But, it hasn’t been until recently that South Africa has actually started using hydrogen fuel cells themselves. And now they have taken another symbolic and practical step in this direction.

According to Mining Weekly, “Platinum miner Anglo American Platinum (Amplats) expects to put a fuel-cell powered mine locomotive through its paces in the first half of this year.

“The locomotive will initially be tested on surface at Amplats’ Dishaba mine, which is situated in the Limpopo province … The point of the demonstration will be to show that fuel-cell powered locomotives can provide superior efficiency and productivity and offer zero-emission underground transport.”

Amplats is the world’s largest producer of platinum, so it’s only fitting that they would be using a locomotive fitted with a platinum-bearing hydrogen fuel cell to mine, well, more platinum.

The only problem with this scenario is that South Africa is getting into the platinum fuel cell business a little late. I’ve talked about at length over the past 5 or so years about all of the research and development going into creating platinum-free fuel cells, since platinum is the most expensive material in fuel cells used in the transportation industry.

But, if no quality replacement can be found for platinum in fuel cells, then South Africa is in a unique position to capitalize on their abundant natural resource, create jobs and money and help create cleaner air while doing so.

Unless you have access to Dr. Who’s TARDIS or H. G. Wells’ Time Machine, you’ll have to depend on old texts to envision William Murdoch’s 1784 steam locomotive debut in Britain or Peter Cooper’s Tom Thumb, the first locomotive to run in America.

But if you can afford an air ticket to Asturias, the colorful northern Spanish principality on the Bay of Biscayne, you’ll be able to buy a ticket and ride on the world’s first hydrail train and experience rail history up-close and personal. If I can scrape up the cost of the trip, that’s an experience I wouldn’t miss.

A Taiwan science museum was the first to ride people regularly on fuel cell rail equipment. Japan built and tested two different hydrail trains late in the last decade, though neither was placed in revenue service. That’s a shame; they would have come in handy when the tragic tsunami interrupted grid power and brownouts occasionally stopped trains far inland.

Last November China “successfully launched” a “new energy fuel cell light-rail train” but the English language People’s Daily Online release makes no mention of plans for putting hydrail into revenue service.

But the Spanish meter-gauge train built by FEVE, the national narrow-gauge rail operator that I wrote about on October 10, 2011, will be selling fares to the general public and I hope to be waiting at the head of the ticket window line on Day One.

The last I heard, Day One had not yet been announced. But, given the wide coverage (in Spanish) on the Internet and the RTV España television coverage online, I’ll bet there are enough hydrogen economy disciples in the world to keep FEVE’s Series 3400 tranvía de hidrogeno booked-up with tourists for weeks before the queues get short enough for locals to try out their own historic innovation.

The TV URL is http://www.rtve.es/alacarta/videos/panorama-regional/panorama-regional-23-09-11/1205440/

The hydrolley segment is about seven minutes into the program, with a short teaser at the beginning.

My prediction: the hydrogen train in Spain will usher in a whole new trend in tourism as we hydrailfans begin flocking to such openings wherever they occur around the world.

It’s way too easy to miss really important events in the history of hydrogen railroading if they don’t contain the magic searchable word “hydrail”. I missed a huge one last month: the demonstration of Europe’s (and perhaps the world’s) first hydrail train—or maybe the first hydrolley—now planned for regular passenger service in 2012.

The honors go to FEVE—“Ferrocarriles Españoles de Via Estrecha” (“Spanish Narrow-Gauge Railways” in English)—and a primary design contractor, CIDAUT—“Centro para la Investigación y Desarrollo en Transporte y Energía” (Center for Research and Development in Transportation and Energy).

On the 23 of September, 2011, FEVE issued a press release describing an event which, if it wasn’t as flashy as the famous driving of the Golden Spike marking the completion of the Union Pacific, was at least the European Green Spike equivalent.

That was the day when the FEVE’s President, Sr. Ángel Villarba, and Sr. Antonio de Luis Solar, Mayor of Pravia, Asturias, waited with several members of the FEVE and CIDAUT project team at the Pravia Station for the arrival of a hydrail-converted, Series 3400 railcar  on its narrow-gauge (one meter) track.

