The Decibel - Hydrogen trains might be the future of Canadian rail

Episode Date: May 16, 2024

Hydrogen fuel is sometimes called the fuel of the future, and it’s being used in a number of ways around the world. The rail giant CPKC is trialling a new hydrogen train in Alberta, that it hopes can replace diesel-fuelled freight locomotives in delivering goods across the continent.The Globe’s Alberta and energy reporter, Kelly Cyderman, joins us to discuss hydrogen trains, how they work, and how this development might lead toward a greener Canada.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

The Globe's energy reporter, Kelly Kriderman, recently took a ride on a train in Calgary. It may sound familiar with the bells and the radio, but listen closer. All right, 1,200 all aboard, coming back, room for 10. But listen closer. Beneath the sound of the voices and the rustling, it's what you're not hearing that's interesting. If we were sitting in a regular diesel train, what would be the difference? It would essentially have this low hum and you would have this gentle shake within the cab that would make you realize that the engine was running. And in this case, it is virtually quiet. Kyle Mulligan is the Assistant Vice President of Operations Technology at the rail network

Canadian Pacific-Kansas City Southern. The company is currently testing out trains that run on hydrogen, which is why they're so quiet. There's also no smell of exhaust since the train emits only steam. The hope is that hydrogen could be a fuel of the future and help with the transition away from fossil fuels. So today, Kelly tells us about this hydrogen train project. I'm Maina Karaman-Wilms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Hey, 1200 stopping.

1200 stopping. All right. Kelly, it's great to have you back. It is great to be here. So Kelly, as we heard off the top, you were actually on the hydrogen train. Can you just tell us what was that like? Well, I've been trying to get on this train for about 18 months. Ever since I heard about it, I was on a panel with CPKC's Kyle Mulligan a while back, and he talked about the train with such enthusiasm and the silence of the train that I really wanted to see it and to hear it. I'm a bit of a train nerd. I love traveling on trains. Being in Western Canada,

it's not so much a passenger rail culture, except within Edmonton and Calgary have great light rail transit systems, which, you know, I've ridden around with my kids just for fun sometimes. That's great. Yeah. I thought it was interesting also that this was such a homegrown project for Calgary, for southern Alberta. And being on the train was really amazing. It was it was it was surprising in a whole bunch of ways. Wow. And this train that you were on, this was not it's not really, you know, functioning at the moment. Right. So you still had to take a bunch of safety precautions in terms of what you were wearing when you got on there.

Absolutely. This is not this is not a passenger train. This is this is a freight train. This is meant for hauling heavy things. Right. And that's very applicable to Western Canada, which, you know, has the busiest freight system in Canada, one of the busiest in North America. There's all kinds of commodities being hauled west, east and south. And so how is this hydrogen train or how would a hydrogen train be different from, you know, a train that we see these days, like going through a city? So, you know, the trains that we see mostly are diesel electric trains. The technology is decades old. It hasn't really changed. And that was the really fascinating thing about this train. It was the body of those trains with basically a brand new inside, right? So the most striking thing about this train,

and this is what all the crews say as they get on it. They step on the train and they're like, is it running? Because it's so quiet. There's no there's none of that diesel sound that you can imagine. It's it's almost silent. So it looks like a regular train. And I you know, it's still steel wheels on steel track. They've painted them all lime green to distinguish the hydrogen trains. So you can tell by the color of paint. But other than that, it's a regular train with this hydrogen inside. So it's being retrofitted essentially from like from a diesel train now to be powered by hydrogen. Exactly. That inside looks the same except the sound and except for a couple of different software screens at the back that show the monitoring of that hydrogen engine. And then you kind of, you know, think about the difference between a regular vehicle and an EV. You can kind of understand the difference. So, Kelly, this probably seems like a really basic question, but what exactly is

hydrogen? I think a lot of us remember this from science class, but what exactly is it? Yeah, science class is a long ways back for me, but it is the most abundant element in the universe. And I always go to my encyclopedia, the Energy Information Administration in the U.S., and they talk about how it can be an energy carrier. It is an energy carrier in that it transports energy into a usable form from one place to another. So it must be produced from something else. It has to be produced or separated from a variety of sources, including water, fossil fuels, biomass. But then it becomes a very good energy carrier. Sometimes the process to produce that hydrogen from one of those substances, that is the energy intensive part.

