxygen molecules in water.
While that may be the case throughout much of the world, the Biden administration has offered new incentives to companies that create hydrogen using clean energy. To get the full tax credit, hydrogen producers cannot use the current power grid in the United States. Instead, they must use power from a clean energy source that has been built within the last three years.
Hydrogen is preferable to dirty energy sources because when it's burned, it produces mostly water vapor as opposed to harmful planet-warming pollution.
"We're getting into the era now that hydrogen is becoming a reality," said Lorenzo Simonelli, CEO of Baker Hughes, one of the world's largest oil field service companies. "We have to invest early on in what we see as the future horizons even though the infrastructure associated with [low carbon] hydrogen may not be there today."
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