There are cases where electrification is not practical so you'd need to develop a portable energy source.
The only explanation I have it’s somewhat less energy intensive to extract hydrogen form natural gas (so fossil fuel guys can still get their cut), but it still seems silly, especially for train.
For areas like Inner Mongolia, which is largely taken up by the Gobi desert, it isn't really feasible to electrify there, so this could be used as a much more energy dense battery than is feasible with standard battery technology, and with much less if any degradation over time. Electrolyze a bunch of hydrogen somewhere with power, then run the train on the hydrogen.
Its genuinely so foreign to me to actually have a new engineering feat be designed to solve an issue and not just as a spectacle. :sadness-abysmal:
Not really, recently a hydrogen car exploded IIRC.
Hydrogen cars are really a huge waste of energy.
Hydrogen is awesome for sea/airports or warehouses.
In high speed accidents the hydrogen tank can become a bomb.
In high speed accidents the hydrogen tank can become a bomb.
immediately directing my energy to hydrogen car production for the USA market exclusively
Tesla will lobby the shit out of you for trying to take over their niche
Eh. You know what else is super flammable? Gasoline. And lithium batteries. I think hydrogen gets a bad rap. It's the most abundant element in the universe by a wide margin and it's already a byproduct of processes that will become increasingly necessary in a climate change world, like electrolysis.
The main problem with hydrogen is storage, because it's really good at leaking through most materials when under pressure plus it can dissolve in metals, weakening them. Not to mention that container for hydrogen weighs like a hundred times more than hydrogen inside.
I've heard that the low energy efficiency in producing it is a problem too
Yes, because we don't really "mine" hydrogen, it is always stuck to something else.
Gasoline
flammable =/= explosive
lithium batteries
(CW death) https://i.imgur.com/Jp5vDi3.mp4
In before The Economist suddenly cares about the environmental impact of water vapor emissions from trains in Inner Mongolia.
Generating the hydrogen itself still doesn't look very good https://youtu.be/2EA4tDYwNYo
Seems like "Blue Hydrogen" specifically is essentially a marketing scam being perpetrated by fossil fuel companies in western countries.
If these groups in China can generate the hydrogen in "green" facilities, and adequately address the other storage and infrastructure problems, it will probably be fine, great even. If that is technically cheaper than other methods, who knows?
Eh, hydrogen has its drawbacks, but so does every energy source.
Hydrogen's drawbacks are like a lot of fuels, in that it's flammable, and storage is hard, being generally just about the hardest fuel to store, leaking out of containers super easily (being literally the smallest atom), and despite that, its not very energy dense compared to pretty much any other fuel. The storage issues also make refueling tricky, can't just use a normal hose like gas or jet fuel, or a charging cable like batteries.
And like batteries, you basically spend electricity to make it, and then use it to make electricity, giving a net loss in power, not to mention its only as green as the electricity grid is, and the tech has more parts and complexity than batteries, making miniaturization hard.
Those drawbacks combine to make it pretty unsuitable for cars and planes, as well as personal electronics.
However, unlike most fuels, you can make it on the spot so long as you have electricity and water, negating transport costs, and compared to batteries, it is much more energy dense, not to mention it doesn't require rare mined elements like Li-ion batteries do.
So it is a useful tech in a ton of ways, its just that its drawbacks make it a tough fit for a lot of the use cases where we are currently using gasoline or batteries.
But trains seem a pretty good fit. They don't have the hard space limitations cars, planes, and small electronics have, and there's usually not a huge rush at the platform, as it takes a while to load and unload, and they're locked to return to stations where the complicated generation/refueling equipment can be.
And I do think its only a matter of time before we see more hydrogen in more places. Per usual, its hard to compete with any tech that's been used for decades, as that tech has had far more time for innovation, getting more efficient and easier to produce, not to mention often a strong lobbying group actively trying to keep its supremacy. Any new rival technology is, by it nature, going to lack the decades of work refining and polishing it, not to mention usually lacking the approval of the big corporations.
why use hydrogen when a train can get power directly from a third rail or overhead wire? the only reason to even consider hydrogen for cars and planes is you cant feed them energy directly off the electrical grid as they travel.
You're right that that's a generally better version.
However, for these trains running on existing rails through large rural areas without electrification, on existing rails meant for diesel trains, they'd have to either retrofit large amounts of track. Biggest issue is power. Electrified rail needs solid power grids to regularly get power from. If you have long distance power lines overhead, feeding from only one location, the power would need to be very high voltage, and would need large transforming stations to step it down.
If you build generation stations to get electrified grids, you have to figure out how to get reliable energy on demand to supply the train, which means a lot of green energy sources are unfeasible without batteries or another storage method. If you do nuclear, its extremely expensive. If you do fossil fuel, it may as well be diesel. So green energy is probably the best option, but its also pretty overkill unless other grids exist in the area to take advantage of the new power plant, and if it relies on energy storage, it has the same losses that just using energy storage on the train has, and there'd have to be storage at every plant, instead of just one storage on the train.
Its hardly an unfixable situation; several of the other options I listed above certainly could work, but at a glance, without knowing the exact situation, I couldn't tell you which would be best. I certainly don't know if hydrogen fuel is better than making electric rails work. But I guess time will tell whether China's engineers picked a workable solution or not.
I maintian browns gass is cool and we should use it. Fucking make a wind farm at sea and just chuck the wires in the water. Problems solved.
It kinda is I think. It is supsr eash to make, and higly energetic so everyone wants it to be useful. However the math just never quite lines up for it to be an efficient solution to sny problem.
Like, one of mh favorite youtubes is a russian guy making an Iron man suit that runs off it, if that tells you anything about it's vibe
wtf a train is the one place you definitely dont need to use hydrogen, because you can feed it power directly through the tracks you dont have to carry around giant batteries, so why carry around a giant fuel tank that will leak a signifigant percent of your fuel effectively wasting it.
