Cross-border review of rail network officially launched

I'm not even vaguely confused here, thanks.

Every single fuel cell train product falls in to the solution looking for a problem box. They are all failures, and were failures the second before they launched. We have 50+ years of knowing they're failures behind us.

I'd also question how many of those are "on offer" - I suspect absolutely zero of them could be obtained for testing outside of the companies labs; whereas multiple companies are trying the combustion option - and finding out that its a terrible idea too - outside of company labs.

You can discount any fuel cell train as a subsidy sucking joke, not a real project. Fuel cells are a dead end technology; there won't be a market for trains, cars, trucks or buses using them going forward - which we've known for 50+ years - they aren't new!

There might be some market for hydrogen combustion for very specific purposes; but it won't be trains either. However, there are at least slightly more serious projects trialling it - but they'll fail too. While emitting NOx.

The flywheel Parry People Mover is a train in actual service. Doesn't make it an actual viable technology.

Fuel cell investment is throwing good money after bad. I'm pretty sure combustion is going to end up exactly the same.

Bordeaux’s trams are a little different in that they do run without wires in some parts, but not by using batteries. Instead there’s an electric rail underneath the tram which feeds it electricity.

Yes hydrogen has a potent greenhouse effect - one of the industry's dirty secrets. It's not directly a greenhouse gas (it doesn't linger because it's highly reactive) but the way it reacts with other elements of the atmosphere means it causes global warming. Most recent studies have calculated its GWP100 (100 year warming potential) at somewhere between 11 and 13 times that of CO2.

The "so clean it produces water when burnt" is another lie or distortion - it only produces water if burned in pure oxygen which is a completely theoretical situation. When burnt in actual air, the high temperature causes nitrogen in the atmosphere to react with oxygen producing poisonous nitrous oxides. There is a proposal and (shockingly still being lobbied for) to add hydrogen to the piped natural gas mix for domestic consumption - even while analysis shows that with a 15% hydrogen mix, the amount of NOx produced by your gas cooker or boiler increases 10-fold. NOx causes a multitude of harms to human health - particularly children (growing up in a home with natural gas cooker increases a kid's chance of developing asthma by 40%); now consider the effect of multiplying the amount of NOx by 10.

The thing to remember about hydrogen is that despite the talk of "green hydrogen", after decades with 10s of billions of investment, 97% of the hydrogen consumed is still produced by dirty means (from fossil fuels). The hydrogen industry's sales pitch is something along the lines of "ah sure start using hydrogen now and we'll figure a way of making the clean stuff economically sometime in the future but when that day comes, you'll be ready!" So any increase in hydrogen consumption today, will actually increase fossil fuel consumption (the principle mechanism used to produce hydrogen).

The big players in the hydrogen industry are, without exception, fossil fuel companies. They're flogging old rope - there were hydrogen "boosters" trying to push hydrogen into the energy sector since the 19th century, the first hydrogen vehicle prototype was in 1810, fuel cells were commercially available in 1930s, electrolysis has been around since the turn of the 18th century, etc. There is nothing new at all about modern hydrogen tech - it's the same stuff that failed to find a use for the last 2 centuries but has now found a use as a mechanism to lever subsidies out of gullible and naive governments.

And all this might not be a deal-breaker but, in addition, you have: massively inefficient as a form of electricity storage, horrifically dangerous to handle, expensive to store and transport, difficult to contain - it's the leakiest gas known to physics, etc.

I generally dislike the term "greenwashing" but if there was one example where the term is 100% applicable it would be with the way the likes of Chevron and Shell are lobbying to have hydrogen projects included in "green" programs so they can get their hands on subsidies and grants.

Straightforward electrification is better, the problem is storing it. If you have sufficient storage then you could generate green electricity from solar in June and burn it at Christmas.