News   Apr 19, 2024
45 and 61-Storey Towers Proposed near Oakville GO
 2.9K     1 
News   Apr 19, 2024
DRP Reviews Innovative Affordable Housing at Kennedy Station
 1K     3 
News   Apr 19, 2024
Lifetime Helping Craft the Future of Toronto's Neighbourhoods
 1.6K     3 

Hydrogen Economy General

MrGoose

MrGoose

Active Member
Member Bio
Joined
Nov 13, 2019
Messages
406
Reaction score
1,337
Hydrogen, hydrail, fuel cell and related discussions should go here.
 
Local media article on a hydrogen staff report that was on the Mississauga City Council agenda. Brief summary:

There has been a new article added on The Pointer:

Last week, councillors greenlit a feasibility study by the City’s transit agency, MiWay, to investigate the possibility of running hydrogen-powered, zero-emission buses. In his report lobbying for the funding, MiWay boss Geoff Marinoff said the City will miss its 2050 climate targets if it keeps buying traditional buses.
Click to expand...

Staff report, see item 9.1: https://pub-mississauga.escribemeet...a=Agenda&lang=English&Item=17&Tab=attachments
 
I think BEV is going to win out for transit buses. IMO Mississauga should not waste money on hydrogen pilots. Let other Canadian cities do feasibility studies and stick with technology that is already scaling elsewhere (thousands of BEV buses in China).
 
afransen said:
I think BEV is going to win out for transit buses. IMO Mississauga should not waste money on hydrogen pilots. Let other Canadian cities do feasibility studies and stick with technology that is already scaling elsewhere (thousands of BEV buses in China).
Click to expand...

For Sauga to worry about the buses breaking carbon neutrality in 2050 - when you have a huge housing stock in the city all heated through fossil fuels is just ludicrous. Something Sauga would do.

aoD
 
I read an article in the Economist about hydrogen economy.

www.economist.com

After many false starts, hydrogen power might now bear fruit

But it will fill in the gaps, rather than dominating the economy
www.economist.com www.economist.com

They suggest that electrolysis capital cost is declining significantly. And the idea is that the storage difficulty of hydrogen could be mitigated by using synthesis fuels like ammonia or methanol. Ammonia is a somewhat dangerous substance, so potentially would only make sense in larger commercial applications with rigorous maintenance practices (aircraft or sea shipping).
 
Interesting how they specifically mention GO electrification as a potential hydrogen application. Such a large project would help jump start Ontario's hydrogen economy production, infrastructure, distribution, and technology.
 
  1. Batteries (or direct grid connection) where feasible (most ground transportation)
  2. Synthetic fuels (including hydroden) where space/weight is a premium: long-haul aircraft, ocean shipping, rocketry
  3. Geothermal, solar thermal, nuclear for industrial/process heat, where practical
  4. Hydrogen or other renewable & carbon neutral synthetic feedstock for industrial processes, such as steel-making, cement, fertilizers, plastics, etc.
Really, hydrogen should be kind of a last resort for renewables, not your first choice. I am skeptical that we'll get electrolysis costs down enough to make opportunistic hydrogen electrolysis for long-term storage to work as an alternative to utility energy storage. I guess if it did (where it was economical to run electrolysis equipment only 20-30% of the time), you just overproduce renewables and use the excess to make hydrogen and other synth fuels (ammonia, etc.). Utility-scale batteries to smooth short term fluctuations, and electrolysis to handle days to weeks variations. A diverse portfolio of renewable sources to reduce variability due to local conditions. Arid equatorial regions become ideal sources for abundant absurdly cheap solar power (1 cent/kwh), and the industrial sinks for it (hydrogen and chemical feedstocks). Maybe even eventually the world's new breadbaskets with vertical farming, despite the scarcity of fresh water. Great news for North Africa/Arabian petrostates. Not such good news for Alberta and Norway.
 
Some updates from the last couple of weeks.
1} Spanish manufacturer Talgo is to begin testing it's new hydrogen trains in 2021 with full deployment by 2023
2} Alstom has confirmed a sale of 6 hydrogen trains {with the option of 8 more} to be delivered to Milan to be used on it's busy suburban rail network. Trains are to begin arriving in 35 months.
3} Austria has now completed it's 3 month trial of hydrogen passenger rail and states it has been a full success and can now be deployed nationwide.
 
I had to google 'road locomotive' as it seems like industry jargon. It means a locomotive used on rails between terminals, as opposed to within switching yards. The road part would imply being used on roadways (wikipedia has a disambiguation on that).

I think the cost dynamics will be interesting here. Maybe there will come a time where the freight railways are more open to electrifying their ROWs and using a mixture of direct power (high traffic corridors), batteries (shorter trips between high traffic areas) and hydrogen (long haul with minimal power provision for charging0. Hydrogen is inherently more expensive, but has greater flexibility. I saw that there was a mine using autonomous mining trucks with catenary to climb out of the pit under direct electric power. Maybe something similar could be done with railways for climbing long grades, which is where I imagine a lot of the energy consumption takes place.
 
I don't think we will ever see {at least for the next 50 years} any form of battery freight and battery trains will be limited to relatively short route passenger rail. Hydrogen is inherently more expensive than direct electrical supply but those costs are off set by the massive amount of infrastructure nd maintenance that catenary would require. Catenary is out of the question even along the Corridor as the massive cost will simply be too hard to justify especially when there is now a viable alternative.

CN & CP are going to have to get to net-zero emissions by 2050 if Canada has a shot at doing so and that ONLY means hydrogen. Prices are expected to plunge over the coming decades as the technology advances and wide scale infrastructure is in place. This is also good news for VIA as it too must completely decarbonize it's entire network and by CN/CP eventually having to build nationwide hydrogen infrastructure, they will be able to piggy-back on it...............it allows VIA to decarbonize and letting the freight companies pay for it unlike catenary.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to post here.

Back
Top