First hydrogen locomotive started working in Poland.
Imagine if we somehow could run trains on electricity, that would be even better
They already do, they just have a diesel generator to make the electricity
Guessing that replacing that with a large battery that charges at night is unreasonable due to the torque needed? You’d probably need a battery larger than a train engine to be able to even do a few stops and starts. Which is why electric trains are wired all the time.
If someone knows for sure I’m super curious!
Is this whole thread a joke or have you people not heard of electrified rail
The problem with battery trains is that locomotives hardly sit around long enough to charge unless it’s some sort of switcher or in for maintenance. Really the only use case for battery locomotives outside of switchers is passenger service where it’s fairly common for a train to sit for eight plus hours. Amtrak and Siemens are actually doing this with 15 of the new airo trainsets which will run on the empire line. The trainsets will specifically run on battery while within the new York city tunnels where diesel locomotives are only allowed to operate under emergency.
If I ran the local power grid I’m not sure I’d want cargo trains using line power for traction, unless there was some mandated weight or length limit 🤔
Without some cargo limit I think sections of the line’s voltage will just collapse under the current being drawn, whenever the cargo train moves off from a complete stop - especially if it’s a multi mile long cargo train that seems common in the US
Even better, we could also put cables above the train and connect them to an even bigger diesel generator located somewhere close to the railway. That would make the locomotive lighter and the energy production more efficient. Better yet, replace the diesel with uranium and you can easily power many trains.
That would make the locomotive lighter
That’s not an advantage. You want your loco to be as heavy as possible for traction. If they were switching it to pantograph and it was lighter they’d add iron, or something else to make up the difference
I don’t know about Poland but I know about France (I would guess we’re not so far appart on this point).
While 95% of railways are electrified, those last 5% are not very worth it to invest in, because really low traffic and hard to operate (eg. in mountains). I’ve already heard of compromises, like hybrid locomotives that can run on battery for more than half the line and rely on diesel for the remaining.
all trains, even the speed trains, in france run on electricity for who knows how many decades.
same trains go to great Britain, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany and maybe some other countries too.
source of the electricity is debatable though. France produces a great majority of its electricity from nuclear since the ww2 trauma.
Oh you mean debatable because it’s one of the cleanest, cheapest, and safest sources of electricity we have?
Which allows France a degree of energy independence which has helped it not suffer the same amount of pain other countries have now that they’re having to kick the cheap Russian gas addiction?
And through huge cross-border interconnects it allows France to sell electricity to neighbouring countries at a huge profit?
Nuclear is not always the answer, but as France has shown, as long as you invest in reliable infrastructure and don’t put it in earthquake/tsunami-prone areas, it can be a huge positive for your country.
And you don’t have to rely on antagonistic petrostates for to power your homes with gas, or on strip-mining huge swathes of land by equally-antagonistic China for rare-earth metals for your wind turbines/solar panels/battery storage.
by “debatable”, i mean that the moment you mention it, debate starts. You proved me right and i thank you 😉
Not trying to start a fight or anything, but don’t we still ‘need’ to burn a lot of coal to fuel electricity? Renewables haven’t gotten close to pushing the necessity of coal away yet, no? Why not alternatives like this in some places to offset the need for electricity?
Hydrogen doesn’t exist randomly in a well or something it has to be created by using electricity - and that transformation is very inefficient if you then use the hydrogen in an inefficient way to power an engine instead of just using the electricity directly
That argument that energy is coal-heavy actually counts against hydrogen…
Hydrogen powered stuff only makes sense when electric isn’t an option like for planes that just can’t carry heavy batteries
Apparently, some hydrogen does come out of the ground like methane: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2023/09/white-hydrogen-deposit-france/ but I assume it’s not abundant enough to make a difference
You don’t have to use electricity to make hydrogen! You can make it from methane! But yeah, it’s probably even worse than a diesel engine when it comes to CO2 emissions…
Nuclear is the energy source that scares everyone but that is actually the most viable option to power the world until renewable becomes the dominant one.
Thorium has been the best solution all along but it can’t be weaponized so countries have been ignoring it for decades until recently
The issue to me in term of effeciency is that the production of hydrogen needs electricity, the movement of it needs electricity, the storage and pumping of it needs electricity, and so on. I’d rather see all that electricity in the process simply be moving the vehicle. Though lugging batteries along is an issue in it’s own.
While it may not be the best option, is it not good that somewhere is at least trying it?
As long as it’s not widespread adoption, it seems like a good idea to at least trial these sort of things on a small scale to properly determine the real world application, even if the conclusion is just “yeah, it shit”.
