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Germany Unveils a Hydrogen-Powered Passenger Train (fortune.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The world's first CO2-emission-free train powered through hydrogen was unveiled this week in Germany. The Coradia iLint, created by French company Alstom, was presented at the Berlin InnoTrans trade show on Tuesday. The train's energy comes from combining hydrogen stored in tanks on the train with oxygen in the air. The energy is then stored in lithium-ion batteries. The train's only emissions are steam and condensed water. The train also has lower noise levels than diesel trains, emitting only the sound of its wheels on the track and any sounds from air resistance at even its highest speed of 140 kilometers per hour (about 87 miles per hour). The train has the ability to travel up to 800 kilometers (497 miles) and carry up to 300 passengers; it's the worldâ(TM)s first hydrogen passenger train that can regularly operate long journeys.
Oh the humanity!!
Cool! Is it cheaper than diesel?
That can happen when you don't blink often enough.
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
maybe but when the batteries go bad it can jam up the line or maybe blowup if they cheap out on them.
Are they saying that no CO2 was created in _that_ process?
Plus whatever it took to make the hydrogen. Which is probably more than it would have taken to just run the train on diesel.
And is condensed water like condensed milk?
Currently it is incredibly energy intensive to separate hydrogen from oxygen. What power plant is powering the separator? If it's anything but nuclear, hydro, solar or wind, then it's powered by whatever fossil fuel is doing the separation, and at a much lower efficiency than simply putting diesel fuel into a diesel-electric or directly powering an electric train by overhead catenary. In the end you're just centralizing the pollution.
If the separator is run by a non-fossil fuel source, then more power to them.
What could possibly go wrong?
There, I said it, so no one else needs to. Everybody got that?
I guess it depends on how you generate the hydrogen. If you do so by cheap electricity produced by burning coal, it might not be so CO2-emission-free...
But where does the hydrogen come from? There aren't any lakes of free hydrogen that we can scoop up, so we're spending more energy at the h2 production facility than we're getting back from "cleanly" burning the hydrogen on a train.
>> The train also has lower noise levels than diesel trains, emitting only the sound of its wheels on the track and any sounds from air resistance at even its highest speed of 140 kilometers per hour (about 87 miles per hour).
Whilst I'm all for these sort of vehicles the lack of noise should be a concern. Electric cars are a menace to wildlife as they can't hear them coming. In my locality there have been several near misses involving two new electric taxis that the local cab company have employed. Admittedly this is in a small built up area and the people were probably drunk but the lack of noise is a concern. I've been walking along or cycling and an electric car has passed me and I;ve barely heard it until it was almost right alongside me.
So to have a near silent train doing 140Kmh is a real concern for the local wildlife.
At the very least electric vehicles should throw out some very high pitched warning sound in front of them. Humans won't hear it but wildlife will. In town maybe the cars should also have some sort of "low but hearable" artificial engine noise to alert people to it's presence ?
like I say the technology's great, but the safety needs thinking about !
Where's the hydrogen coming from? Last I checked, making the hydrogen is an energy intensive activity.
How was the hydrogen used in the train produced and delivered?
OK. How efficient is hydrogen, really? Shout out to all of the chemistry majors out there who might answer this.
One of the reasons that fuels work, from my understanding, is that you start with a small number of molecule, combust them, and get a larger number of molecules with more heat. The heat increases the pressure, and the increase in the number of molecules increases the pressure.
Example: combustion of alcohol:
C2H6O +3O2 --> 3H2O + 2CO2
We start with four molecules on the left, and get five molecules on the right. Even if the reaction was not exothermic, we would still get a pressure increase good for pushing a piston.
Now, when we burn hydrogen, we get a decrease in the number of molecules (goes from three down to two):
2H2 + O2 --> 2H2O
So, yes, we get increased pressure due to heat production, but we get decreased pressure due to fewer molecules.
So, I guess that my question is: when burning a fuel, how much pressure created is due to the typical increase in molecules, and how much pressure is due to heat?
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
Until you figure out that 95% of the hydrogen is produced from carbon fuels.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B - D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Two, They are using Note 7 recall batteries for storage!
Silence is a state of mime.
Hydrogen is a battery with what, 50% loss right off the bat? Weeeeeee.
The world's first CO2-emission-free train powered through hydrogen was unveiled this week in Germany.
Note that they haven't built or sold any production units yet. Just some prototypes.
The train's energy comes from combining hydrogen stored in tanks on the train with oxygen in the air.
It's a fuel cell system so yeah, that's kind of how it works.
