The units reach a maximum speed of 140 kilometers per hour and have a range of 1,000 kilometers
Since Wednesday, Germany has had the first railway with trains that run exclusively on hydrogen for passenger transport. The regional commuter company of the state of Lower Saxony LNVG today put into service a fleet of hydrogen-powered convoys to supply the diesel locomotives that have so far circulated along the approximately 100-kilometer line connecting the cities of Cuxhaven, Bremerhaven, Bremervörde and Buxtehude, in the north of the country and near the city of Hamburg. It is a joint project of the Lower Saxony region and the French company Alstom, which has been experimenting since 2018 with locomotives powered by this clean and non-polluting fuel on that railway line on the North Sea coast. “This is a world first,” says Stefan Schrank, head of the project at Alstom.
“This is an exemplary project for the whole world,” emphasized the Prime Minister of Lower Saxony, the Social Democrat Stephan Weil, at the presentation of the new trains. At a cost of 93 million euros, the first five convoys of the new ecological train were put into service on this day, while the remaining nine to complete a fleet of fourteen trains will be delivered before the end of the year. They will fuel just as many other convoys that have worked on that line until now.
The convoys, called Coradia iLint, were developed in the French city of Tarbes and assembled in the German city of Salzgitter. They are pioneers in the field of hydrogen transport by rail. The locomotives mix the hydrogen in their tanks with the oxygen in the air to produce the power they need in a fuel cell. The French consortium has so far signed four contracts for the manufacture of several dozen rail convoys in Germany, France and Italy and is counting on growing demand. In Germany alone, “between 2,500 and 3,000 diesel trains could be replaced by hydrogen locomotives,” said Schrank, who stated that “by 2035, between 15% and 20% of the regional rail market in Europe could be powered by hydrogen.”
Hydrogen trains are especially relevant and profitable for regional rail lines, where the cost of overhead line electrification is too high and unprofitable. Currently, one in two regional trains in the Old Continent carries diesel locomotives. Alstom’s competitors, meanwhile, are not resting on their laurels.
In May, the German consortium Siemens, together with Deutsche Bahn, the major German railway company, presented a similar prototype that will be put into service from 2024. However, Germany’s strong push for hydrogen as a fuel has its problems, according to Alexandre Charpentier, Roland Berger’s expert on railway issues. Especially when it comes to the supply of this organic product.
As the entire transport sector, whether by road, air or sea, as well as heavy industry, relies on this technology to reduce CO2 emissions as much as possible, the demand for hydrogen will skyrocket in the coming years. And although Germany already announced in 2020 a €7,000 million plan to become the world leader in hydrogen technologies within ten years, the country, as in all of Europe, lacks infrastructure for its production and transport, while huge investments are needed, he says. Charpentier. . “For this reason, we think it will be impossible to replace all diesel trains with hydrogen,” said the expert, recalling that not all hydrogen production is ecological, but only that carried out using renewable energy sources such as wind or solar. energy .
Source: La Verdad
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