(The following column, "The world shook last month," was written by Stan Thompson and appeared July 15, 2009, in the Statesville, N.C., Record and Landmark. Thompson, a leading proponent of hydrail technology, is a retired strategic planner and environmental futurist for BellSouth Telecommunications. Email him at: HST2nd@aol.com.)
On Monday, June 29, 2009, the world shook a bit, though it didn't make the evening news or the front page -- except perhaps in Topeka, Kansas, the epicenter. That was the morning when Burlington Northern Santa Fe ("BNSF"), the biggest railroad in the USA, presented to the world the first full-scale hydrail locomotive.
BNSF produced the hydrogen fuel cell powered switch engine in collaboration with the US Army and the Colorado development firm that invented the first small-scale hydrail locomotive around 2004.
It was an earth-shaking event in the same sense that Billy Mitchell changed the meaning of military air power by bombing and sinking a ship. If hydrail can be done, it will be done. And now that BNSF has done it, the total supplanting of petroleum rail power by hydrogen is a matter of two or three decades at most -- an inconsequential interval on the long scale of history.
Petroleum prices are low at the moment. But those who think that's meaningful don't remember that "super high test" gasoline sold for 38¢ per gallon just fifty years ago and probably won't be available at any price thirty years in the future (if that long) except to museum curators.
To those of us whom fate cast in planning roles, it's a source of frustration often bordering on despair that people believe that things are the way they are for some reason and are thus not going to change. Things are as they are only because the converging influences that will next shift the paradigm just haven't quite yet reached the level of intolerability to make it happen.
To be sure, Machiavelli's famous observation about the difficulty of fostering change in the face of vested interest in the status quo still holds true. But it just retards change for a while.
Glaciers are sliding toward the sea even though you don't need a flash camera to snap them. And diesel locomotives are sliding toward oblivion, illuminated last June 29 by a technology flash in Topeka.
In 1999 a brilliant Air Force fighter pilot in Arizona named Max Wyman wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on the defense implications of depending on oil imports to move the American economy and military by rail. At about the same time, Dr. Alistair Miller, a nuclear scientist in Ontario, was also writing a paper that showed rail and maritime applications were by far the easiest ways to move people and goods using energy delivered via hydrogen.
With the help of Dr. Bob Johnson (UNC-Charlotte's dean of engineering) both papers came the attention of a small team of Mooresville volunteers working since 2001 to make the hoped-for CATS rail connection to Charlotte the first American line to incorporate a commuter train powered by hydrogen fuel cells. It was Mooresville that named the new technology "hydrail."
Today, hydrail's the name used around the world and Google finds over 8,000 references to it online.
These early volunteers included me, Ingersoll-Rand design engineer Jim Bowman and the present Mayor of Mooresville, Bill Thunberg. We called our project "the Mooresville hydrail initiative."
It was, and is, meant to serve three purposes: (1) to improve the odds that our air quality region won't be subjected to the $6 billion in Federal penalties that non-attainment could bring down on or heads; (2) to help reduce the region's, the State's and the nation's dependence on expensive, problematic petroleum imports; (3) to position Mooresville to take advantage of the under-exploited railway niche in the hydrogen economy.
In 2003, the US Department of Transportation arranged for Mooresville to make a presentation about Mooresville's hydrail vision to members of the Army team that designed the BNSF locomotive. In 2005, the two scientists whose papers Dean Johnson sent us spoke at the First International Hydrail Conference hosted by Mooresville, the EPA, UNC, the NC Department of Commerce and others.
In 2007 and 2008, Mooresville made invited hydrail presentations in Canada, the UK, France, Belgium, Italy and Spain.
In 2008, because of our hydrail initiative, Proterra LLC wrote to the Town of Mooresville, Iredell County and the State proposing to build hydrail streetcars here, employing 200 to 500 people.
This summer, UNC and Mooresville focused the Fifth International Hydrail Conference on replacing overhead wire systems with wireless fuel cell streetcars (hydrolleys) as the new standard for urban rail, saving $5to6 million per mile of track construction. Charlotte is now studying that technology as one option for their proposed Beatties Ford to Eastland streetcar.
Train builder Bombardier Transport of Ontario has been encouraged by the Premier (governor) their to build and export hydrail commuter equipment of the kind a Mooresville-Charlotte line would use.
And now Burlington Northern Santa Fe has built a hydrail switch engine that, successfully tested, will later this year switch freight emissions-free in the most air quality challenged port in the US.
The odds that the world's railroads will ignore what BNSF has done and stay with oil beyond a couple of decades are less than the odds that flat screen TV's won't catch on or that analog broadcast technology and filament light bulbs will still be the norm in a decade or so.
BNSF shook the world last month. We might not have felt it In Mooresville but the foundations of a diesel railroading future were shaken and cracked beyond saving. The rest will be history.