The energy is then stored in lithium-ion batteries.
The company that makes this train says nothing about Li-Ion batteries being involved.
The train's only emissions are steam and condensed water.
Correct but misleading. The real emissions depend on how the hydrogen was produced. If they got it by cracking hydrocarbons then the real emissions are considerably nastier than just water.
It was a gas!
love is just extroverted narcissism
to stop building obscenely tall buildings?
No?
Germany lost a lot fewer people via airship than the US has via skyscrapers.
Even hydrogen filled airships have a lower chance of flaming death than many common vehicles people take for granted today (motorcycles, cars, boats, and airplanes. And if you're unlucky canadians, flaming train cars.)
I took a ride in it. What a blast!
This seems utterly pointless, really - if you look at the railroads in Germany and most of Europe, they have this funny wire above the track, that is attached with insulators and stuff. I wonder what that is for? Oh it carries the effing electricity to drive the trains! Yeah, so rather than subsidise this harebrained way to use even more sorry-but-we-can't-get ourselves-to-call-it 'clean' brown-coal plants, they may have to string them fancy wires on some of these tracks...
CO2-emission-free train
This is a total crock. You have to also look at how the Hydrogen is being produced. And not some theoretical but not real theory of how it could be made by electrolysis, but the real truth of how it is being made by a very dirty and wasteful process that breaks down natural gas and captures some hydrogen in the process. The truth of the matter is it would be much cleaner overall to just run the train on liquid natural gas. This Hydrogen bullshit is all smoke and mirrors with even more carbon being released into the atmosphere.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
... The energy is then stored in lithium-ion batteries. ...
carbon fuels -> electricity -> hydrogen -> electricity (battery stored) -> drive motor/wheels?
Can't super caps be used instead of batteries, as the energy is used relatively immediate, or readily generated by hydrogen?
(scientific papers are online, no I won't do the search for you)
They found that fuel cell split water trains, using the stored hydrogen, could be easily refilled along routes by solar and wind accumulators, similar to coal and water stops, and that they were highly efficient and very safe.
Glad Germany is joining the 21st Century at last.
The main problem with split water is the economy of scale. Car sized power plants don't have sufficient efficiency, but large tractor trailers and trains do.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
A rapidly moving gian tank of hydrogen... hmmm, I suggest to name it the "Hindenburg".
Video of some good progressive thrash music
Of all the crazy hydrogen energy schemes, this one appears to me to be a reasonable use case. All this talk of hydrogen powered cars is just crap. But put it on a train and it's a whole new ball game.
The production of hydrogen can be condensed to a single location: The train station. No transporting, no distribution, no "how do we contain hydrogen in a car, make it safe AND make it easily re-fillable by consumers". Every train station could become it's own hydrogen processing plant. The power density would allow trains to travel long distances between refills, and be re-fuelled in no time. The alternative, I suppose, would be huge battery banks in the locomotives, probably loaded as removable power pods so they can be changed with fresh ones at each stop. The cost of maintaining backup and spare "power pods" would be enormous, and it would still require time and energy to charge them.
The electricity could come from wind/solar (as mentioned in the post) and stored between non-peak production, even with horrendous conversion efficiencies. The hydrogen wouldn't have to to come from fossil fuels. Well, it wouldn't 'have' to, someday, even if maybe it is now.
Materials have to be transported, and this looks like a clean way to do it with existing infrastructure.
I would think the same could apply to airports and air travel. There's no way we can replace modern jet passenger transport with any foreseeable future electric technology. Hydrogen might be a valid replacement here. Why not turn an airport and all it's surrounding land into one huge solar array to create the hydrogen fuel used by the aircraft?
Go gas, go boom!
Ok, my chemistry is a long time in the past, but AFAIK hydrogen is a really stupid fuel to choose. It is the smallest atom possible; even H2, the usual form of hydrogen gas, is tiny. That makes it incredibly hard to contain. Also, none of our existing infrastructure can handle it.
If you are going to manufacture fuel, you are better off producing methane (natural gas, CH4). It does require a second reaction: After electrolizing water to produce H2, you then catalyze the H2 with CO2 to produce methane and water. So the overall process is more complex, but the result is not only much easier to store, we already have the infrastructure for transporting and storing methane.
This line from TFA is also a laugh: "operating costs will be similar to the operating costs of diesel units." Sure, except for the cost of building a completely new infrastructure to produce, transport and store hydrogen. Which doesn't count as "operating costs".