The H2 Series 3400 railcar (or tram or “tranvía”) is designed for the hilly terrain of the Principality of Asturias—Northern Spain’s ancient Kingdom of Asturias, back in the Middle Ages.

Its four traction motors are powered by lithium ion batteries, topped-up by two 12 kilowatt hydrogen fuel cells fed by a rack of twelve hydrogen tanks.

Stopping energy is recovered in the batteries via regenerative braking and reacceleration is boosted by supercapacitors, also charged during braking.

Although Taiwan’s hydrail museum train was the first by several years to haul passengers around its grounds on a regular basis, FEVE’s narrow-gauge line in Spain will be the world’s first to sell tickets on a real live hydrail passenger line.

CIDAUT’s Alberto Montes, a key member of the design team, tipped me off about FEVE’s September press release (in Spanish):

http://www.feve.es/es/sala-de-prensa/feve-informa/feve-presenta-el-tranvia-de-hidrogeno-que-entrara-en-circulacion-en-2012.html?texto=&idCategoria=0&fechaDesde=&fechaHasta

Sr. Montes has been invited to tell the story of the H2 3400 railcar conversion at the Seventh International Hydrail Conference, hosted by the Birmingham [UK] Centre for Railway Research and Education at the University of Birmingham on June 26 and 27, 2012.

The University of Birmingham, UK, will host the next International Hydrail Conference there in the summer of 2012 in cooperation with Appalachian State University. Dates and details will be available in late September, 2011, on the hydrail web site of the Energy Center at “App State” in Boone, North Carolina: http://www.hydrail.org.

The University of Birmingham and the University of Pisa, Italy, have become the first to offer Ph.D. degrees addressing hydrogen railway technology. Candidates from Birmingham and Pisa made invited presentations last summer in Istanbul, where the United Nations Industrial Development Organization’s International Centre for Hydrogen Energy Technology (UNIDO-ICHET) hosted the Sixth International Hydrail Conference (http://www.hydrail.org/summary6.php).

The international character of the hydrail transition is illustrated by the fact that both the Birmingham and Pisa doctoral candidates are from different countries than their schools. Birmingham’s first candidate, Andreas Hoffrichter, BSc, Bankkaufmann, (http://www.hydrail.org/docs/6_hoffrichter.pdf) is from Germany. The first hydrail-related doctoral candidate at Pisa is India’s Tarun Huria (http://www.hydrail.org/docs/6_huria.pdf), on sabbatical from Indian Railways Institute of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering at Jamalpur, where he chaired the locomotive and rolling stock design faculty.

Given the high and growing price of copper and labor, external power for most railroads that don’t already have it seems a doubtful proposition at best. Vulnerability to climate variation plus resource competition with foodstuffs production do not augur well for biofuel availability in the amounts that rail systems require. Cost, geopolitical considerations and environmental concerns (both climate and pollution) make staying with oil less and less practicable.

Unless some truly remarkable breakthrough in electrochemistry makes batteries more capacious by orders of magnitude, hydrogen seems the only plausible way to deliver the cleanest energy sources for railway use.

Hopefully other universities will follow and expand the trail that Birmingham and Pisa are blazing.

Perhaps the single greatest impediment to the advent of the hydrogen economy has been the media-led insistence that hydrogen fuel cell technology is an automotive design experiment that has not yet been made to work. The ubiquity issue—the controlling obstacle unique to the car application—is never examined. Mention hydrogen and people inevitably assume that you’re talking about cars.

Steam technology was applied to railroads in the 1830s but wasn’t commercialized in automobiles until nearly 1900—seventy years after rail. Similarly, diesel was introduced to railroading about 1925 but—excepting the few Cummins cars produced in 1934 and the early Mercedes diesels in Germany in the mid-1930s—diesel cars, supported at the pump island, did not appear for another fifty years or so after diesel rail.

Why, then, do newsrooms insist that hydrogen cars should either emerge on the scene out of nothing, like some quantum commercial prodigy, or else be written-off as a failed experiment?

