Spanish utility company Iberdrola has announced that a memorandum of understanding (MOU) has been signed, with signatories including AECOM, for a project to convert Italy’s historic Apennine railway into one powered by green hydrogen.
Other members of the agreement include Italian sustainable developer Ancitel Energia e Ambiente and Italian hydrogen company Cinque International. Funded by the European Clean Hydrogen Alliance, the project aims to replace defunct diesel locomotives with green hydrogen-powered ones. This switch will be a “drastically less expensive alternative” to traditional electrification, says Iberdrola. The company also claims that this will bring “innovation and development” to areas impacted by depopulation and deindustrialization due to earthquakes in 2009, 2016, and 2017.
The more than 186-mile-long railway line will connect inland areas of Italy, running through four central Italian regions. The MOU also includes an evaluation of the technical viability to convert another line, the Two Seas Railway, to run on green hydrogen, which would connect Flumincino and Rome airports with the coastal town of San Benedetto del Tronto.
Lorenzo Costantini, country manager for Iberdrola in Italy, says the project “is an opportunity to put our skills at the service of this ambitious project which, in addition to having a major environmental impact, is also intended to have a significant economic and social impact, supporting areas affected by seismic events in recent years."
8 Comments
Do you mean green hydrogen as opposed to grey or blue or are you using the buzzword green to suggest that hydrogen is universally environmentally friendly, a claim that is debatable?
Or is this just an AECOM press release from their PR Department?
In Italy the hydrogen comes in green, red, and white.
I was also curious/skeptical, and it turns out "green hydrogen" is the actual name of the fuel, not just a tagged on adjective: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_hydrogen
Now, there's also some obvious buzzwording in that term, but it's not like AECOM et al just pulled the term out of nowhere for this project.
I am aware of the actual fuel name. The article, however, does not indicate that it does, nor does it link any sources for further research other than landing page for AECOM. If I don't know whether green in this case is buzzword or actual fuel name, I guess Archinect is as useful as my nearest search engine?
Oh, and if my response is confusing, read it as if I didn't see whatever x-lax said.
I'm assuming they mean green hydrogen in the fuel sense. Iberdrola is one of the largest renewable energy companies in the world and has more information on the project and green hydrogen in (and linked from) their press release.
My point is that this information should have been in the article. Otherwise why come to Archinect instead of AECOM or Iberdola's websites?
I agree. When you dress up a press release and publish it on your own site, hopefully you've added to the informational aspect of the press release rather than subtracted from it. Seems like it would have been worthwhile to simply include a statement at the end saying, "For more information find press releases here..." and link to them. Even then, I won't castigate the author for not defining what they may have assumed was common knowledge. Perhaps a slap on the wrist is all that is needed for not understanding their audience better. The Iberdrola release is better in that aspect because while they don't necessarily define the term, they've linked to places that do, and they provide sufficient context that the reader can probably determine the meaning if they only read the release.
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