Tright here’s a brand new practice pulling into the station in San Bernardino, a southern California metropolis about 60 miles from Los Angeles. From the surface, it appears like some other commuter practice, with three passenger carriages, blocky home windows and a vibrant blue exterior.
However inside, it’s not like something the area – or the nation – has seen earlier than. The $20m Zero-Emission A number of Unit, often called Zemu, makes use of a hybrid hydrogen gasoline cell and battery system to propel the practice and run different onboard electrical methods. The one byproduct of the gasoline cell is water vapour, a welcome change in an space often called the Inland Empire that suffers from a number of the worst air high quality charges within the nation.
The brand new expertise will make Zemu the primary hydrogen-powered, zero-emissions passenger practice in North America to satisfy Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) necessities when it goes into service early subsequent yr.
The practice will run between the cities of Redlands and San Bernardino on a 9-mile line often called the Arrow Hall; it’s one of many area’s smallest, carrying an estimated 416 day by day weekday and 6,433 weekend riders, however ridership is rising. Its operators hope that Zemu, which was unveiled to the media final week, paves the way in which for clear power trains to run on a whole lot of miles of monitor in southern California and throughout the nation.
It may mark the beginning of a clear power rail motion within the US, which has historically lagged behind locations like Europe with regards to each practice ridership and innovation. It’s additionally a win for California, which has struggled to get formidable rail tasks like its high-speed bullet practice between San Francisco and Los Angeles off the bottom.
“What now we have carried out with Zemu is transformational,” stated the president of the San Bernardino county transit authority (SBCTA), Ray Marquez, in an announcement. “The event of the practice has solidified SBCTA’s place as an innovator in clear passenger rail right here within the Inland Empire, all through the state and the nation.”
A venture years within the making
The debut of this expertise in North America comes because the better Los Angeles area prepares for the 2028 Olympics, which town’s mayor has stated can be a “no-car” video games, and as California ramps up its efforts to satisfy 2045 carbon neutrality targets.
San Bernardino has lengthy suffered from poor air high quality introduced on by a excessive focus of freeways, rail yards and industrial amenities together with transport warehouses. The town failed the American Lung Affiliation’s 2024 State of the Air index, which is predicated on the variety of days that ozone and particle air pollution exceeded protected ranges.
The venture has been years within the making. A decade in the past, motivated by the poor air high quality and a want to cut back the stress on the county’s roads, typically crowded by vans transporting items from the close by ports of LA and Lengthy Seaside, SBCTA officers got down to discover clear options to their current diesel trains.
They landed on the hydrogen fuel-powered Zemu, and in 2019 contracted with Swiss rail producer Stadler Inc to ship on that mission, stated Tim Watkins, chief of legislative and public affairs on the transit authority.
A fleet of hydrogen-powered trains, constructed by the French producer Alstom, have been working in Germany and Austria since 2018, however comparable trains have by no means run in North America.
Hydrogen gasoline cells mix hydrogen and oxygen molecules to generate electrical energy and produce water vapour as a byproduct. In apply, the gasoline cell capabilities as an onboard generator that prices the batteries that flip the wheels of the practice, driving it ahead in addition to operating electrical methods. Contained in the cell, hydrogen molecules, composed of 1 negatively charged electron and one positively charged proton, are break up aside. The protons move by a membrane, leaving the electrons behind. With the intention to rejoin the protons, the electrons bounce the membrane, producing electrical energy within the course of.
Although the onboard course of doesn’t straight emit greenhouse gases, the manufacturing processes to create hydrogen gasoline within the US nearly all the time do.
For riders, the applying of this expertise means a quieter trip. “All you’re going to listen to is a pair HVAC blowers and cooling followers,” stated Kaden Killpack, a industrial venture supervisor at Stadler US who oversees the SBCTA and Caltrans tasks. Riders may additionally discover a smoother journey as a result of practice’s light-weight development.
Nonetheless, the light-weight, aluminium-body design posed new challenges for Stadler, which wanted to show its trains may function safely on California’s current rail infrastructure. Lighter trains are extra power environment friendly, however in an effort to function on the identical tracks as heavy freight, Stadler wanted to reveal that its aluminium trains may move the FRAs excessive requirements for front-end collisions, which it did with diesel-powered models in 2018.
Growing a light-weight body that handed FRA requirements is a promising accomplishment as a result of it supplies a zero-emission different to the costly overhead electrification that’s frequent in Europe, however is prohibited by the FRA on freight strains within the US. “As soon as you are taking that automobile and also you add hydrogen to it, you make it attainable to have zero emission expertise on the identical corridors the place Union Pacific and NSF run,” Killpack stated. “That’s what’s actually loopy and funky about this”.
The beginning of one thing larger?
Inserting the Zemu on the Arrow Hall is admittedly a small first step, Watkins says: “It’s one practice, so it doesn’t transfer the needle dramatically.” However, he says, “it introduces the expertise as a proof of idea” that might run on greater than 500 miles of southern California’s regional rail system and past.
It’s an idea that California leaders have already acted on. After seeing the early success of the Zemu venture final yr, the state’s division of transportation – often called Caltrans – commissioned Stadler to construct longer variations of the hydrogen-powered trains that may run between Merced and Sacramento within the Central Valley on a yet-to-be-built line. Thus far, Caltrans has ordered 10 models, with the choice to purchase 19 extra below the phrases of the $80m contract. The primary models may arrive as quickly as 2027.
To ensure that these small however promising steps to be economically sustainable in the long term, although, large funding will must be made to develop the infrastructure. “You’ve obtained to be promoting not less than a whole lot [of trains] to begin to get some scale economies and convey these prices down,” stated Lewis Fulton, the Vitality Futures Program director at UC Davis’s Institute for Transportation Research.
Some, in the meantime, level out {that a} pivot to hydrogen energy comes with its personal flaws. As a result of hydrogen is so mild, a big quantity of fuel is required to supply a train-fleet-fueling quantity of electrical energy, making it not an particularly power dense gasoline, says Paul Erickson, a hydrogen gasoline skilled and the director of the Vitality Analysis Laboratory at UC Davis. Hydrogen should additionally bear a number of transformations between its pure state and its use for electrical energy, additional lowering its effectivity, he explains.
And extracting hydrogen from nature, the place it’s bonded to different parts, itself requires power; except that energy comes from renewable sources like wind and photo voltaic, some carbon is due to this fact launched into the ambiance within the manufacturing course of. Erickson says he thinks it could be more practical to spend money on renewable diesel fuels for transportation as an alternative of constructing new infrastructure from the bottom up.
However whatever the challenges, California officers are forging forward. By way of a mixture of state, federal and personal funding, California’s Alliance for Renewable Clear Hydrogen Vitality Methods (Arches) will distribute some $12.6bn to get 1000’s of hydrogen-powered buses, vans and automobiles onto the highway and to construct hydrogen manufacturing and distribution hubs to run these rising fleets.
Fulton, who additionally chairs the transportation working group at Arches, says the Zemu tasks are a knock-on impact of this funding. “What we’re seeing in California now’s a way that hydrogen is coming and infrastructure is coming, and so why not faucet into that?”
Supply hyperlink