If steam took 70 years to evolve from the rail to the road and diesel took 50 years, why is the non-technical press so bent upon “putting the car before the iron horse” in the case of hydrogen?

This question, I concede, is somewhat rhetorical. In the 1830’s (with apologies to Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot) there was not yet a horseless paradigm to pique public interest in personal steam vehicles. By the mid-1920s, the reverse was true; cars were well past the innovation stage and barreling through the integration stage. That is, the state-of-the-art was advancing fast, having standardized on the energy density advantages of gasoline, with its ready domestic availability. Expensive, heavy-engined diesel cars were a “why bother” technology until the 1970s Arab Oil Embargo made diesel’s superior fuel range a design factor that could no longer be ignored. The minute diesel dispensing pumps became relevant, they popped up like mushrooms. Hydrogen will do the same.

But all that would happen very much sooner if hydrogen, like steam and diesel, were first made familiar to the public as a rail technology. Easier-to-implement hydrail would hasten the advent of hydrogen cars if its imminent emergence were not buried by the general press. Hydrail is a natural for compact, closed rail systems like streetcar lines, industrial plant yards and, especially, in maritime switching yards, where it complements hydrogen ferries and work boats. Hydrogen needs this kind of showcase to advance.

South African journalist Rowan Watt-Pringle has just broken ranks and disclosed present-day hydrail in all its progress and promise. Let’s hope the path he’s just refreshed is kept open for a while!

Here is the interview:

HydroKevin (HK): How did you come to the decision to pull the plug on this year’s hydrail conference?

Stan Thompson (ST): Coming up on one month before the Seoul Conference, far too few of the invited presenters had received the needed travel OKs and funding from their organizations. Many had responded with “regrets” even to our initial invitations—almost all citing travel expense related reasons. The Hydrail Conference organizers just could not risk having to cancel the event after some presenters had purchased air tickets, probably without a refund option. We conferred … and deferred, taking the Hippocratic route:  if we could not do the intended good, we could at least avoid harm. And, of course, it was getting too late to orchestrate the conferee attendance we’d hoped to attract.

HK: With the weak economic recovery do you see the hydrail industry growing in the coming year?

ST: Yes. Only to the extent that the weak economy cost us an opportunity to collaborate in Seoul has it harmed progress much. The narrow-gauge project in northern Spain is still on track  (so to speak). Electric trains stopped by power outages in Japan during the recent tragedy might help switch their two pioneering passenger hydrail projects off the test track and onto the main line production. And, surely, the implications of China’s hydrail announcement last year will prod the West to remember Napoleon’s sage observation.

Actually, since the recession highlights a general need to contain both risks and costs, it could have positive results.  If hydrail technology were not unaccountably shunned by the general media, considerable economic recovery and Green innovation Fedbux might already have watered a seedling hydrolley (fuel cell hybrid streetcar) industry.

In fact, that very nearly happened here.

Dale Hill, the visionary founder of Proterra, Inc., (which recently settled in Greenville, South Carolina and drew kudos from the White House, the US Secretary of Transportation, and the Federal Transit Administration) would have set up shop in North Carolina if hydrogen savvy had been a little more advanced.

But SC Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, co-founder with of the Senate Hydrogen Caucus with his Democrat colleague, the recently retired Senator Byron Dorgan of South Dakota, knew better than anyone that the oderant in hydrogen gas is money. He and other SC visionary leaders lured Proterra, with its 1,300± new transit vehicle jobs, and about $80 million in mostly Government investment, to SC.

But Proterra’s SC products are buses;  hydrolley manufacturing may still be up for grabs.

HK: Which sector of the hydrail industry has the most growth potential right now?

ST: Without doubt it’s hydrogen hybrid streetcars or “hydrolleys.”

Circa 2007, the new streetcar line forecast for the US (per the American Public Transportation Association) was fifty-three new lines or “alignments.” Back then, when the copper price was only about 1/4 of today’s, streetcar track electrification was already pushing $7 million per mile.

If the average alignment length were—say—around seven miles, then electrifying each new line would cost roughly $50 million. That’s well over $2.5 billion, nationally, to buy a nicely updated 120-year-old design.

