High Speed Rail - Europe and the American Election

It was President Obama who famously said, after the 2008 vote that “Elections have Consequences.” Well two years later that dictum still applies (as it will two years from now). I bring it up since (h/t to Luis) the European Commission has just released a report on High Speed Rail which gives some of the progress that has been achieved on that continent since the first high speed line was inaugurated between Florence and Rome in 1977, though it was not until the service between Paris and Lyon in 1981 that the boom began. And now Europe has 3,861 miles of high-speed lines where trains can travel at faster than 150 mph (the fastest is over 220 mph in commercial service, 350 mph in trials). The inter-continental service is continuing to grow, though to facilitate progress the EU is seeking to develop common technical standards across the network. Unfortunately, after Tuesday, the prognosis is not that favorable to the change in the United States.



It will be a considerable boon in Europe, as expansion continues. Spain, for example, is planning on expanding the network so that 90% of the inhabitants are within 30 miles of a station. The results can be seen with the reduction in travel times between major cities. (And remember that the stations generally lie in the heart of the city, not an hour or so away as many airports now are).


It becomes faster, and more efficient, as well as (speaking personally) less physically tiring, to travel increasingly great distances in Europe by train, in contrast both with air and car. As a result, the report notes:

The advantages of HSLs, in terms of frequent connections (which can easily be modified depending on demand) and flexibility for passengers, have allowed the railways to compete more effectively against other modes of transport. Since 1997, over 6 million passengers a year have been using the Brussels–Paris HSL. As a result, flights have been cut back on this route.

Overall the growth in traffic has been a six-fold increase in usage.

Since high-speed lines were introduced, the number of passengers opting for this mode of transport has constantly increased. The number of passengers on all German, Belgian, Spanish, French, Italian and British lines increased from 15.2 billion passenger-kilometres (bpkm) in 1990 to 92.33 billion in 2008.

In looking at door-to-door travel times, the report chart shows that air becomes faster than conventional rail at a travel distance (in Europe) of around 240 miles, while air does not become faster than high speed lines until a distance of about 500 miles. I start to think about flying instead of driving at a distance of around 300 miles.

At the present time those dealing with the anticipated growth of the network over the next ten years have not, I suspect, taken into consideration the changing fuel availabilities of the next decade. If, as is a reasonable possibility, crude oil pops over $100 in the next year, thereby drawing increasing attention to the coming of Peak Oil, then it is likely that demand for improved rail traffic will likely rise significantly beyond the 25% increase in growth that has been projected. As I have noted before, trains in Europe are becoming increasingly full, at current rates of demand, even in off-peak hours. In the shorter term, as the report notes, train transport may also be helped by the increasing saturation of existing airports with flights. But it also leads to the problems of using rail to transport goods as well as people. These services have different imperatives, and so the report concludes that two separate systems will evolve.

The difference in speed between a (slower) goods train and a high-speed train impacts on rail traffic management for the simple reason that freight trains spend longer on the track and therefore use up more traffic capacity (train paths). This difference in speed may also cause safety problems when these two types of train pass. This makes safeguarding infrastructure availability, while guaranteeing optimum capacity and security, an extremely difficult task. Physically freeing train paths simply means dedicating HSLs solely to passenger traffic and giving freight a higher priority on conventional lines. This is an option being explored by Sweden in particular.

They do however expect that, if environmental policies are tightened, that rail traffic as a whole might increase to as high as 420 bpkm for the entire network by 2020, from 189 bpkm in 1999. The planned network expansion at present looks to being completed in 2030, at which time it will be at around 20,000 miles of track, and carry 535 bpkm per year, with extensions moving out into Eastern Europe. The initial connection to Russia will be through Finland.


The report even looks at the environmental impact of the change in travel mode, since it recognizes that while the trains are electrically powered, that power does not magically appear in the power lines.


And for those interested in energy efficiency

Although the environmental impact of HSLs can also be reduced by improving the energy efficiency of trains and working on other elements of the vehicle, the carbon foot- print of rail travel is still much smaller than that of air or road travel. In the case of a journey from Paris to Marseilles, CO2 emissions in grams per passenger-kilometre (g/pkm) are just 2.7 g/pkm by HS train, compared with 153.0 g/pkm by air and 115.7 g/pkm by car. From the point of view of energy efficiency, HSTs also perform better, using 12.1 grams of petrol per passenger-kilometre, compared with 17.6 for conventional trains, 18.3 for a coach, 29.9 for a car and 51.5 for an aircraft.

