Hydrail comes of age
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Fuel cells from Canada
Hydrogenics is a Canadian-based company that develops and manufactures hydrogen generation and fuel cell products. It also has plants in Belgium and Germany. The company has contracts that include the supply of fuel cells for thousands of buses throughout China and support for California’s heavy-duty fuel cell vehicle projects.
It has supplied electrolyzers for over 55 hydrogen fuel stations worldwide, including two in Britain. In 2014, Hydrogenics was awarded two contracts to install them in Aberdeen, to fuel the city’s fleet of ten hydrogen buses, and at Honda’s Swindon factory to support the development of the company’s fuel cell cars as well as fuelling the Council’s small fleet of bi-fuel Transit vans.
In 2015, the company announced that it had signed a ten-year exclusive agreement with Alstom to supply at least 200 fuel cells over a ten-year period based on the company’s second generation HyPMTM power modules.
The development of the company’s fuel cells shows why it is only recently that hydrogen power trains have become a viable proposition. In 2001, its 25kW fuel cell weighed 290kg and had an efficiency that ranged between 38 and 45 per cent. The iLint’s HD30 fuel cell has an output of 33kW and weighs 72kg with an efficiency ranging between 48 and 55 per cent. Thus, since 2001, the company’s fuel cells have become much more compact because of a fivefold increase in their energy density (from 86 to 458W/kg).
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Looking to the future
Pollutants from rail diesel traction may soon become increasingly unacceptable. In California, a study has shown that the nitrous oxide emissions from diesel locomotives hauling freight trains from the ports of Los Angeles is equal to that from all Southern California’s industrial plants. In the USA and Europe, emissions standards for railway diesel traction are more relaxed than those for lorries and buses on the basis that railway emissions are low per tonne hauled. This may change with increasing concern about total emissions.
In Toronto, such trains are hauled by diesel locomotives of 3,000kW, which is far greater than the power of any hydrogen powered rail vehicles to date. Initial feasibility work shows that a hydrogen-powered locomotive with this output would have to be a two-unit locomotive with one unit containing only the hydrogen storage. Such a hydrogen locomotive would thus need the train to be extended by another coach length, or require a passenger coach to be removed from the train.
This indicates that the space required to store hydrogen is such that its use to fuel freight locomotives or high-speed trains may not be viable. For high-powered rail traction applications, electrification is likely to remain the only non-polluting, low-carbon option, dependant on how electricity is produced. For lower-powered applications, such as shunting locomotives and multiple units, it will be difficult to persuade legislators to continue to accept higher emissions from railway diesels when hydrogen offers a zero-emissions alternative.
For example, Canada’s fleet of 3,000 locomotives consumes two billion tonnes of diesel to produce six million tonnes of CO2 and 100 thousand tonnes of pollutants that are hazardous to health. This is one of the reasons why Transport Canada has funded a study into the feasibility of using Hydrail vehicles for commuter trains in Ottawa and Toronto.
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