By Paul Homewood
I spotted this video on BBC News yesterday:
Hydrogen-powered trains are arguably the greenest trains out there.
"Mini power stations on wheels", is how Alex Burrows from the University of Birmingham describes them.
He is the project director for the ‘Hydroflex’ train which was showcased at an event in the West Midlands.
Unlike diesel trains, hydrogen-powered trains do not emit harmful gases, instead using hydrogen and oxygen to produce electricity, water and heat.
It is "a fully green fuel", says Helen Simpson from rail rolling stock company Porterbrook, which created the Hydroflex in partnership with Birmingham University’s centre for Railway Research.
But hydrogen trains are still incredibly rare.
The only two in active service in the entire world are in Germany.
Britain is looking to become one of the next countries to start running them.
And the ‘Hydroflex’ is a tester train where the technology is being trialled.
The hydrogen tanks, the fuel cell and the batteries sit inside a carriage where passengers would normally sit.
In future commercial models that equipment will have to be stored away above and beneath the train.
So why is this all happening now?
A quarter of the UK’s trains run solely off diesel.
The government wants them all gone by 2040.
"The carbon writing is on the wall", says Mike Muldoon from French train manufacturer Alstom, the company behind Germany’s hydrogen trains.
He argues the rail sector has to get greener "if we are going to convince more people to shift from car to train."
But until the day when hydrogen trains are ferrying passengers around the UK, diesel-powered trains are a necessity.
That is because more than two thirds of our rail lines do not have overhead cabling which electric trains need to run.
So trains are bi-mode, which means they can run off electricity, where there are overhead cables, and off diesel the rest of the time.
But bi-mode trains are, in environmental terms, far from perfect.
And electrifying rail lines does not come cheaply for the government.
Regional routes which carry relatively few passengers are unlikely to be electrified soon.
And that is where hydrogen trains come in.
The hope is that they will be carrying passengers in the UK in two years.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-48698532
Nowhere in the story does the BBC explain to viewers where the hydrogen comes from, instead giving the impression that it is somehow plucked out of the air.
Basically there are only two ways:
- Electrolysis, which is a small scale and highly expensive of using electricity to produce hydrogen. To then use this hydrogen to produce electricity must be the height of illogicality.
- Steam reforming, which uses natural gas in a process which still produces carbon dioxide.
Both methods will add hugely to the running costs of trains, and both rely heavily on fossil fuels in the first place.
The BBC mention Germany, where interestingly the new Datteln 4 coal power station is due to open next year. Rated at 1.1 GW, a third of Datteln’s power will be fed directly into the Deutsche Bahn grid:
The 50Hz power generated by the plant will be converted into 16.7Hz, which is ideal for the train system, by a traction current converter facility to be constructed along the power station. The converted energy will be fed to Deutsche Bahn’s 110kV high-voltage grid.
https://www.power-technology.com/projects/datteln-4-coal-fired-power-plant/
So while British trains will apparently be running on unicorn farts, the German counterparts will still be relying on good old coal!
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
June 21, 2019 at 08:27AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 