If the US were to build them, then we’d have to maintain them; to expand them; and (some say even worse) to look at them until salvage time brought relief. My guess: the transit world will wait for hydrolleys rather than string up all that superstructure.

As San Antonio transit chief Keith Parker said in IEEE Spectrum Magazine, ”The biggest issue with [hydrogen trolleys] is that there isn’t one on the ground and running, so municipalities don’t have anything to test that would allow us to make a decision…”

With major transit vehicle makers introducing wireless [albeit intermittent externally powered] streetcars left and right, it’s only a matter of time until the simpler hydrolley solution supplants that costly cosmetic fix. Then we’ll see hydrail growth (on steroids!) as the streetcar revival reboots.

You are so unlikely to believe this that I’ll let Google tell you; enter this search argument in your browser:

copper + church + (steal OR stolen OR theft)

As of this writing, that entry nets well over ten million Google responses and over five million from Yahoo. An EPA friend whose church was just hit tipped me off to the problem. The price of copper has roughly quadrupled since the 2008 trough at the bottom of the Great Dismal Crunch. Yet copper’s price is at an all-time high, even with the economy bumping along the runway and trying to bounce airborne. Outdoor copper is like keys in an open convertible.

High copper prices are the calling cards presented by China and India and Brazil as they join the ranks of developed countries that use it to move energy around and, in exported products, move copper around the world to markets.

Petroleum prices pop-up fiercely but, when no one is looking, they ooze partway back down as the latest news sensations fade and lose their fear stimulation clout. But copper’s price is real, driven by steadily growing demand. It may feint a dip now and again but it’s always headed up, up and away.

Cooper’s worth stealing—so much so that the US Mint adulterates pennies with zinc to keep them from morphing (with the aide of entrepreneurs) into shiny ingots.

In this bent new world, does it make sense to pretend that future high–speed rail growth (which many of us believe is essential to relieve highway and airport congestion) can be powered externally via track electrification? To believe that is to believe that there is no upper copper price point beyond which railroads and their customers are unwilling pay in order to avoid coming to grips with the need for a better way to power electric trains. Of course there must be some such limit. But eyes are averted so as not to see it.

The present electrification cost is in the ten-million-dollars-plus-per-track-mile range. You’d need a flash camera to freeze it at that level. Aluminum may fill in, but only at the cost of a loss of efficiency, waste energy dissipated as resistance heat, and the problems of  electrical junctions between dissimilar metals.

Still, track electrification has two solid selling points: (1) it exists; and, (2) after 120 years, it still works.

And so did steam power and vacuum tube electronics and hand-wired circuit boards and cathode ray tube television sets and four-barrel Holley carbs perched atop huge displacement V-8 engines. Like all those things, track electrification is barreling toward the sunset of unaffordability.

But unlike those technologies, railroad traction and rolling stock have such long amortization and service lives that it’s intensely uncomfortable to contemplate a market abstraction like the price of copper making expensive, like-new, capital rolling stock obsolete. Being the first to nod toward that elephant in the parlor could have a foreshortening effect on one’s years of gainful employment. In change-averse industries, silence is more than golden; it’s a survival skill.

Standing safely outside the industry and regarding the electric passenger train elephant through the parlor window, I’d describe the ignored beast this way. All the following technologies are well known; they only want cobbling together.

Each car in the new-tech consist (the string of cars) has a very large, fast-charging lithium battery to reaccelerate it, using the energy it captured in stopping —using dynamic regenerative braking traction motors, powered partly from the locomotive.

Up front, there is a locomotive with an even larger battery system, fed by one or more clean, constant-speed diesels and also by a complement of hydrogen fuel cells. The FC’s are sized to have enough power to sustain the train at speed without diesel help (on all but the steepest grades) but also without enough power to reaccelerate the consist unaided. That is where the diesels come in.

An onboard “smart grid” deals out power from the hydrogen fuel cells and the diesel prime-movers to the locomotive’s and the cars’ traction motors and to all the train’s batteries.