So how does this tie into the first paragraph? Well in the United States, and a part of the Stimulus from the Federal Government, high speed lines had been proposed, with funding from Washington. However, with the election of Republican governors in several states due to receive that money, the plans may have to change. The new governor of Wisconsin, for example, has vowed to kill the high-speed line between Madison and Milwaukee. This was meant to be part of a network that would run from Chicago to Minneapolis, and stopping the project will likely cost the state money and jobs – but as a top campaign issue it is likely something the Governor-elect may have to follow up on.

Similarly in Ohio, the incoming Governor, John Kasich has said that “Passenger rail is dead in Ohio.” In this case he was discussing the $400 million plan to restart passenger service between Cincinnati, Columbus and Cleveland.

Work on the high-speed Florida link has already started, this is expected to carry up to two million folk a year from Tampa to Orlando or back, by 2015. It was not favored by Rick Scott who was just elected Governor of the State, though some of his opposition may come from the investment needed to extend the link from Orlando down to Miami. However the incoming Chair of the House Transportation Committee has already spoken out against it.

On the other hand the fate of the investment in a high-speed link in California has not been changed by the election. The backbone of that system, the 500 miles from LA to San Francisco is planned for completion by 2020. (video here). The discussion is more about where the construction will start.

Electrifying the Railroads - Alan Drake's manual

While I was away Alan Drake sent me his “An American Citizen’s Guide to an Oil-Free Economy -A How-To Manual for Ending Oil Dependency.” It is only now that I am able to review it. His objective is sound

We can transfer our economy, bit by bit, to the new, more efficient and oil-free replacement as our present system becomes increasingly more fragile and eventually unsustainable. These plans all rely on mature, proven and economically viable technologies and not the current “Hunt for Miracles” that Secretary of Energy Chu has so aptly described his department’s Advanced Projects Research.

As new technologies develop, as they will, and are debugged and scaled up, our plans can be adjusted to incorporate these new solutions. Yet we can make a viable, workable plan with what we have “on the shelf”, ready to go today. We need not gamble our future on “Just-in-Time Technology” appearing at just the right time and with just the right technology. No miracles are required, simply foresight, persistence and hard work.

Alan is a great believer in the energy savings that can be achieved with a transfer to electrically powered railways. I largely agree with that underlying premise, and in Europe particularly, generally travel by train, where I have a choice. In his manual Alan points out some of the considerable savings that can be achieved if the country were to switch to an enhanced electrically-powered railroad system, relative to the oil-based transportation that we currently enjoy.

There are two factors that are required to achieve, in the long run, considerable energy savings, as well as a move toward energy independence, rather than our continued, and growing dependence on importing oil. The first is the transition itself, from diesel locomotives to electrically powered engines. It is a change that has already occurred in many parts of the world. He points out that the current system, which relies heavily on diesel-powered truck transport, could reduce energy costs comparatively, from 20 Btu’s of diesel power, to 1 Btu of electrical power, if long-distance haulage was carried out using Double Stacked Trains. In Europe, without the stacking, the trade-off is still 2.5 to 3.0 Btus of refined diesel converted to 1 Btu of electricity, with a slight reduction (circa 10%) in transit times. He cites Switzerland, China and France among those making the change. Roughly 30% of the 10,000 miles of track in the UK is electrified and the system is one of the busiest in Europe. (And on a personal note I have seen the density of passengers increase over the years as I ride the trains from London to Carlisle and beyond. And, in Austria, an off-peak trip from Vienna to Graz last week was made in a train that was close to full.)

Double Stack Train (Source Freephoto.com )

He notes the lower maintenance costs of train over road transport, and given the delays that have been encountered around the country this summer as more highways were repaired under the Stimulus program, that is not a small consideration. I am reminded of a British Rail ad from some years ago, showing a commuter looking at his watch aboard a train running past a highway blocked and stalled with cars, and complaining that the train was running 5 minutes late again. (On the road into St Louis this summer delays of more than half-an-hour have not been uncommon as the highway has been widened near Pacific). Rail is also a safer method of transport (he conjectures the savings in life would be from 4,000 to 5,000 individuals a year).

