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.

Comments

Oblig.

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh the humanity!!

Re:Oblig.

[sittingnut]

energy comes from combining hydrogen stored in tanks on the train

Thus confirming my theory: Germans Love Hydrogen.

hope they will not name it hindenburg.

It's missing the full picture

[PhantomHarlock]

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.

Re:It's missing the full picture

[tomhath]

Here's a better link. As I read it, the idea is to use extra electricity from intermittent power sources such as wind and solar to produce hydrogen, which can then be stored and transported to where it's needed. That seems far better than trying to store electricity in huge batteries.

Thompson's calculations, based on a 2007 set of figures from India Rail, estimate that as much as three billion barrels of crude oil - or the equivalent of 214 million tonnes of CO2 - could be saved over one year by transitioning from diesel to hydrail.

"The two magic properties of hydrogen are the ability to store and transport it," Thompson says. "It's that utility of time and place which is unique to the hydrogen economy. And that's what you can't do with the existing power grid."

There's also an economic reason behind investing in windmills instead of diesel oil, as Busch explains: "We have fluctuations in wind and solar energy which gives us the chance to produce energy for very, very cheap."

Re:It's missing the full picture

[OpenSourced]

Surprise, surprise, the Germans had already thought about the objections that could muster the Slashdot crowd.

Re:It's missing the full picture

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm german, and as such I don't want to be the nazi here, but MW is not a unit of energy, but an unit of power (or as we germans say "Leistung"). Use MWh instead.

Re:It's missing the full picture

[Anonymous Coward]

Read post above, second paragraph beginning with "Oh and why not just use the electricity itself to power the vehicle?" Basically, it would be a physical burden and materially pollutive to bring electricity itself onboard, when renewable & free electricity can be used to create a more portable fuel.

Re:It's missing the full picture

[GuB-42]

Germany has plenty of solar and wind, which have a nasty tendency to give you plenty of power when you don't need it.
H2 production can be seen as way to store that energy, with a much better capacity than batteries.

Re:It's missing the full picture

[mspohr]

H2 is very inefficient compared to batteries.
This diagram explains it in detail...
http://cdn.greenoptimistic.com...
Bottom line, only about 20% efficient compared to battery 69% efficient.
More detail here:
http://www.greenoptimistic.com...

Re: It's missing the full picture

[Anonymous Coward]

You realize about half the railway lines in Germany already are electrified? In Switzerland, all of the electricity is carbon free (a mix of hydro and nuclear) and all the trains are electric

Re:It's missing the full picture

[mspohr]

If you'll read the references, you'll see that batteries are much cheaper. The equipment needed to convert surplus electricity to H2, compress it, store it, transport it and convert it back to electricity is much more expensive than batteries.

Re:It's missing the full picture

[Sique]

Oh, I like people who think that the Third Law of Thermodynamics is the same as all Four Laws of Thermodynamics.

I was talking about the First Law of Thermodynamics: U_system = Q - W.

One way to put it is: In the case of a thermodynamic cycle of a closed system, which returns to its original state, the heat Q_in supplied to the system in one stage of the cycle, minus the heat Q_out removed from it in another stage of the cycle, plus the work added to the system W_in equals the work that leaves the system W_out.

Another way to put it is the Law of the Conservation of Energy.

If we increase the energy of a system consisting of Hydrogen and Oxygen by separating molecules of water, we need the same amount of heat and work (Q_in + W_in), as we get when we reduce the energy of the system later by putting Hydrogen and Oxygen together (Q_out + W_out). We can do this by burning the Hydrogen, but then (as you rightly state) we only get 45% back as W_out, everything else leaves as heat Q_out.

As of today, we have fuel cells that increase W_out (as electrical output) up to 70% (SOFC, Solid Oxid Fuel Cells), so only 30% gets converted into heat.

Re:It's missing the full picture

[Sique]

On the contrary: That's exactly how the Laws of Thermodynamics work.

There are four of them, not just the Third. And also heat (Q_in, Q_out) is a form of energy, albeit not a very usable one.

Re:It's missing the full picture

[mspohr]

Regardless of the energy density, H2 is still massively inefficient as an energy storage medium so it doesn't make sense to run anything on it.

Re:It's missing the full picture

[jabuzz]

It's a train, the idea that you carry the fuel required to power the train around on the train is shear nonsense.

  Any modern train and track is overhead electric and if the line is not electrified the first job is *TO* electrify it. There is some third rail stuff mostly in the south east of England and even there they are looking at the costs and practicalities of changing to overhead.

The basics are carrying fuel on train is idiotic in the extreme.

Only emissions are H2O?! Wrong

[Bugler412]

How was the hydrogen used in the train produced and delivered?

How efficient is hydrogen really?

[harrkev]

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?

Re:How efficient is hydrogen really?

[avandesande]

I assume since it is noiseless it is using a fuel cell. As to your concern with pressure, I know that the Wankel is the preferred ICE for hydrogen. Not sure why but it is more efficient than a piston engine.

Re:How efficient is hydrogen really?

[hey!]

Conversion efficiency is not a big deal when you're using renewable sources; in those cases you're interested in capital investment efficiency (what you get out for dollar invested).

That's because wind or solar or tidal you don't capture simply goes away; the waste is 100% when you don't use it, so if you capture any of it, it's a win, so long as the money up front isn't too much.

Hydrogen is a stupid fuel to use

[bradley13]

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".

Re:No noise = problem !

[dunkelfalke]

I wonder how we Germans have survived, given the shitload of electric trains running here.

If only...

[Roger W Moore]

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...