Okay. Okay. So that, so this is interesting. That's how we get hydrogen. And so then the next question is how does this work on the train? Like how is the hydrogen turned into fuel? So you have fuel cells on the train, Ballard fuel cells, that use the chemical energy of hydrogen to produce electricity. That's what powers the train. As we discussed, hydrogen is an energy carrier rather than an energy source per se. But on the train, hydrogen fuel cells convert hydrogen and oxygen into electricity and water. And again, what you have as an emission from the train is just a stream of water vapor coming from the top of the train. The train itself has a tender car that carries hydrogen. So it carries the hydrogen with it to provide that and

also can be refueled if need be. They can bring a truck out and refuel. So it gives them a lot of flexibility and it also gives them some of the same flexibility that they would have using diesel where you can do a refuel almost anywhere. Hydrogen is seen as one of the things like further electrification of our energy system that is seen as a pathway to greening our electricity system. Now, there's a lot of debate about this. You know, in the world of vehicles, people, most people believe that batteries are going to win that fight. If you think of it like a beta versus VHS type of thing, people think that EVs are going to win the day over hydrogen vehicles. But there's some specific applications where hydrogen might be helpful in a way that

batteries cannot be. And especially when you're talking about hauling heavy things, if you think about the number, the amount of batteries you need to haul something and the weight that entails. That can be problematic. Okay. And so where do we actually get our hydrogen from? So Canada is a big hydrogen producer already. It's used for a whole number of industrial processes for ammonia. And of course, Alberta produces the most hydrogen in the country. And like most of the world, most of the hydrogen that Alberta produces is derived from natural gas. So you can see that's where the emissions come in. When you do this process, there are a lot of emissions. And what Alberta is trying to do more and more is capture those emissions, carbon capture.

So you can do this process and you can capture the emissions from the process to create the hydrogen. The big question on hydrogen is the energy it takes to create the hydrogen. So until that probably gets more efficient, I think there are still going to be major questions about how green hydrogen can be. Yeah, okay, that's an interesting point here. Because I think like the idea here is to create a more greener option for this train. But it sounds like we still don't quite have this down in terms of, you know, the equation in the end, when we balance out both sides of it, is this worth it? Yeah. And if you think about EVs again, right, the move to electric vehicles can be green, but you have to think about where does

that electricity come from? If the electricity comes from burning coal, it's not necessarily green. If the electricity comes from hydro, it's greener. So it's that you have to think about the full life of the process to get to a fuel or a fuel carrier. And are they as powerful as a diesel train? Like a train running on this hydrogen, can it perform as well as a diesel train? So that is the big question. That is this experiment. So they started this experiment with a few people, eight and a half million dollars, three and a half years ago.

An executive that I've been talking to, this project is kind of his baby, Dr. Kyle Mulligan. He made the pitch to the CEO of Canadian Pacific then that, you know, we need to take some green initiatives with our company. Most of our carbon emissions come from our engines. So what can we do on that front to try to mitigate our emissions? They have three locomotives right now. They're planning to have three more by the end of the year. They're already testing it around southern Alberta and to Red Deer. But this summer will come the big test, and that is carrying heavy freight through the Rocky Mountains. And you can imagine it's much different going along flat ground than it is going up and down the very steep grades of the Rockies, which, you know, were the greatest

challenge to build roads and railways through. You have the spiral tunnels that, you know, are kind of this iconic Rocky Mountains site that people go to watch the trains go through it. It's such a fascinating thing. They'll be making their way through there. And we're not just talking about, you know, we're not just talking about a pleasure cruise. We're talking about hauling the heaviest stuff that trains haul in Canada. We're talking about the workhorses of the rail industry. We'll be back after this message. Is this something that's new here, Kelly? Or like, is the hydrogen train something that's

been tried elsewhere? There have been hydrogen trains around for about two decades. Most of them are passenger trains. Quebec has a hydrogen train. They're developing a hydrogen passenger train in San Bernardino, California. There are passenger trains in Europe, in Asia. But the difference here and the part I find fascinating is it's kind of building on an expertise that Western Canada already has, and that's hauling heavy stuff like canola, like coal, like potash across the mountains to export, but doing that in a greener way to try to cut down the emissions from that transportation process. So let's talk a little bit more about this company behind the Hydrogen Project. This is actually the new iteration of Canadian Pacific, but people probably know as CP

in Canada. And they recently merged with a US company. So tell us a little bit more about this company, Kelly, known as CPKC. Yeah, this was a big $31 billion merger that happened exactly a year ago in April 2023 of Canadian Pacific, which is, of course, the, you know, kind of one of the two iconic Canadian railway companies that built West. And they merged with Kansas City Southern last year to create a much bigger company with operations in Canada, the U.S. and Mexico. And this experiment started under Canadian Pacific when it was only Canadian Pacific. It continues today under the same CEO and many of the same staff as well. And what are, I guess, their plans with this project? So they've kind of begun it, but how, I guess, how many trains are they looking to convert to hydrogen?

