Fuel Cell Powered Japanese Trains on Trial in July

ScorpFromHell writes "As per this yahoo! news item, "East Japan Railway Co. is to conduct a test run of the world's first fuel-cell-powered train in July. The fuel cells, which generate power from a chemical reaction between hydrogen and oxygen, will help reduce environmental pollution compared to the existing electric and diesel engines, the company said." But I wonder how much energy did it consume to produce those huge amounts of Hydrogen & Oxygen? Will it be lesser than the power generated by the reaction between them? In other words, can this technology be used by countries with not so deep pockets as Japan?"

Comments

Good echnology applied at the wrong place

[Wayne247]

Seriously, what can be possibly better than electric trains? Unless your electricity comes from coal, in which case replacing the power station to something else, say nuclear, would make more sense.

Fuel cells are useful for energy storage. Perfect to, say, drive a car for a few hours, then dump some more into your energy storage, and drive back, in any direction. Also, they're good to bring energy to remote location. Setup a quick electricity generator in the middle of nowhere. But for trains? They go on tracks, so installing a few wires isn't too expensive or difficult, making the electricity transportation far more efficient trought wires than fitting fuel cells on every locomotive, and then carrying all that hydrogen and .. sheesh!

Really, i see this as the wrong match of a technology to a need.

Re:Good echnology applied at the wrong place

[martijnd]

I think you are looking at the wrong kind of trains -- the Japanese have lots of commuter trains connecting smaller cities, and literally millions of miles of track, don't think Tokyo, think outback.

These trains are actually more like busses, they have maybe 2-4 cars and run infrequencly, so electrifying these tracks doesn't make much economic sense; or is just downright ugly and expensive to maintain. They are mostly diesel powered (with the engines located below the passenger compartments, there is no seperate loc).

For these, replacing a noisy diesel engine with much quieter electrical ones makes very good sense.

Re:no it's not worth it.

[LordLucless]

While I'm not sure about the relative polution created by burning natural gas to create hydrogen vs burning it for energy directly, there is an advantage to relocation the pollution to a single point. It's much more feasible to implement high-tech and expensive filters and control mechanisms in one or two hydrogen production plants than it is in a couple of million cars across a country. Then too, when a better method of production is discovered, all you need to do is upgrade the production plants, rather than wait for everyone to be a new, cleaner car.