The world’s largest manufacturer of rail vehicles has launched a zero-emission train that uses a combination of hydrogen fuel and a supercapacitor as a power source.
The train consists of 4 cars, has a range of 600 km and can reach speeds of up to 160 km/h, making it the fastest hydrogen rail transport in operation today.
The development is owned by the state-owned industrial enterprise CRRC and Chengdu Rail Transit. The train is equipped with 5G and automatic start, stop and return to depot modes.
Hydrogen is considered a clean source of energy because water vapor is the only byproduct that is released when it is burned. It does not produce harmful substances that pollute the environment or greenhouse gases. In addition, hydrogen can be produced from a variety of sources, including renewable resources such as wind, solar and water power, further increasing its potential as a clean energy option.
Germany is a leader in the production of such transport, there are already 14 Alstom trains operating on hydrogen fuel. The CRRC machine is ahead of the German trains in terms of speed by about 20 km/h, but they, in turn, offer a longer range of up to 1000 km.
In 2019, Great Britain launched its first HydroFLEX hydrogen train – a modified version of the Class 319 electric train.
Previously, Japan and Korea were the most active countries that pushed for the use of hydrogen as a “green” solution for transportation. However, recent data shows that it is China that is taking the lead in the actual deployment of hydrogen fueling stations. There are about 1,000 hydrogen stations in the world, and about a third of them are in China.
This could be a telling move: the country that controls the vast majority of the lithium battery supply chain (we recently published a visualization showing this advantage) is also slowly transitioning to hydrogen. Given that dwindling lithium resources could cause prices to jump and stall the electric revolution that is accelerating right now, it would be wise to prepare hydrogen alternatives ahead of time.
China has a bold goal to drive growth in the hydrogen energy sector. According to a plan released by the National Development and Reform Commission and the National Energy Administration (NEA), the country will have about 50,000 hydrogen fuel cell vehicles by 2025, and produce 100,000 to 200,000 tons of hydrogen annually.
Rolls-Royce was the first to test a hydrogen-powered aircraft engine
Source: New Atlas