The systems integration engineering to put all this together for the first time to even approximate the hefty pull of a catenary-powered electric locomotive is going to be very expensive. But even if it cost a billion dollars worth of R&D (unlikely), at ten million a mile, that’s just a hundred miles of track electrification, even at today’s snapshot price of copper. And the resulting train can go anywhere; it’s not wire-bound to only high–use corridors.

Security costs compound copper’s rip–off cost. If mid-city church rain gutters and downspouts and the lighting system wiring of Interstate Highways and live power lines and plumbing copper snagged from empty foreclosed homes don’t daunt copper–snatchers, imagine the temptation posed by lonely miles of open country electrified track. Image the security labor needed to keep copper cables from snaking away in the dark of night during construction. Mentally price-out the helicopter patrols needed to keep trains running in the wide open spaces of the South and West.

In a very real sense, planning investments committed to electrification of high-speed rail lines may prove the biggest rip-off of all.

When asked “How’s your wife?” Henny Youngman famously quipped, “Compared to what?”

Lately I’ve been conflicted by the flurry of interest in High Speed Rail and the several states whose governors have “just said ‘no thank you.’”  My hunch is that they may have made the right call for the wrong reason. If so, their error may buy the US time to rethink High Speed Rail. The question to ponder is not “whether” so much as “when,” and especially “how.”

A while back I wrote a blog piece here called Hydrail: a Tale of Two Metals.  A cautionary tale, it pointed to the steep rise in the price of copper, a significant component in the cost of overhead track electrification.

I have no doubt that, on the streetcar scale, hydrogen hybrid fuel cell technology is both feasible (they run buses, don’t they?) and very long overdue.

But, at the High Speed Rail scale, my expert friends assure me—and I accept—that hydrail is not ready for prime time, just as it’s not ready to pull coal trains from Montana to Atlanta or mixed freight from Pittsburg to Charlotte. What’s different is the power requirements, which are dramatically higher.

But here’s where Henny’s quip comes in.

The cost of scaling hydrail up to high speed passenger power levels is more than daunting. But then, so is the cost of electrifying intercity tracks which—based on the cost of light rail electrification—might run to well over $10 million per mile.

There are a lot of miles out there to electrify and 120-year-old catenary technology feels rather like a traffic light that’s been yellow for ten seconds.

The cost of electrifying enough miles to make a dent in the need to de-load airports might run up to the Carl Sagan scale: “Billions and billions.”

As daunting as powering hefty intercity passenger trains with hydrogen might be, massive track electrification might be much more so. And capital spent on old technology ceases to be available for the development of replacing “new tech” and the jobs it could have created.

If non-fuel-cell technologies, such as H2ICE (hydrogen internal combustion engines with battery hybrid re-acceleration capabilities) could be developed and funded with a relatively few hundred million bucks, the result would probably amount to a much more attractive and longer-term solution. And a cheaper one. Compared to what? …to “billions and billions.”

The Savannah River National Hydrogen Laboratory’s (and the University of Ontario’s) water-splitting systems show promise of domestic hydrogen priced far lower than even last year’s petroleum energy equivalent. If even a modest part of the billions and billions contemplated for track electrification were redirected to water-splitting and H2ICE hybrid traction power, the US might be much better served over the long haul.

Sadly, there is little evidence in the news that “new tech” alternatives are being considered in the US.

China, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Spain and Turkey are on the march toward hydrail. The US, too, needs to consider that alternative.

When the history of railway evolution in the first half of the twenty-first century is written, it may largely be a tale of two metals and their respective economics. Copper and hydrogen are both essential to the long-term economical delivery of electric power: copper to stationary applications and hydrogen to things that move over land and water and through the air.

Track electrification is a pricey but proven hybrid solution, powering moving trains and streetcars via massive stationary plant.

Hydrail (hydrogen fuel cell) railway traction is pursued primarily as a preferable alternative to petroleum railway traction fuel rather than as an alternative to track electrification.

