Canadian Pacific’s southern merger puts zero-carb freight in easy reach
by guest blogger Stan Thompson
Canadian Pacific Railway has throttled-up the transition to zero-carbon freight movement by two big notches recently. Last December, 2020, CPR announced “that it plans to develop North America’s first line-haul hydrogen-powered locomotive.” Then in March, 2021, they announced a combination with Kansas City Southern that will link Canada, the USA and Mexico via a single railroad for the first time.
While I have no inside knowledge whatever about CPR’s plans, my futurist’s instincts are pointing toward a great leap forward in the global transition from fossil to renewable railway traction power.
Here are a few dots that connect nicely with CPRs first two. Across the pond, France and Sweden have proposed to replace the last of their freight diesels with hydrail by 2035 and its likely that the rest of the EU will follow suit. Germany is said to be looking at 2038 and the conservative UK, 2040—though I’m all but certain they’ll match the continent’s earlier date.
There is a sort of natural scale progression for hydrail. Largely due to fuel capacity issues, small-and-slow is easier; big-and-fast much harder to design and produce. That’s why trams were the first to go hydrail and high speed rail will be last.
That said, here’s an eye-opening exercise: Try to envision a 2121 where all the trams, light rail and freight trains and the trucking and marine industries have been powered for decades by wireless electrification via hydrogen and yet high speed rail lines are still tethered to the power grid by a sliding contact. It’s hard, in the present, to envision profound future change with only the past and present as mental reference. But it’s even harder to imagine some legacy technologies persisting a hundred years into the future when external track electrification will be 240 years old.
We can’t yet imagine just how hydrail will be adapted to HSTs—but neither can we imagine HSTs not being wireless hydrail a century from now—though the Battery Bunnies could conceivably pull that out of their magical hat.
Getting back to Canadian Pacific’s dip down south of two borders, here are a few facts that make hydrail not unlikely.
At the top end, as I’ve often written, Canada has perhaps the deepest hydrail roots of any country. They extend from the first tiny mining fuel cell locomotive tested in the gold mines of Quebec’s Val D’Or region, through the 2013 rescue of of the hydrogen transition from the “tar pit” of H2 car fixation, to the national pro-hydrail position of the 2021 Federal Government.
Canadian fuel cells from Ballard will power CP’s innovation and Canadian fuel cells from Hydrogenics (now Cummins) have been powering passenger rail in Germany for years and will soon cover Europe and Morocco.
The USA Government’s hydrail vision, after a brisk start back in 2008, was pricked by an evil political needle and slept until 2019, when it was awakened by the kiss of a bustling world’s hydrail activity, including Canada’s.
Hydrail is already on Mexico’s green screen. President Lópes Obrador is keen on the tourist Tren Maya to carry tourist through the Yucatan’s rain forests. The Calakmul routes’s not finally designated as hydrail, but for a rail line created to showcase a rain forest, ¿por qué no?
Fueling for the prospective MEXUSACA (my abbreviation for Mexico-USA-Canada, not CP’s) is a green dream. Canada is committed to a national transition to hydrogen and is rich in hydro power, wind and the makings for “blue” H2 if that were necessary. The middle USA is wind-rich, sunny enough for wheat, and fitted with the occasional nuclear station if the hydrogen storage is deemed iffy, early-on. Mexico has PV sun and to spare.
Canadian Pacific’s bold move up to line haul hydrail freight is not an isolated upgrade. China is manufacturing hydrail switch engines and so, soon, will the USA. While it’s not announced, my guess is that the former Kiel, Germany, locomotive works—now China owned—will help power Europe’s transition to hydrail freight.
George Friedman, publisher of Geopolitical Futures, is one of the top-rung futurists whose thinking I most admire. Dr. Friedman has long been bullish on a global Mexico. A recent GPF article explains why that country is functionally North American, not Latin American. If CP stitches North America’s three giants together with a hydrail thread of logostic and climate innovation, Dr. Friedman’s unity assertion will be born out in spades.