Kyle Mulligan, again, the man in charge of this project, he talks about decades on and converting much of Western Canada's fleet to hydrogen. If it's successful, if they find this works, they have 700 vehicles in Western Canada. They're wondering if in a couple of decades, whether they could decarbonize 65% there and if they get the federal and provincial funding in that. And I should make that clear. It is more expensive at this point, about 30% more expensive to build a hydrogen train than to just maybe get a new diesel electric train. So we are talking about an increased cost at this point, and they are looking for government funding to help with this. And they are looking at it as a green initiative. But they do see a day where the $1.8 billion that they spend on diesel fuel every year is mitigated to a certain point.

And maybe that becomes a hydrogen budget instead with, you know, a completely different cost structure. Now, they will be the first to tell you that they don't know the potential for it exactly, but they do want to give this a real go and try to build a practical project and build it here in Canada as well. The other interesting part about this is this is a push by the company and its largest investor, Sir Christopher Hahn. He's a huge hedge fund manager in London, England, and he is known for his activism, both when it comes to companies and when it comes to the climate file. The CEO of CPKC is very open about the fact that the largest investor in the company is pushing for green initiatives like this as well. Interesting. Can we talk directly about the cost too, though, because I imagine this whole initiative is pretty expensive. What do we know

exactly about the cost, Kelly? The budget did start at 8.5 million, three and a half years ago, it's expanded to 10s of millions of dollars. And I know that they are applying for a whole host of federal and provincial grants. And that is the other interesting thing about anything train related in Alberta. There is often not agreement between the federal and provincial government on energy and climate initiatives. And I do see something like this. Both Ottawa and Daniel Smith's UCP have been very keen on hydrogen projects. Yeah. And this transition, I guess, is making me think of how we always do transitions, right? From like coal to oil now to hydrogen. I guess there's always kinds of challenges for moving from one to

the next. And eventually there's maybe a tipping point. Yeah. There was a reason that the world moved for transportation a lot off coal and to oil 100 years ago that it was a more efficient energy source when you're talking about combustion when you're talking about bang for your buck. So most of the energy transitions that have happened in history have happened because it's better or it's cheaper, there has been an efficiency there or there's been a cost element there. But this energy transition, I would argue, is different than any other energy transition because it's driven by the climate imperative. It's not just driven by what works, what's cheap, what's available, what's the most efficient as it has been in the past.

Yeah. It's interesting because I think we often talk about like road or air travel as in terms of sources of emissions, not so much rail because I, you know, I think relatively speaking, it is fairly sustainable. But I guess why is reducing train emissions? Why is that so important? You know, it is. And, you know, the company itself will brag about rail being about four times as energy efficient as transporting by truck.

And I believe that the rail sector makes up only 3.6% of the country's transportation sector, greenhouse gases. So we are talking about a small percentage, but it does contribute. And if we envision more transport by rail because of it being energy efficient, we're going to have to ask green questions on that front as well. So, yeah, so it seems like there's a lot of excitement around hydrogen trains, but I know there's also challenges. So let's talk about those, Kelly. Specifically, I want to ask you about safety. Can we talk about the safety concerns of having hydrogen on a train? Hydrogen can ignite more easily than either gasoline or natural gas. And with that in mind,

the pressurized carbon fiber reinforced cylinders that hold the fuel on these locomotives are mounted at the top. So in the event of any leak, the lighter than air hydrogen just floats up and rises away. That is one safety feature they built in. They also have built in leak detection systems and a flame sensor, because my understanding is if there are any flames from hydrogen, it's all invisible. So they need to have that sensor. And they also have trained the crews to deal with that. But the one thing that is really important in all of this is

the software that they've developed, that they're able to monitor the whole locomotive much more closely than you can monitor an old diesel locomotive. So if there's any problems, whether it has to do with safety or mechanical, just like an EV, they should be told that more quickly than they would on an old diesel electric train and get it in for servicing more quickly. And that's another way that they're hoping that they'll be able to find efficiencies with using hydrogen trains as opposed to diesel electric trains. Just in our last few minutes here, Kelly, I want to just take a look at the broader picture. These hydrogen trains that we've been talking about, how do they fit into the larger conversation right around clean energy in Canada? I think it's a really small part of the conversation, frankly, but I think we're

going to need a bunch of really small parts, a bunch of different energy pieces to tackle climate change and to tackle energy security, which has become a more pressing policy concern as of late. We are realizing with population growth, with the need to electrify Canada's energy systems more, with the need to look to different energy sources and share energy more, we're going to have to do a whole bunch of things to confront the problems of both having enough energy and confronting climate change. And I think we're going to need a whole bunch of small pieces like this and experiments, and not all of them are going to work to face both our climate and our energy challenges. Kelly, thank you so much for taking the time today. Thanks so much for having me.

That's it for today. I'm Maina Karaman-Wilms. Our intern is Aja Sauter. This episode was produced by our intern, Raisa Alibi. Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show. Adrienne Chung is our senior producer, and I'll talk to you soon.