No! If it doesn’t immediately solve the issue completely without any drawbacks it must be scrapped and no one should work to improve it!
Best regards,
Every conservative party (and their corporate sponsors).
Most of the supporters of hydrogen trains are the Oil & Gas lobby, a traditionally conservative group. It’s another, “Technology will save us from climate change!” scheme, which will allow unabated oil extraction to continue so we can make hydrogen fuel.
If I may?
Hydrogen, green hydrogen, can be produced from water, using electricity produced from renewables, like solar amd wind.
My own country is in the process of converting a decomissioned refinery into a hydrogen plant.
It may not solve much in the short term but as an energy reserve, hydrogen can find use directly as a fuel or for running gas turbines to produce electricity in replacement of conventional gas.
This train is being trialed by an oil subsidiary so I think there is more than a little greenwashing going on here. The vast majority of hydrogen is “blue”, i.e. it’s manufactured from fossil fuels, so there is no environmental benefit to this. Even if it were “green”, i.e. made from water and renewable energy, the same power used to make the hydrogen, store it, transport it, turn it back to power could charge 3 or 4 battery powered trains or tenders - a tender could mean a smaller locomotive hooks up to however many battery tenders it needs for its route or switches them out in the yard.
Honestly all this feels like the railway’s Dieselization 100yrs ago. When the end of steam powered engines was drawing near, coal hauling railroads and Baldwin Locomotive in the U.S. tried all kinds of whacky and hilariously inefficient engine designs, just to keep the ol’ ways alive… none of these worked out - everyone who stuck to it lost hugely. Viz. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chesapeake_and_Ohio_class_M-1
The environmental benefit of blue hydrogen is that it doesn’t put CO2 into the atmosphere. This is better than burning the hydrogen carbon gas it was produced from.
Except it does. This study suggests that the plants that produce hydrogen from fossil fuels are only capturing 80% of the CO2. So 20% is emitted. And aside from that hydrogen has the potential to contribute 12x as much to global warming as CO2 emissions.
Hydrogen probably has some niche uses but there are some things that proponents like to gloss over.
- It’s not green since most of it is produced from fossil fuels. It’s also disgustingly expensive even compared to fossil fuels. I’d note that the company Orlen Koltrans which is funding this train is a subsidiary of an oil company PKN Orlen so yeah.
- Even if it were green (e.g. water electrolysis from renewables) it takes something like 3-4x the energy to produce, store, transport, and convert back to energy as just charging a battery.
- Regardless of how it’s made hydrogen also contributes to global warming - if any hydrogen leaks or escapes during fueling or venting, it promotes the methane production in the atmosphere.
- It can and does go kaboom. e.g. this hydrogen powered bus has seen better days.
All said and done, I think it’s crazy to even bother with the tech unless its so niche it cannot be done some other way. Japanese automakers & oil companies looking to do a bit of greenwashing have been the major proponents of hydrogen and that should say something. Also the fact that hydrogen has been a miserable failure in areas where it has been piloted.
In the case of trains it seems more sensible to manufacture biodiesel or synthetic fuels than this. It’s certainly safer to transport and store. Perhaps existing trains can be converted relatively easily. Or electrify the train line or stretches of it. Batteries would be an option too - a train might simply hook up to a fresh battery tender and off it goes. Or some kind of hybrid solution that can source power from overhead lines and/or diesel and/or battery. Or even put solar on carriages to reduce fuel consumption during daylight operations. All these things seem more viable than hydrogen.
Biodiesels arent more efficent, a huge waste of land and destroying the local environment through monocultures, pesticides and fertilizers.
The most reasonable solution would be to fucking electrify the train tracks. It is a train god dammit. It runs on tracks and the track aint running anywhere else.
Biodiesels are still better than diesel and the stuff can be manufactured from seaweed, algae, any biomass really. It doesn’t have to be a monoculture. It doesn’t even have to be 100% biodiesel either - start blending it in. I agree electric motors and electrification are the ultimate outcome but the rail industry has a lot of lines and a lot of locomotives and and you want progression over time with options for battery, power lines or diesel, potentially all 3 on the same line in different parts. It might take decades to transition. It’s certainly not hydrogen, that’s for sure.
In support of your point, and to help clarify it, there’s a lot of train lines where the cost (and the carbon output) of electrification is far beyond the benefit. A lot of the North Wales coast, for example, because working in the tunnels would be prohibitively expensive. In these cases it makes sense to have bi/trimodal trains, at least until electrification technology makes significant breakthroughs.