However the second step that must be made is to increase the capacity of the existing rail system. Even as far back as 1998 Brennan was writing for the USDA of concerns that the existing system was reaching capacity.

Employment in the industry fell from 532,000 in 1980 to 256,000 in 1996. Similarly, rail mileage fell from 179,000 miles of road in 1980 to 147,210 in 1996. Over the same time period, the number of freight cars fell from 1.7 million to 1.2 million and the number of locomotives dropped from 28,094 to 19,269 units.

Even though their miles of track and number of employees, cars, and locomotives decreased after deregulation, railroad output has increased. Measured by carloads originated, output increased from 22.2 million carloads in 1980 to 24.2 million in 1996. In addition, shipments of intermodal containers and trailers increased from 3.1 million to 8.2 million over the same time period. Measured in terms of revenue ton-miles, the growth has been even more impressive. In 1980, railroads handled 919 billion ton-miles of traffic. By 1996, that number had increased to 1,356 billion ton-miles of traffic. U.S. railroads have been able to move this increased volume of freight by handling larger shipments over a longer distance at a much greater velocity. . . . . . However, the recent rail congestion problems suggest that U.S. railroads may have reached the practical limit of their possible productivity increases without major expansion in the capacity of their basic infrastructure. Increasing the volume of freight movements on a fixed network by handling larger shipments over a longer distance at greater velocities cannot be continued indefinitely. Indeed, one of the lessons of the western railroad crisis is the sensitivity of current railroad operations and the productivity of major sections of the U.S. rail system to even a slight downturn in the velocity of the system.

To overcome this more of the track will have to be converted from single to double tracking. However, as Alan points out, most of the infrastructure is already in place, and the right-of-way established, so that it will not incur the high costs of a totally new development.

Good cost estimation is difficult given the variety of issues with the existing infrastructure. However, rail investments can provide superb value for money. An excellent investment example is BNSF double tracked and improved 2,217 miles (Los Angeles to Chicago) for slightly over $2 billion recently. BNSF more than doubled track capacity and now offers 70 mph express container freight service.

A $2 billion investment made BNSF’s Transcon line the world’s busiest container rail line (the Trans-Siberian is #2). By comparison, $2 billion spent on highway expansion projects would have no national and limited local impact. For example, $2.3 billion is proposed to just rebuild the Milwaukee Zoo interchange and $1.2 billion to add two lanes to the Huey Long Bridge outside New Orleans..

The arguments that he makes are strong and should be persuasive, after all – as he points out -

Warren Buffett (BNSF Railroad is his largest single investment) and Bill Gates (30% of his non-Microsoft stock portfolio is in CN Railroad) are hardly charity cases.

Smart though they may be in foreseeing the benefits of investment, the money is not yet being fully invested to make the transitions that Alan feels are needed.

The following are reasonable cost estimates for what is being proposed, given the available information, in 2010 dollars.

• Electrify 36,000 miles of double track railroads - $100 billion.

• Double track 15,000 miles of single track, new rail over rail bridges, better signals, improved curves and grades – $75 to $150 billion.

• Grade Separation (a cost that should be borne by highway budgets) could easily absorb $50 to $100 billion.

• Semi-High Speed “3rd track” on existing ROW - 7,000 to 14,000 miles - $140 to $280 billion.

• Strategic Railcar Reserve – perhaps a couple of billion dollars for mothballed used equipment. New equipment, when used is not available, should be an order of magnitude more expensive.

• Improved Intermodal Centers – a very rough estimate to supplant 85% of existing truck traffic would be $50 billion or so.

Given the investors, it will be interesting to see how this catches on.

Thoughts on the trip to China

The trip to China is now over, and I am left looking back to see what impressions remain the most profound. I will forgo the cultural and geological and rather focus just on the items that relate to energy. But before going into that in more detail I would also like to thank my son, the Engineer. When I arrived at Shanghai Airport I was curious to see which sites I could access, given the controversy over censoring Climate Audit in Canada. So I started to check to see which sites I could access. Both Climate Audit and Real Climate were available. Anthony Watts site (Watts Up with That), Robert Rapier's and mine were not available. (TOD was). And since I had hoped to do what I did, I had to find a way around the problem. Enter the Engineer, who, for the past week has been posting my posts, after I sent them to him. Thanks again, good sir.