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Almost all hydrogen is generated from natural gas today, which means hiding CO2 emissions and supporting the old dirty extractive industries which we must kill as quickly as possible. Windmills and solar are intermittent, but there are plenty of smart long term smart grid solutions that show promise alleviating those concerns. I suspect that hydrogen has a role to play in rocket and airplane applications since they are sensitive to weight and current battery designs are heavy. That may change too though.
The efficiency of hydrogen also works when it explodes. And train craches usualy have lots of fires and sparks. And if they add a oxigen tank to it it becomes a space rocket explosion...
Can you imagine that fireball in a train full of ppl, in the midle of a city?
Its like 9 11 all over again.
Now we compress it. the compressors suitable for it have 70-85% efficiency (adiabatic). Which means that of the energy used to compress it, 15-30% is lost
Which doesn't matter because remember how we are using excess electrical capacity anyway?
Then we store and transport it.
This is the part the battery people really miss on, because they basically assuming the cost of transporting giant batteries is free it would seem.
You simply are not factoring in the reality of the system at a whole at various stages for battery compared to hydrogen.
Not to mention the horrific aspects of making the batteries to begin with, they always seem to just magically appear in all of these kinds of calculations.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
now I think it's just an overly complex idiot honey pot. I'm not entirely clear on the long term plan.
If you can't make money from rich technical people who are also idiots, you can't make money from anyone!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The article only mentions French company Alstom unveiling the train at a German trade show. If we're into putting national stickers on things, in what way is it more German than French?
Interesting how its all about Germany while it's made by a French company - because it will run on German tracks and the trans conference is in Germany.
The PR material is also all French people http://www.alstom.com/innotran...
I guess its just sounds better if its "German".
So if I use a Tesla in France, then France introduced a new electric car right?
Trains are in the unique situation that supplying external electricity is relatively easy, you string up a cable above the track. It is the form of EV that has been practical for decades and is widely deployed so why would you create such a complicated alternative? Yes, you could argue the less used or longer remote tracks would be expensive to electrify but do wonder if a hydrogen hybrid stacks up economically for those cases anyway.
Full disclosure: I thought hydrogen vehicles where dumb when I first read about how they where going to change the world "real soon now", in the 1980s, and nothing in the years since has change my view. If I subscribed to conspiracy theories then I would believe hydrogen vehicles were backed by oil industry to slow the development of EVs. It has annoyed me how long it has taken EVs to reach market but now they are here I think it is time stop giving press coverage to impractical hydrogen demo vehicles and focus on the real issue, the transition from ICEs to EVs.
Conversion efficiency is a big deal when you're using a mix of renewable and fossil fuel energy sources. It makes little sense to send renewable energy to a train at (say) 20% efficiency causing a shortage in the electrical grid which needs to be made up by a fossil fuel plant operating at 50% efficiency (overall average 35% efficiency), if you can instead use the renewable energy directly on the grid at 70% efficiency and power the train with fossil fuel at 40% efficiency (overall average 55% efficiency).
This is a very common error I see made by people advocating renewables. They like to compare to a nonexistant zero state. You need to compare to the next best (or better) alternative. Or in other words, you can't think of this in terms of where the energy for the train (and only for the train) is coming from. You need to think of it as having x MWh of renewable energy, and where is the best place to send it to maximize the reduction in fossil fuel burn. In that respect, it is deceptive describing vehicles as "zero emissions" - all they do is shift the emissions elsewhere. The act of charging up their batteries or hydrogen tanks requires energy, and implemented poorly it can actually end up requiring more energy than just burning diesel.
The Germans certainly didn't.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I am dissapoint.
Afterall, they gave all their trans rapid tech to China.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
They are what wealthy people pay, in donations or outright bribes in order to have their children get the best certificates, degrees, jobs, or prison term avoidance than money can buy!
maybe but when the batteries go bad it can jam up the line or maybe blowup if they cheap out on them.
If only there were some technology where we could have a train powered by electricity without the need for large batteries or hydrogen...
If you bother to RTFA, it states: "The Coradia iLint, created by French company Alstom, was presented at the Berlin InnoTrans trade show on Tuesday."
But, hey, this is /.
Countries like Norway and New Zealand which have electric commuter or long distance rail already have near 100% CO2 emission free trains due to their renewable electricity generation. Increasingly the power grid is heading to 100% in other counties. Efficiency is better, having skipped the hydrogen conversion.
Did they call it the Hindenburg?
Also title is a bit misleading (as per standard Slashdot practice these days). While true Germany may have "unveiled" it, it was created by France...