The units reach a maximum speed of 140 kilometers per hour and have a range of 1,000 kilometers
Germany has since this Wednesday the first railway line with trains powered exclusively by hydrogen for passenger transport. The regional commuter company of the federal state of Lower Saxony LNVG put into operation today a fleet of convoys with hydrogen engines to supply the diesel locomotives that have circulated until now along the line of about 100 kilometers that connects the towns 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 firm 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,” said Stefan Schrank, head of the project at Alstom.
“This is a project of an exemplary nature for the whole world,” stressed 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 came into operation 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 supply as many other convoys that until now worked on that line with diesel as fuel.
Developed in the French town of Tarbes and assembled in the German town of Salzgitter, the convoys, named Coradia iLint, are pioneers in hydrogen rail transport. The locomotives mix the hydrogen in their tanks with the oxygen in the air to produce the current 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.”
regional lines
Hydrogen-powered trains are especially relevant and profitable for regional railway lines, where the costs of electrification with catenary laying are too high and unprofitable. Currently one out of every two regional trains in the old continent carries diesel locomotives. Alstom’s competitors, meanwhile, are not resting on their laurels.
The German consortium Siemens presented in May together with Deutsche Bahn, the great German railway company, a similar prototype that will come into operation from 2024. The strong push in Germany for hydrogen as a fuel has, however, its problems, according to Alexandre Charpentier , Roland Berger’s expert on railway issues. Especially when it comes to the supply of this organic product.
Given that the entire transport sector, whether by road, air or sea, but also 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 plan of 7,000 million euros to become a world leader in hydrogen technologies within a decade, the country, as in all of Europe, lacks infrastructure for its production and transport, while gigantic investments are necessary, says Charpentier. “For this reason, we believe that it will be impossible to replace all diesel trains with hydrogen,” said the expert, who recalled that not all hydrogen production is ecological, but only that which is carried out using renewable energies such as wind or solar. .
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