All Aboard: Hydrogen on Rail

Hydrogen is gaining momentum as a key component to a clean energy future. As part of this push to decarbonize sectors, new applications for hydrogen transportation, storage, and usage are being developed. While electric vehicles have increased their market share at the light duty vehicle segment, emissions originating from heavy duty transportation including long-haul trucking, rail, maritime shipping, and aviation are often considered hard-to-abate and hydrogen is proposed as one promising alternative.

Sensing business opportunities, new participants are entering these markets and look to develop solutions to meet these needs. Hydrogen presents specific challenges that developers and engineers may not fully appreciate if they look to transfer experience from handling traditional, carbon-based fuels. For example, hydrogen’s combustion properties, including its broad flammable range, low minimum ignition energy, and high burning velocity, suggest that explosion mitigation is an even more important topic and may require unique design solutions.

In the US, the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) has authority over locomotives and locomotive tenders. However, we are not aware of specific regulations issued by the FRA for hydrogen fueled locomotives. In this presentation, we first review FRA guidance issued for test programs using another alternative fuel: natural gas. We will briefly describe current operations using compressed and liquified natural gas (CNG and LNG). Then, we will discuss how to translate lessons learned for natural gas projects to mitigate the hazards specific to hydrogen. In particular, we will address fueling operation, leak detection and response, and potential incidents including derailment and external fires.