Another example might be cases where an old rail line (e.g. ex-mining) is looking at being reopened at a low capacity. It would be madness to immediately electrify. An example I have looked at was running a train for tourists on what is currently a little-used freight line (that still uses tokens!) in the Lake District.
A whole lot of misinformation about biofuel here. Manufacturing biofuels does not require significant changes to current agriculture practices. Most biofuel is made from byproducts that would be burned as waste otherwise.
That is wrong already. Land use for biofuels
But it would get even worse, when we’d expand the land use even further by raising the demand significantly.
I can appreciate the electrification push for passenger vehicles. Good luck moving frieght with electric.
I fail to see the problem? Freight trains in Europe regularly run electrical already. There is no technological reason as to ehy they shouldnt or couldnt be electrified.
- Green hydrogen is being produced at scale.
- So what, renewables are infinite
- That’s overblown
- You think the toxic (deadly) lithium thermal runaways that can’t be stopped are somehow better? No. They are worse and a deadly underground carpark disaster waiting to happen.
- Not enough lithium in the world to supply the global suv market let alone compete with other markets and let’s not forget that the rest of the transport market…Lithium batteries are yet again another finite mined resource with the same problem as dinosaur juice.
- Rail lines won’t be electrified, they are barely being maintained as is!
You think the toxic (deadly) lithium thermal runaways that can’t be stopped are somehow better? No. They are worse and a deadly underground carpark disaster waiting to happen.
Yup, all those trains waiting to explode in carparks. Nor are we developing better batteries that don’t have these problems. Nope, just leaving things exactly as they are.
Not enough lithium in the world to supply the global suv market . . .
Even if lithium was our only battery option, this is just plain wrong. People misunderstand what “reserve” means in mining. It’s not the amount of something that’s available to be mined. It’s the amount that is available profitably under current economic conditions. Both better technology and other shifts in the market mean more reserves “magically” open up.
Oceanic lithium mining may already been commercially viable, and the amount of lithium we can get from that is basically unlimited. On the lab side, there’s a promising string-based evaporation method, which would substantially reduce costs and environmental footprint–exactly the sort of tech that makes more reserves open up. It still needs to be demonstrated at scale, but the strings involved don’t use any exotic materials or have any difficult production.
I wish they gave a $ per KG estimate in your link about harvesting with strings. The methods detailed in this Journal article gives estimates of $2-5 per KG which is like a 5 to 12x return at current prices.
I wonder if you could couple that string method with desalination plants? Take the brine output, extract the lithium with the string method before releasing back into the ocean. Two birds one stone sorta deal. I also wonder if the string method is as technically easy to implement and separate the end products, and it’s just a lot of labor if this will end up economically benefitting countries with extremely low wages. If so, that could be ecologically very bad, especially if it’s possible to do with salt water brine. (As it could incentivize people to pump ocean water inland to make brine pools for harvesting).
The fact you couldn’t put the recent derailments and toxic unstoppable fires together shows clear ideological bias.
“Developing” cool so 5 years? 10 years? For these super safe “in-development batteries”. Neat. More clear ideology borderline fantasy.
“Reserve” Hahahaha More fantasy. Demand has never been higher but don’t worry. “Reserve” will save us all…
“Other technology” “Profitability “ hahaha good god how much of a fantasy are you selling.
- Not really. There are plans for hydrogen plants. The vast majority is “blue”. Secondly what are the chances that an oil company is going to make green hydrogen?
- The renewables aren’t the problem. The cost of capturing energy is the problem. If hydrogen takes 3-4x the energy then that’s 3-4x the land with 3-4x the solar and/or windfarms at 3-4x the expense. Do you not see the problem?
- No it isn’t. Scientific studies suggest the impact on the atmosphere might 12x worse than releasing CO2.
- Lithium isn’t the only battery material. Nor I daresay even if it were, that the safety risk is anywhere near as bad as driving a train with a hundreds of kgs of hydrogen on board
- Lithium isn’t the only battery material. There are numerous battery chemistries in existence. It might even be that some less dense chemistries like sodium ion would be viable.
- Which is why I clearly I suggested a progressive approach. Switch from diesel to biodiesel, start building hybrid trains where the motor and tender are almost separate things and where the source of power can be 2 or 3 potential inputs - diesel, electrification, battery. And where rolling stock can use solar to reduce consumption further.
- Sorry to burst your bubble. Australia, Africa, take your pick, both have huge multimillion dollar green hydrogen plants being built. Like the 1GW North Queensland hydrogen project currently in contract.