The oil-emphasis of hydrail stems from the fact that replacing petroleum solves more conspicuous problems than placing a moratorium on electrification. Reducing oil dependence reduces particulate pollution; ozone precursors; greenhouse gas emissions; depletion of finite extractable resources which have important non-fuel uses; and “geoilpolitical” turbulence—reinforcement of barriers separating the populations of some oil-endowed nations from the levels of self-determination and confidence they observe abroad and demand at home.

It still makes little or no sense to contemplate replacement of modern electrified routes where they already exist in good operating order.

But the recent (and probably permanent) rise in the price of copper, driven by the emergence of China and India as industrial giants, is bound to shift the economic balance between hydrogen and copper in a way that requires rethinking capital deployment assumptions.

Hydrogen is destined to become cheaper and more plentiful as copper becomes ever more scarce and is priced accordingly.

For new, small, rail vehicle (“hydrolley”) alignments, about all that stands between overhead trolley systems and the end of the line is the absence—to date—of a hydrogen streetcar demonstration. The presence of proven hydrogen buses around the world shows that battery-fuel cell hydolleys are feasible at that scale and are over-due to make their debut.

At the other end of the scale, however, the much greater energy requirements of high-speed rail present disproportionately daunting hydrail engineering problems.

But that may not be the case always.

With the price of copper hovering near its all-time high, even in a lingering world recession (having approximately quadrupled in about three years) and the cost of track electrification at around US$ 7 million per mile, the break-even point between a crash program to scale-up hydrail technology to high-speed rail proportions may be closer in time than we suppose.

Even the keenest track electrification advocates would not seriously propose that switching yards and branch lines could economically be electrified nationally. If not, that means carbon-fuelled and/or battery traction would have to coexist with electrified main lines indefinitely. It would be the kind of uncomfortable hi-tech/lo-tech symbiosis the telephone industry experienced during the transition years from circuit-switched to digital call transmission.

If hydrail technology can side-track the copper supply problem and serve all rail technology scales (streetcars to high-speed rail and perhaps even cross-country freight), then the rail industry can converge toward a single, environmentally benign technology.

R&D costs will be enormous. Implementation will take decades.

But even these barriers are small in proportion to the cost of widespread track electrification.

And they could be negligible in proportion to the capital write-offs that would follow if massive electrification were already far advanced when fuel cell/battery hybrid rail traction (and mass production of low-cost hydrogen via emerging thermochemical technologies) inevitably overtake electrification and strand that redundant investment.

Prudent capital allocation between extravagant electrification and unfamiliar hydrail may be one of the toughest questions the rail industry chews on over the next few years.

But projected growth in the price of petroleum and copper may soften it up considerably.

In my February 10, 2011, commendation of public broadcasting for its help in raising hydrail awareness, I failed to credit Ira Flatow’s excellent program, Talk of the Nation – Science Friday. On September 4, 2009, Ira ran a great segment on hydrail but never mentioned the technology by name. Web searches on the subject don’t find it. (Perhaps, if NPR’s webmaster reads this, a hydrail tag can still repair the oversight.)

While putting the segment together, the producer contacted me for experts to interview. I immediately thought of Ontario’s Dr. Alistair Miller, whom (over his strong protests) I always credit as being the “Father of Hydrail” because of his seminal 1999 paper explaining why rail and maritime hydrogen fuel cell applications are the easiest to implement.

By introducing the producer to Dr. Miller, I blew my best chance to snag the “fifteen minutes of fame” that Andy Warhol said we’re all due. If I had thought fast, I might have been on NPR!

But, being devoutly Southern, I chose to Do The Right Thing instead.

The producer did too. Given a choice between interviewing a North Carolina accent that Sheriff Andy might have heard in Mayberry barbershop or a Scottish one as articulate as Sir Walter Scott and as real-life tech savvy as “beam me up” Scotty on Star Trek, he chose the latter. It was a reasonable choice.

A less reasonable choice was omitting the word “hydrail” from the script, rendering the segment invisible to search engines. What could have been a home-run for hydrail science awareness became a bunt instead.

Still, it was a bunt heard by 1.3 million listeners—the vast majority of whom would otherwise never have guessed that fuel cells will soon power trains and streetcars (hydrolleys).

So, thanks anyway, Ira.  Maybe next time.