this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2023
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This train is being trialed by an oil subsidiary so I think there is more than a little greenwashing going on here. The vast majority of hydrogen is "blue", i.e. it's manufactured from fossil fuels, so there is no environmental benefit to this. Even if it were "green", i.e. made from water and renewable energy, the same power used to make the hydrogen, store it, transport it, turn it back to power could charge 3 or 4 battery powered trains or tenders - a tender could mean a smaller locomotive hooks up to however many battery tenders it needs for its route or switches them out in the yard.
Honestly all this feels like the railway's Dieselization 100yrs ago. When the end of steam powered engines was drawing near, coal hauling railroads and Baldwin Locomotive in the U.S. tried all kinds of whacky and hilariously inefficient engine designs, just to keep the ol' ways alive... none of these worked out - everyone who stuck to it lost hugely. Viz. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chesapeake_and_Ohio_class_M-1
The environmental benefit of blue hydrogen is that it doesn't put CO2 into the atmosphere. This is better than burning the hydrogen carbon gas it was produced from.
Except it does. This study suggests that the plants that produce hydrogen from fossil fuels are only capturing 80% of the CO2. So 20% is emitted. And aside from that hydrogen has the potential to contribute 12x as much to global warming as CO2 emissions.
That statement is correct, but you are still wrong. Blue Hydrogen specifically refers to hydrogen produced fron fossiles where the CO2 is captured. There is just very little blue Hydrogen being made from fossiles- most production is either grey Hydrogen (from gas no capture) or brown (same but coal).