- Again see above
- Right… that is bullshit. Plenty of real world studies and events HAVE occurred and the toxic release is not a maybe flip flop study. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-09784-z
Don’t like papers in nature? This guy is a bit of an asshole but he is not wrong at all and reports on the recent event/s Watch it to the end. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7l4wR1zhbc 4. Sure but none are here and more competitive or suitable for application (like compressed air) the leader is clear and underwhelming. Here we need to understand promises of development realistically don’t occur more often than do. 6. I won’t knock on biodiesel as we need a solution, something but we can’t create religions on one in development “potential” more likely to fail than succeed
I agree hydrogen has a lot of challenges, but as you said, it does have niche uses, and I do see some places (Steel Arc Furnace) where it could make an impact IF driven by green energy. Not really disagreeing with you persay but you are downplaying Hydrogen a bit in my opinion.
We are still finding new ways to utilize it both in the electrolyzer and in chemical synthesis so there is more ground for us to cover in the near future I feel like (opinion).
I’m not sure a train is the right place though… yeah.
One use case for hydrogen is sea amd aircraft. H2 has a very high power density. Sea abd aircrat can’t use batteries because they woukd take all tge space for people and cargo.
It’s more complicated than that. Hydrogen has a higher energy density than gasoline on a mass basis (i.e. 1 kg of hydrogen is about 3x the energy density of 1kg of gasoline). But for volumetric density the situation is reversed - 1Kg of hydrogen takes 4x the space of 1kg of gasoline. So you’re not really saving anything by using hydrogen.
On top of that gasoline is a liquid at atmospheric pressures and can flow into any nook and cranny of your aircraft. Most aircraft will store fuel in the wings and under the fuselage. If you use hydrogen you have to store it in heavily reinforced pressurized tanks, preferably spheroidal, cylindrical, toiroidal in shape. That means you’re looking at putting some honking great cylinders on your aircraft and there is no convenient place to do it. They’ll either have to be mounted on struts or in the body somewhere.
I don’t think batteries will find much application in aircraft until solid state batteries come along. But there are some high density batteries appearing for aviation applications (drones, taxis etc.) and just like with gasoline they can be incorporated pretty much anywhere in the structure of the aircraft.
even solid state batteries are not close enough to come close to what aircraft need. Also there are some way to store hydrogen in a liquid form that does not need pressure. Although then you have to have a water to mix with to make the h2 gas for the fuel cell.
I personally see hydrogen as a great energy dense storage solution to utilize excess generation from solar/wind/etc.
But we’re a long way off from that, so it seems the consensus is that if anything, hydrogen research should primarily be in preparation for a time when it could be utilized reasonably. That may be 20-30 years out, or more. Idk.
There’s a ton of options there besides hydrogen. Flow batteries are far more efficient than hydrogen, and there’s no particular barrier to mass production at this point. Then there’s anything from flywheels, other battery chemistries that are too heavy for EVs, or just pumping water uphill.
We need options there today. We want to be on 80% renewables by 2030 in industrialized countries, and that will require some kind of storage solution. Fortunately, we already have quite a few.
Actually, we’re not a long way off from that. Hydrogen production facilities utilizing (excess) renewable electricity output are under construction as we speak. For example, a large project in Kazakhstan (which has large stretches of windy, sunny and empty steppes) is aiming to be online in 2030 with 30 GW of production going towards green hydrogen.
It’s not green since most of it is produced from fossil fuels.
Dear Faust, it’s them again. Them who say “electricity is not green since most of it is produced from fossil fuels”
It’s also disgustingly expensive even compared to fossil fuels
Hydrogen is mean of storage, not source
it takes something like 3-4x the energy to produce, store, transport, and convert back to energy as just charging a battery.
Ehhh. 60% efficiency means 1.6x the energy to produce. And battaries are transported too.
In the case of trains it seems more sensible to manufacture biodiesel or synthetic fuels than this. It’s certainly safer to transport and store. Perhaps existing trains can be converted relatively easily. Or electrify the train line or stretches of it.
Electrify? Yes! Everything else? Meh.
Or even put solar on carriages to reduce fuel consumption during daylight operations.
Small area, create drag, may be even energy-negative. Worse idea than hydrogen storage.
Why, Poland, why? You have elecrified network, why?
German Lower Saxony recently halted developments of a hydrogen locomotive fleet, arguing that electric battery ones are cheaper to operate https://qz.com/the-dream-of-the-first-hydrogen-rail-network-has-died-a-1850712386
Nonetheless, Alstom and Siemens remain fixed on the production of hydrogen-fueled trains https://news.europawire.eu/siemens-mobility-successfully-tests-hydrogen-powered-mireo-plus-h-train-in-bavaria/eu-press-release/2023/09/16/15/35/04/121944/
