Smithsonian Magazine: North America's First Hydrogen-Powered Train Will Debut This Summer
The hydrogen-powered train will travel between Parc de la Chute-Montmorency and Baie-Saint-Paul. While traveling a 90-minute route, the Train de Charlevoix will emit only water vapor. Image: Train de Charlevoix
Smithsonian Magazine | Molly Enking | March 16, 2023
This summer, North America’s first zero-emission train will start running in Canada.
The hydrogen-powered Train de Charlevoix will run a 90-minute route between Parc de la Chute-Montmorency, the site of an almost 300-foot waterfall located just outside of Québec City, and Baie-Saint-Paul, a picturesque riverside town known for its art galleries and local food scene, reports the Independent’s Joanna Whitehead. Developed by the French company Alstom, the train has been in the works for a decade.
The project is a triumph for North America, though European countries beat Canada to the punch: Germany started testing the world’s first hydrogen-powered passenger trains in 2018, going on to roll out a fleet in 2022. The German Coradia iLint trains, also made by Alstom, can reach speeds of 140 miles per hour. A single tank of hydrogen can last for more that 600 miles.
Germany’s trains are a “model for the rest of the world” and “a milestone on the road to climate neutrality in the transport sector,” said Stephan Weil, president of Lower Saxony, last summer, per CNN’s Julia Buckley...
“With only 1 percent of the networks electrified in our region, this technology will provide an alternative to diesel,” says Michael Keroullé, president of Alstom Americas, in the statement. “This project will demonstrate our capabilities to provide more sustainable mobility solutions to customers, agencies and operators, as well as to passengers. It will also provide an extraordinary showcase for Quebec’s developing green hydrogen ecosystem.” ...more
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/north-america-first-hydrogen-powered-train-180981800/
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Why Hydrogen Trains?
UK: University of Birmingham: Answering your questions about our hydrogen trains research
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advocates of bad and even dangerous ideas.
Marketing types rely on the use of appeal to authority arguments all the time. It's slimy and bad thinking but it's used all the time.
In order to cite an authority, one should be competent to judge whether the authority cited is himself or herself competent in the subject at hand.
If one has obviously never shown evidence of opening a scientific paper because one apparently hasn't done so, the citation of an opinion, this with no reference to research but only because "so and so" says and "I have declared 'so and so' to be an expert because he or she supports what I market," this has no bearing on truth or falsity.
Neither does naming an institution, as in "University of Birmingham." There are professors with tenure who are fools.
Here's some examples of just how stupid and wrong Appeal to Authority arguments can be: Kary Mullis won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of the polymerase chain reaction. Kary Mullis also also denies that HIV is caused by the HIV virus. Even though he is a world famous molecular biologist, the statement that "HIV is not caused by a virus" is not credible. This is an appeal to authority argument and it's just unbelievably stupid, to put it in stark terms. Similarly Kary Mullis's claim that ozone depletion is not caused by chlorofluorocarbons is just declared to be true because he won the Nobel Prize.
Recently, as I noted in the Science section, the editorial staff of the prominent scientific journal, one that marketing types hyping hydrogen clearly don't read apologized for not calling out a wrong Nobel Laureate, William Shockley on his claim that African Americans were genetically inferior to Caucasians: Science Apologizes.
Neither of the "experts" cited in the marketing video give any consideration of how hydrogen is made, although any competent person could look it up.
Thousands upon thousands of papers are published each year on the topic. Recently I cited one in this space:
Evaluations of Sustainability of Making Hydrogen from Waste Plastics With Various Approaches.
Figure three from the cited paper is reproduced in my post, showing the climate cost of producing hydrogen by electrolysis, including the current grid, not some fantasy grid, but the real grid we have. Now, I know that the hydrogen marketing team doesn't give a flying fuck about climate change, but if they did, that figure would give them pause to reconsider going into a more honorable field.
Here is that again:
Environmental Sustainability Assessment of Hydrogen from Waste Polymers, Cecilia Salah, Selene Cobo, Javier Pérez-Ramírez, and Gonzalo Guillén-Gosálbez, ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering 2023 11 (8), 3238-3247.
This figure clearly demonstrates that electrolysis, particularly using the existing grid, has an unacceptable carbon dioxide impact. The fact that nuclear energy has the lowest climate cost for electrolytic production of hydrogen does not mean that it is ethically, scientifically, industrially or environmentally wise to divert it to making hydrogen, because under all circumstances, hydrogen wastes energy, because, as a law of physics, storing energy wastes it. Hydrogen made from electricity is dirty because overall, electricity is dirty.
As for the endless and tiresome bullshit predictions that someday the world will be powered by trashing vast land areas to make industrial parks for solar and wind, as of 2023, decades of handing out this bullshit, solar and wind remain trivial forms of energy, not worth the money, materials and energy to build spent to build them nor electricity used to hype them. They function, as of March 17, 2023, as a front for the dangerous fossil fuel industry.
The world does not live by soothsaying. It lives in something called "reality."
Now to address what appear to be personal remarks about whether or not I "prattle," with what I write at DU. What I write here, what my job, and in my scientific work is all framed by the ethical universe in which I live. I'm generally proud of my long work here, and whenever I'm criticized for it, it almost 100% of the time any concern can be prevented from troubling me when I consider the source.
Consideration:
I consider the hydrogen fantasy to be toxic, dangerous, expensive and wasteful - the last adjective being a function of an inviolable law of physics.
As I repeatedly point out, hydrogen is a dirty fuel that consumes more energy than it can store, again as a function of an inviolable law of physics. Almost all of it, is made from fossil fuels, which anybody with access to facts can easily discern. This is opposed to avoiding facts, denying facts or burying them or offering "alternative facts"
Now I know that the makers of marketing videos don't give a rat's ass about the laws of physics, anymore than the give a rat's ass about climate change, but I insist that the key to saving what remains to be saved and to restore what might be restored will very much involve the wise application of those laws far more than it will involve hype driven marketing vides.
I've been at DU for more than 20 years. We've had ethanol marketeers, and we continuously have solar and wind marketeers, and now hydrogen/solar/wind marketeers. None of their bullshit in these 20 years have done a damned thing to slow climate change; in fact, climate change is getting worse faster than ever.
The answer to climate change is not batteries, hydrogen, or any other rube goldberg energy storage fantasy. It's producing primary energy. The fact that energy storage and not primary energy is what is being funded is a colossal mistake, an incomparable mistake which entrenches the most widely used and increasingly used form of primary energy, fossil fuels, all of which are consumed to make hydrogen.
It's a fucking disgrace!
I'm not interested in marketing shell games that work to make things worse, no matter how popular they are. It is generally pleasing to avoid confronting ignorance, and I've availed myself of that privilege, but on my best days I choose to confront it. This ethical position is not subject to negotiation, particularly when the person suggesting the "negotiation" wants to be ignored for selling what is effectively snake oil.
I really don't care who likes what I say and what I do; but I make a point of using my access to the scientific literature, my long hours spent working to absorb as much as I can, and citing references from the primary scientific literature, feeling free to criticize it and endorse it based on my general knowledge.
Some people value what I do here; others don't. I. Couldn't. Care. Less.
I don't ask anyone to ignore me. I'm satisfied that I can defend myself. I'm certainly not going to be directed by anyone here to ignore nonsense when I see it, particularly toxic nonsense.
Have a wonderful weekend.
