California Launches America’s First Hydrogen-Powered Passenger Train
Alex Kimani

San Bernardino, a Southern California city, has unveiled the first-ever hydrogen-powered passenger train in the United States, an important milestone as California ramps up efforts to meet its 2045 carbon neutrality goals. 

Dubbed Zemu for Zero-Emission Multiple Unit, the $20 million train uses a hybrid hydrogen fuel cell and battery system to power the lightweight vehicle capable of ferrying 108-seated passengers on a 9-mile line known as the Arrow Corridor. San Bernardino is notorious for its poor air quality thanks to a high concentration of freeways, rail yards and industrial facilities. 

The city recently failed the American Lung Association’s 2024 State of the Air Index, a test based on the number of days that ozone and particle pollution exceeded safe levels. Zemu is likely to appeal to riders not only for its green credentials but also because it’s going to run quieter than conventional passenger trains.

.“All you’re going to hear is a couple HVAC blowers and cooling fans,” said Kaden Killpack, a commercial project manager at Stadler US who oversees the San Bernardino County Transit Authority (SBCTA), as reported by The Guardian. 

Hydrogen fuel cells combine hydrogen and oxygen molecules to generate electricity and water vapor as a byproduct. Zemu will become the first passenger train in North America to meet Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) requirements when it goes in 2025. Zemu has been years in the making, with SBCTA officials having contracted Swiss rail manufacturer Stadler Inc to deliver a technology that will alleviate the area’s poor air quality and reduce the stress on the county’s roads.

“Once you take that vehicle and you add hydrogen to it, you make it possible to have zero emission technology on the same corridors where Union Pacific and NSF run,” Killpack said. “That’s what’s really crazy and cool about this”.

Zemu is likely to act as proof of concept that other states can adopt to make their transport networks greener. California is, however, not wasting any time ramping up its hydrogen train system, with Caltrans--the state’s department of transportation--having commissioned Stadler to build longer versions of the hydrogen-powered trains that will run between Merced and Sacramento in the Central Valley. Caltrans has already ordered 10 units of the bigger trains, with the option to buy 19 more under the terms of the $80m contract.

High Costs

As is often the case, high costs are likely to be the biggest barrier to the rapid adoption of hydrogen technology in the U.S. transport sector and other sectors, too. Last month, Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) reported that just 12% of hydrogen plants have customers with offtake agreements, with most being vague, nonbinding arrangements that can be quietly discarded if the potential buyers back out. The big problem here is that many industries that could potentially run on hydrogen require expensive retooling to make this a reality, a leap that most are unwilling to make. Indeed, it’s prohibitively expensive to retrofit freight lines in the U.S.

“You’ve got to be selling at least hundreds [of trains] to start to get some scale economies and bring those costs down,” said Lewis Fulton, the Energy Futures Program director at UC Davis’s Institute for Transportation Studies.

Green hydrogen made by electrolysing water using renewable energy costs nearly four times as gray hydrogen created from natural gas, or methane, using steam methane reformation but without capturing the greenhouse gasses emitted in the process. Quite naturally, it's hard to build hydrogen infrastructure when the demand may not materialize for years.

“No sane project developer is going to start producing hydrogen without having a buyer for it, and no sane banker is going to lend money to a project developer without reasonable confidence that someone’s going to buy the hydrogen,” BNEF analyst Martin Tengler notes.

“It’s no different than any other energy development at scale. Natural gas pipelines didn’t get built without customers,” says Laura Luce, chief executive officer of Hy Stor Energy. Laura’s company has secured an exclusive letter of intent to supply hydrogen to an iron mill that Sweden’s SSAB SA plans to build in Mississippi.

The cost conundrum is quite dire, even in renewables-obsessed Europe, “If half of it comes to fruition, we’ll be happy. If a quarter of it comes to fruition, we’ll be happy,” Andy Marsh, CEO of Plug Power Inc. (NASDAQ:PLUG) told BNEF, referring to the company’s 4.5 gigawatts in engineering and design work underway on European projects to generate green hydrogen. According to Marsh, EU member states are still incorporating their hydrogen roadmaps into their own regulations, delaying private investments.

By Alex Kimani for Oilprice.com

Alex Kimani is a veteran finance writer, investor, engineer and researcher for Safehaven.com. 

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