ECONEWS REPORT: Hydrogen Buses Coming to Humboldt. Mass transit along CA’s N. Coast is difficult. Long distances b/w rural communities are trouble for ordinary battery-powered electric buses, which don’t have the range to make there-&-back trips. H2 buses, however, are able to make the long journey

by chopchopped

2 comments

  2. Good for them. I’m glad they’re testing that out.

    Here’s the route its for:

    >Jerome can talk about this, a new express route from Eureka to Ukiah, and we have to get from Eureka to Ukiah and back to Eureka on one tank of hydrogen. And a battery electric bus couldn’t come close to doing that route, but a hydrogen bus can.
    …
    we realized that the hydrogen buses that exist today wouldn’t make it. So we negotiated with the manufacturer, New Flyer America, to build a new fuel cell bus that has a bigger fuel cell, a bigger motor, a bigger battery, and more fuel storage, and can make the trip from Eureka to Ukiah and back, 320 mile trip, and still have some fuel left over. And this bus is going to be a real positive technological improvement for transit agencies all over the country.

    So, they had to get a custom hydrogen bus for this. I think the new Proterra electric busses should be able to handle this also.

    And then, ugh:

    >So I think, so right now, the vast majority of hydrogen that is available for purchase by companies that manufacture and supply hydrogen is all derived from natural gas. So it’s, it’s splitting that natural gas molecule apart and pulling the hydrogen off of it. And then liquefying it, storing it, and then trucking it to a place. Right now, most of that trucking is also on diesel trucks. And right now the state requires any hydrogen that we purchased to be 33% renewable right now, the really, the only source of renewable hydrogen is through renewable energy credits that incentivize the production of renewable natural gas through municipal landfills or through dairies, and so you kind of offset that the carbon intensity from the hydrogen going forward

    Yea, not currently a great emissions profile at all, and it will stay that way for a long time. They’re just having to buy renewable energy credits on top of the natural-gas based hydrogen. I can’t imagine that’s cheap.

Leave a Reply