Hydrogen powered zero emission trains in Cali
Idk, seems like it’d be easier just to string up electric lines and run on electricity. Probably more efficient too since you don’t have to haul fuel.
Also, most hydrogen is made from fossil fuels because it’s super inefficient to convert renewables to hydrogen.
From a technological point, yes. That being said, there are some complications. The US runs double-stacked intermodal freight so clearance is a concern, first of all. It’s doable, in fact India has many electrified lines that allow for double-stacked intermodal freight, but it does add a little to the cost and effort. The second issue is, unfortunately, cost, but not because it’s outright “too expensive”. Rather, it would eat too much into the short-term quarterlies of the various publicly traded rail companies that own a vast majority of the US’s rail lines during the installation. And as publicly traded companies, even if one of the major rail companies wanted to spend the money to electrify, they would get sued by their shareholders for doing so because there’s no immediate return on profits. And the final issue? NIMBYs already hate rail as-is, they’d hate the overhead lines even more.
So, yeah, a lot of challenges to electrification unique to the US, almost all of them political in nature. It would be really nice to put in electrified rail again (late PRR and New Haven were almost fully electrified but most of that was ripped out after the Penn Central merger. Seriously, everyone likes to rag on New Haven for screwing that up but honestly the evidence all points to the New York Central’s management team being the real culprits).
It’s kind of sad that we live in a world where even if a CEO wanted to do something to help the planet at the expense of his own profits, they’d be sued for doing so.
The one way a company can avoid that is to not go publicly traded in the first place. Problem is there’s a huge a mount of incentive to go publicly traded - specifically, it’s a huge boost to cash-on-hand, which can be crucial for expanding a business - so most corporations will basically do so without batting an eyelash at it. It’s a lot slower to build a company solely from net profits and private investors. But the cost of faster growth is a loss of control of the company.
You see here, the problem is that trains are just too efficient. So we made an electric train that wastes half the raw electricity by converting it into and than storing a cryogenic liquid, has to have massive on board lithium ion batteries to not overload the fuel cell by doing weird things like accelerating and to capture energy from breaking, and which at best diverts desperately needed non-methane produced hydrogen from the industries that actually can’t just put in highly efficient electric motors and more commonly at worst is more polluting than burning coal.
This may all be an incredibly expensive and inefficient way to use taxpayer money, but it’s not like the US can afford to put cananary lines over a very short commuter rail line. Overhead electrification is something only very rich and technology advanced countries like Ethiopia and North Korea can achieve, not a poor country like the United States.
Worse, it uses well understood technology over a century old and so would only take a few years to roll out over the entire amarican rail network, not only completely eliminating the two consumers of Diesel fuel that use more than the entire US military, but halving the operating costs of thouse railways.
Much better to spend a decade and half a billion dollars to create a pilot program to study the possibility of maybe replacing fossil fuels with a highly limited, more expensive, and less reliable alternative, maybe, in another few decades of burning oil. That’s what all you climate activists wanted, right? /s
As a tribute to its efficiency, the train has also been entered into the Guinness World Records database “for the longest distance of 1,741.7 miles achieved by a pilot hydrogen fuel cell electric multiple unit passenger train without refueling or recharging,” according to Stadler, the Switzerland-based manufacturer.
Guinness world records are almost universally bullshit, and go to whoever has the money to pay for someone to come out and verify that they can actually do something, but good grief that’s a lot of qualifiers.
