Hydrogen Transport in Latvia: The Technology Works, the Price Doesn't Yet
Latvian bus, taxi and rail operators agree hydrogen vehicles work, but at roughly €16 per kilogram at the pump the fuel costs more than twice what it needs to compete with diesel. We look at where hydrogen already pays off in high-mileage fleets and how Baltic-scale production can close the gap.
NEWS
HydrogenLatvia
10/15/20264 min read
Jelgava has one hydrogen bus. It runs its route for three days, then somebody drives it to Riga and back to fill the tank. Half a day gone. That one line in Latvijas Mediji's 12 October piece tells you more about hydrogen transport in Latvia than most strategy documents do. The bus works. The people running it want more of them. And the sums still don't close, because of what a kilogram of hydrogen costs by the time it reaches the nozzle.
The number that decides everything
Gints Burks from Jelgavas autobusu parks gave the figure outright: hydrogen at the Riga station is nearly €16 a kilogram. For the bus to cost the same per kilometre as diesel, it would need to be about €7. Half the price. And that's before you count the bus itself, which runs roughly double what a diesel one does.
Rail is harsher still. Roberts Strods of Digas rebuilt a diesel locomotive to run on a hydrogen combustion engine in Ireland. It worked. It ran for two months, and then the hydrogen bill stopped it. His maths: grey hydrogen is 1.5 to 2 times the price of diesel, green is 2.5 to 3 times. Fuel is a fifth to a third of a rail operator's costs. Triple that line and there's no business left to run.
So let's be honest about what the problem actually is. It's not range. It's not refuelling time, and it's not winter — Jelgava tested all of that back in 2021 and the bus coped. The problem is the price of a kilogram. Everything else in this piece is about how that comes down.
Where hydrogen already earns its place
What tends to get buried under the "too expensive" headline is that nobody in the article disagrees about where hydrogen fits. Bus, coach, taxi, rail — they all describe the same vehicle: one that covers a lot of kilometres every day and can't sit around charging.
Burks's comparison is the one we keep coming back to. A battery bus doing 200 km a day hauls almost two tonnes of battery, gives up around 26 seats to carry it, and needs more than four hours on the charger at night. The hydrogen bus carries 37 kg of fuel, runs for days on it, and fills in seven minutes. On top of that, an electric depot needs grid connections and transformers that are busy for a few hours and idle the rest. Ask Burks what he'd choose if the decision were today and he says hydrogen. Jelgava is planning at least 15 of them on the way to a half-zero-emission fleet.
Tallinn says something similar from a different seat. Bolt's hydrogen taxis there, filled at Alexela's electrolyser-fed stations, already cost about the same per kilometre as a battery EV, and Bolt gives hydrogen a five-to-ten-year window in hard-working fleets. FlixBus and Wanema Line both land on long routes as the sensible niche. For Latvia that points somewhere quite specific. Not private cars. Buses, rubbish trucks, postal vans, port and airport vehicles — the Jelgava "hydrogen valley" Burks talks about, where one station feeds a whole cluster of heavy users instead of one bus a week.
Scale is the only lever that moves the price
Why is a kilogram €16 in Riga when Tallinn taxis are at EV parity? Mostly volume, and the logistics that come with low volume. Strods doesn't expect the big European pipelines to help much at the pump either, because the expensive part is compressing, trucking and dispensing small amounts. A station that fills one bus a week puts all its fixed cost on that one bus. The Riga station, by the Transport Ministry's own account in its review of the national energy technology plan, does about 0.3 tonnes a day against a 1-tonne target for the TEN-T network. It was built for a market that hasn't turned up yet.
Jānis Bethers at Alexela makes the supply-side case. Wind and solar are already saturating the Baltic grid and pushing wholesale prices down; offshore wind will push harder. Cheap surplus power is what makes green hydrogen competitive, and the same kilogram that goes into a bus is the raw material for e-fuels and the way the region exports energy it can't use.
Demand is starting to gather, slowly. Jelgava's H2Value project is putting an electrolyser on the Gren Jelgava site, which means a permanent filling point in the city and no more trips to Riga. Vilnius has committed to a first batch of hydrogen buses. Digas is building a hydrogen-battery hybrid train in Poland that burns 25–30% less hydrogen. Nothing in that list fixes the price on its own. Put together, it begins to look like the demand a Baltic production network could actually run on.
What this means for Latvia
The takeaway isn't that hydrogen transport is going nowhere. It's that Latvia has been running a pilot-scale market at pilot-scale prices and waiting for commercial numbers to appear. They won't, not like that.
Three things would move it faster than another single-vehicle trial:
Tie every new station to a fleet before it's built — a bus operator, a municipal services yard, a port — so it runs near capacity from the first week.
Make the price per kilogram the public target, not the number of vehicles, and publish it.
Plan production with Estonia and Lithuania, so Baltic surplus electricity becomes Baltic hydrogen for Baltic fleets, instead of three tiny markets each paying full freight.
Burks is still waiting for Jelgava's station. When it opens, the question for Latvian hydrogen ecosystem stakeholders won't be whether the bus works. We know it does. It'll be whether we've put enough demand around that station to make the next kilogram cheaper than the last one.
Source: Tehnoloģija darbojas, izmaksas bremzē: vai ūdeņradim transportā ir nākotne?