This week on Talking Headways we're joined by Adrianna Rizzo of Californians for Electric Rail.
We chat about freight and warehousing growth in California's Inland Empire, the benefits of train electrification, a new California push for overhead wires — and why hydrogen trains are getting attention that they may not deserve.
Scroll down passed the audio player for an edited partial transcript of our conversation. Click here for unedited AI-generated transcript of the full episode.
Jeff Wood: It’s an interesting fork in the road because, you know, the freight railroads and others could go down this hydrogen track instead of the electrification track.
And I still don’t understand — I’ve said this many times, and as you know, my namesake, "The Overhead Wire," suggests I’m in the tank, kind of, for overhead wires, but at the same time, like, why would you want to carry around all your power with you? You don’t have to, that’s a lot of weight. That’s a lot of energies just a, you know, transporting the energy to transport the energy kind of thing.
So I feel like this fork in the road is interesting to me because you can go towards electrification with catenaries and overhead wires, or you could go down this battery/hydrogen road. And it seems like the hydrogen discussion is getting some traction, at least at the state level.
Adriana Rizzo: Yeah. There’s a lot of energy going into hydrogen right now, that’s coming larger from the governor’s office and from executive offices in California. The Inflation Reduction Act has created massive subsidies for hydrogen, and there’s this whole sort of "hydrogen hub" program with these federally funded public private partnerships that is applying for these IRA funds to massively scale up hydrogen production. The one in California is called ARCHES. There’s a lot of money in lobbying going into this right now. And a lot of, I think, really misguided policy coming from the governor’s office.
The idea behind this is that there’s two main ways to make hydrogen. One is that you split water — take the hydrogen atoms off of water molecule using electricity. That’s usually called "green hydrogen," although people disagree about those definitions.
The other way is a process called steam methane reformation, where you basically take the hydrogen off of natural gas. That’s where the overwhelming majority of [hydrogen] comes from today. There’s been a lot of lobbying by fossil fuel interests. They’ve been investing a lot in hydrogen, doing a lot of active lobbying in order to promote hydrogen because they see hydrogen as basically their salvation as we wind down the use of fossil fuels.
For example, Sempra, which is the umbrella organization that owns SoCalGas, donated $250,000 last year to California politicians. They’re one of the top donors in the state. Chevron spent $1.2 million lobbying. These companies are consistently the top donors and some of the top corporate money going into our state house, mostly targeting moderate Democrats.
Back to the statewide policy that’s promoting hydrogen: We’ve seen this in a lot of different offices. We’ve seen it actually in CARB, which passed this "in-use locomotive rule," which is technology-neutral. But a lot of their messaging is just completely ignorant about electric trains.
They put out this public facing zero emissions rail dashboard that has, like, maybe like only 50 zero emissions rail projects in total. A third of them are hydrogen. All of the electric rail projects are brand new, making it look like overhead wires or this new experimental technology that’s, like, basically the same as hydrogen — when in fact, there are probably tens of thousands of electric locomotives used all around the world. It’s the backbone of many countries' rail systems.
In terms of other offices, the California Office of Business has been actively lobbying for weaker regulations on what counts as green hydrogen — and another concern with hydrogen is even if you’re not making from natural gas directly, you’re using electricity.
If that electricity isn’t new renewables, if it’s not carefully matched in ttime and space to the hydrogen production, then you’re just sucking renewable energy out of the grid and increasing demand for electricity and creating more demand for natural gas. So, you know, the governor’s office has been actively lobbying against those restrictions — which is kind of the same thing that fossil fuel companies have been lobbying for.
The last thing, which is maybe the most egregious, is Caltrans has ordered a bunch of hydrogen trains to be used on what are formally known as Amtrak California routes. The ther Surfliner, that’s Capitol Corridor, that’s San Joaquins.
They spent $127 million for eight of these that they bought from Stadler. This is a significantly higher cost for a train, then, you know, battery or catenary alternatives. They have made these purchases without having these ever operate anywhere in real world use in United States. They’re pouring a lot of money into this completely untested hydrogen technology, which could be run on really important rail lines like the Surfliner, which connects the two biggest cities in the state — from LA to San Diego. Capital Corridor connects Oakland to Sacramento. These are really important rail lines.
Jeff Wood: So what is the biggest issue with hydrogen trains?
Adriana Rizzo: So there’s issues from kind of environmental perspective, and then there’s also issues from, I think, a performance, reliability, and cost aspect, which I think are overlooked, but quite vital.
Most of the hydrogen on the market today comes from fossil fuels. The CO2 emissions are almost the same as diesel. They are cleaner from an air quality perspective, but it’s certainly not "zero emissions" like many people claim. Even if you’re using green hydrogen made from electricity, it’s at least three times less efficient than just powering it with overhead wires.
You’re using three times more energy for the same thing, which is going to be more expensive. And you know, it’s just, it’s just wasteful, right? Especially when we’re concerned about grid reliability and grid capacity? You want to be as efficient as possible.
Now, from the transit rider perspective, hydrogen trains are a very new technology. They’ve never been used in North America in an operational sense outside of a testing facility. There’s been some fairly widespread adoption of hydrogen trains in Germany, primarily for these rural low frequency rail lines, which is what they’re generally considered to be best for. If you have a rail line that it’s so low frequency that it’s not cost effective to put up the wires, and you have a long distance so you can’t use battery — that’s when when they’re looking at hydrogen. That is incidentally not the application that they’re being proposed for in California.
Those type of trains don’t really exist that much because we have just so much less rail. These are being proposed for like high frequency, you know, main line, regional rail, intercity rail. That’s not where they are appropriate, but even in these kind of niche uses where they’ve been used in Germany, they’ve seen a lot of problems.
Some of this can be blamed on Alstom, which has had a lot of reliability issues with many of their trains. But in the state of Baden-Württemberg in Germany, a bunch of studies found that hydrogen trains are 80 percent more expensive than battery electric trains. To operate in the Frankfurt, they had widespread service disruptions after there were issues with the electrolyzer. In another location in Germany as well, where they just tried hydrogen trains, they found they were too expensive and are discontinuing them after only a few years in operation.
The track record for these hydrogen trains is not good. Another thing about hydrogen train is they don’t have any of the technical benefits of electrification, at least as far as we know. It’s possible, you know, with the technology improves over time, maybe they could get there, but that’s currently unknown. You know, electric trains can accelerate faster, they can also do up to 125 miles per hour on inner city rail line. Hydrogen trains have not really been approved in the United States for speeds higher than 79 miles an hour.
We don’t really know what their top speeds are, but they’re probably going to be worse because, as you said, they have to carry around all their fuel. In general, hydrogen trains are most cost effective at low service frequencies, less than one train per hour, whereas electric trains are most cost effective at every 15 minutes.
If you’re running hydrogen trains, there is an incentive to not run more trains, not run more service because it’s going to increase costs. With electric trains, it’s actually most cost effective to run a lot of trains because then you get more revenue to pay off the cost of the infrastructure. So the real concern we have is that by investing in hydrogen trains on these really vital routes, like Capital Corridor, like Surfliner, we’re locking in low service for potentially decades.
