Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumSpain Builds World's First High-Speed Hydrail Train - Forbes
Spain Builds Worlds First High-Speed Hydrail Train
Forbes | Marianne Lehnis | Sep 27, 2024
Hydrogen-powered railway technology began around 20 years ago with Japanese experiments and a tiny U.S. underground mining locomotive that used a fuel cell so it did not have to be taken out of service to charge its batteries. Since then, hydrogen electrochemical railway traction has progressed to trams, commuter and intercity trains, and switcher and freight locomotives.
Earlier this year, Spanish train building giant, Patentes Talgo S.L. or just Talgo, undertook to move hydrailhydrogen power railway tractionover the finish line. Spains Talgo is set to build the first-ever high-speed hydrail trains, named Europes most efficient high-speed rail network last November in a report by engineering consultancy, Ineco. This will be another feather in the cap for Spain. Could this be the start of a more widespread transition to hydrogen-powered railway? And what are the cogs that need to turn to make this a reality?
Talgo is not Spains first foray into hydrail. In 2006 Dr. Carlos Navas, then Chief Technical Officer of hydrail startup, NTDA Energìa, attended the Second International Hydrail Conference in Denmark. Soon after, he opened an NTDA Energìa office in Raleigh, North Carolina. Later, in Brussels, he headed the European Communitys Fuel Cell and Hydrogen Joint Undertaking. In 2008 Dr. Navas organized the Fourth International Hydrail Conference in Valencia. One of the first hydrail trams was demonstrated in Northern Spain by FEVE narrow gauge railways in 2011.
Talgos undertaking will showcase the capability of hydrogen-powered transport. In the hydrail world, high‑speed marks the equivalent of evolving from hand-wired transistor devices to integrated chips...more
https://www.forbes.com/sites/mariannelehnis/2024/09/27/spain-builds-worlds-first-high-speed-hydrail-train/
Meanwhile, in China...
Train Enthusiast Explores CRRCs Cinova H2 at InnoTrans 2024
NNadir
(34,476 posts)Like natural gas, from which hydrogen is made with exergy destruction (wasted energy), hydrogen is a very dirty fuel, but natural gas has the benefit of being cleaner than hydrogen and having better physical properties, a higher critical temperature, a higher heat of vaporization, and well known compatibility with metals which is sorely lacking in hydrogen.
This scam, while popular, rebranding fossil fuels as hydrogen, is not merely wasteful, but it is costly and destructive to the planetary atmosphere.
A Rube Goldberg Scheme to Clean Up the Filth of Hydrogen Manufacturing.
Think. Again.
(17,188 posts)...and since our only hope to stop CO2 emissions is to move away from fossil fuels like natural gas, Hydrogen will be an energy storage fuel that we will need to use widely.
Caribbeans
(942 posts)and want to wait at least 10 years (maybe more) for their billion dollar + pet nuke projects to start providing energy - while bashing everything else. It would be hilarious if it wasn't so sad.
The rest of the world knows that the US built the last 70+ years on the PETRODOLLAR and isn't about to really change much of anything until forced. Meanwhile, they blew trillions on a failed global hegemony scheme.
Hydrogen can be as green as it gets. Ignore the ignorant.
NNadir
(34,476 posts)Exxon rebranding fossil fuels as hydrogen:
I note with disgust, in a time that the fossil fuel industry and its advertisers have left the planet in flames, that fossil fuel marketeers have always hated nuclear energy, because clearly, it is the only sustainable infinitely scalable form of energy that can drive them out of business.
And of course, the fossil fuel industry never tires of slick advertising videos, never has, never will. It's called, um, "bullshit."
We hear, even to this day, the fossil fuel marketeers whining insipidly and dishonestly about tritium at Fukushima, while the fucking planet experiences extreme weather driven by extreme global heating.
They lack a sense of decency and a sense of shame.
The malign marketing of antinuke rhetoric, which fossil fuel marketeers never tire of producing, has had it's day. It successfully demonized that form of clean energy, while causing untold trillions of dollars in damage to the environment, leaving the planet in flames. It is too late, as a result of this successful marketing, to save what might have been saved were it not for fear and ignorance hyped by fossil fuel interests, but we may be able to save what is left to save, and restore what can be restored.
I can assure you, with a son who will be entering the nuclear industry when he completes his Ph.D., really don't give a shit about what the fossil fuel/hydrogen industry thinks.
Slick advertising, nor overtly dishonest advertising, with videos of little Potemkin hydrogen this and that, funded and supported by fossil fuel interests designed to rebrand their product, fossil fuels, as hydrogen, do not invalidate science, in particular the laws of thermodynamics.
It hasn't done so in the last 50 years of continuous bullshit about a putative "hydrogen economy," and it won't now.
When I promote nuclear energy, because unlike the hydrogen industry, the nuclear industry does not depend on fossil fuels, I don't produce videos. I produce reference to the scientific literature, which I read regularly and continuously, because unlike the marketing team at Exxon, I give a shit about the future of the planet.
The reason I do this extra work, is because I give a shit about the world.
For example, in this post, which I reference frequently since it contains scientific references, A Giant Climate Lie: When they're selling hydrogen, what they're really selling is fossil fuels, I produce the numbers behind how destructive the hydrogen scam is to the future of the planet.
People lie, to themselves and, as we can observe here in many cases, to each other, but numbers don't lie.
I stand by my remarks, all of them, showing that a hydrogen economy is an unsafe and dishonest scam. It has been thus for all the last half century that I've been hearing this crap - once upon a time, when I was a young man and not an old man, being so uneducated as to actually have believed it - and it will remain the same for the next fifty years, this because of the inviolable laws of physics.
Have a wonderful week.