To return to Chinese use of energy, there are two levels to the Chinese activity that are both worth noting, and also are likely to have future impact.

The most common thing that I saw was probably a pile of bricks. Historically many of the houses in Qinghai province were made of mud brick, with mud walls being used in construction of the many greenhouses. But it seemed wherever we went, whether down a back street in Beijing, a Muslim or Salar village in Qinghai, or a Tibetan temple there were piles of fired brick, and construction of new buildings (following the shape of the old) but with the stronger brick, was going on almost everywhere. Yes, the big cranes dominating the blocks of apartments and hotels that are being constructed didn’t seem to be moving a lot, and that construction is slowed, but for individual houses it seemed to still be continuing at a steady pace.

The bricks come from largely coal-fired plants (at least in the cases I saw) with many relatively small brickyards working to provide for the demand. The houses may end up being plastered and painted, in Beijing back to basic grey, but are built along ancestral lines, with in Qinghai, the flat roofs that collect the most sun in winter to help keep the buildings warm. Solar water heaters (as opposed to solar oven types of water boiler for meals) were more common in the big cities and down at lower heights on the tops of apartment buildings with not that many on individual dwellings. The change is going to have an impact on rural life, particularly where they can get the nomadic herders and shepherds to adopt to a fixed domicile rather than wandering with the herds.

But it is the other change and construction that I found more spectacular, and will likely have at least as great an impact on the society. We left the Tibetan Plateau and Xining City on the train, and started the descent to the coast by travelling down the valley carrying the Yellow River. After a way, however, we turned into another river valley as we headed to Xi'an and ultimately Shanghai. The rail line had a companion line, and there was a road to bring access to the small villages that were found in the corners of the valleys as we moved down. Before the roads these villages would have been almost isolated, with connections achieved by whoever (and I suspect it would be mainly monks) wandered over the passes. Small isolated rural communities that live on a subsistence level are only romantic and idealistic in novels. Thus a major effort of the Central Government is to provide access to and for these folk. But it is not easy, in that railway lines and highways can’t easily make the bends along the valley that the rivers have cut. So the carriageways have to go through tunnels, or carried on pillars down the heart of the valley, in order to maintain grade.
Railway causeway set across a valley and carrying the second line (photo taken from the first) the river crosses under the line and runs along the left hillside. The train I am on goes into a tunnel as the line curves to that hillside.

The basic requirement for passage seemed to be 2 rail lines and a road, with tunnels being required in many cases to ensure that the curves were sufficiently gradual. While the above show the scale of some of the construction where the valley was wider, it did not get any easier as the valley narrowed (as it did in the top of the first picture).
Further down hill, the valley is much narrower and where all the trucks are both rail lines are in tunnels (one on each side of the river). The narrow roadway initially driven meant that whenever there was a hold-up, before long the line of trucks waiting was over a mile or two. (Very few cars).

To help solve the problem, further down stream the road is being converted to a dual carriageway. This is also a great endeavor, and will require additional tunnels as it moves up the valley, but will make it a lot easier to travel up and down the road.
Construction of a dual carriageway further down the valley, a typical village lies behind the construction. As we went downstream the houses changed from mud brick, to fired brick, to tile faced.

At the moment Qinghai is very popular in the summer, since temperatures at altitude rarely get above 70 with a good many sunny days. (As in many parts of the world they are also seeing record harvests). We were told that all hotels fill with domestic tourists in that time, and even last week we were thought very lucky to have been able to acquire train tickets.

The installation of the dual carriageway suggests that the Chinese Government anticipates that individual vehicles will become much more popular, and so roads must be provided to take the public, by car, where they want to go. In those circumstances, where the specific areas get quite remote quite quickly, it is easier to provide a road, than a rail line.

Providing fuel for those vehicles is going to require a significant volume of imports. Sales of cars in China have surged this year

auto sales have surged after the government offered subsidies to drivers in rural areas and cut retail taxes as part of a wider 4 trillion yuan ($585 billion) economic stimulus plan. The demand jump has caused GM to double its 2009 industrywide growth forecast. Combined with a 37 percent slump in U.S. auto sales because of the recession, the surge has made China the world’s largest auto market so far this year.

“Customers have to book in advance because there’s not enough stock of the bestselling cars,” said Guo Yong, information manager at Beijing Asia Games Village Automobile Exchange, which houses dealerships accounting for about 10 percent of Chinese car sales. “Fourth-quarter sales weren’t that good last year and most carmakers curbed production as they were pessimistic about sales this year.”

The Chinese Government would not be making these investments if they did not see the roads being used, and that is going to require a lot of fuel, which will be their next problem. (And this is not considering the arrival of foreign tourists, for which the country is already well prepared, even though, at present, numbers are down.)

P39. Pick Points

Half-a-dozen or so stories of interest:

China is going to need a lot of oil, and to ensure it gets it, it has just loaned the Russian oil companies Rosneft and Transneft (who runs the pipelines) $25 billion, and for this they get an annual delivery of 15 million tons of oil (300,000 bd) for 20 years. Of the sum Rosneft will get $15 billion. The first pipeline heading that way will carry up to 0.6 mbd, but needs a spur to carry the oil to China. The oil will likely come from the Vankor field in the Tyumen region of Siberia, with the pipeline running from Taishet in Siberia to Skovorodino, a town of about 10,000 people, on the border, and in Amur province. Overflying part of the route on Google Earth, it doesn’t look quite as uncivilized as the articles make out. There is a Youtube video of the town of Tynda, for example.

Despite the problems that they are having with the California budget, customers of the Southern California Gas Company are getting a 20% drop in their heating bill. The average winter bill of 75 therms per month is expected to be in the $70-80 range. However there is a drive to change the gas hot water heaters to solar heating, given that about 38% of the home power goes to heating water. Unfortunately I suspect that the $250 million price tag will be too much for the state right now, even though it would be through rebates. Oddly Government support for such a move in Australia is meeting some opposition from Greenpeace, on the odd argument that they don’t generate electricity. It was only last week that tentative agreements were signed for solar-thermal power for Southern California Edison, with Brightsource Energy building 7 plants for a total of 1,300 megawatts over the next seven years. though the first 100 MW unit, in the Mojave Desert won’t be ready until 2013. SCE states that it now gets 16% of its energy from renewables. (Though by next year the state target is 20%).

BrightSource CEO John Woolard said the 400-MW Ivanpah project will create about 1,700 full-time jobs in construction and another 3,500 jobs to last the 40-year life of the plants.

The technology uses the tower approach rather than the trough shaped collector idea used by Acciona in Nevada. Israel contrarily has just approved the connection of a photo-voltaic power station to their national grid, though it will take 4 years to install the connection.

Perhaps the money put into the stimulus package for high-speed rail might head toward maglev. China is looking to start a new project next month although there is already one system in operation in Shanghai, that uses German technology. Plans for high speed rail systems in California are being debated even though no-one knows where the stimulus money is going yet.

While recent talk has focused on a gas pipeline from Iran to Pakistan and on to India, and recent reports have been either favorable or discouraging, Bangladesh remains strapped for energy, and so there is now talk of a pipeline from Myanmar, through Bangladesh to India.. However economic reality, and the fact that coal is indigenous to many in the region is causing the countries of South Asia to seriously consider switching to coal. India, for example, is now seeing a gap of some 5.7% between available supply and demand and needed the pipelines that had been planned, since even now gas can only meet 60% of industrial demand.

There have been concerns in the past over the ability of wind turbines to operate in cold climates, but with turbines now working successfully in Alaska those days may be over. It may still take about 17 years to pay for the installation, however, on an expected life of 20-25 years. Yet with that promise there is still uncertainty over the future of wind in Canada. In the UK permission was given to install ten new wind farms around Scotland. Britain currently generates some 3 GW from wind, and these farms may add double that amount.

And the EU has just released the Market Observatory for Energy report looking at energy generation in the EU. However since the range of oil prices assumed go from $61 to $100 per barrel for oil in 2020 it may still be a little unrealistic – but I will take a look!

More stories can be found at The Energy Bulletin and Drumbeat at The Oil Drum.