An old diesel freight train in British Columbia, Canada is about to get a new lease of life.
Local firm Hydrogen in Motion (H2M) is currently converting the Green Goat locomotive to run on a mix of hydrogen and battery power.
The so-called switcher locomotive performs tasks such as transporting small loads of lumber or animal feed at rail yards.
If all goes to plan, H2M will have the engine running by the end of this year, or early next.
“With the successful demonstration of this we would be looking at much larger trains as well,” says H2M president and chief executive Grace Quan. “We’d be looking at converting entire fleets.”
Hydrogen, which emits water but no carbon dioxide when burned, is often touted as a fuel of the future.
There are already a few hydrogen-powered trains out there, such as the ones currently being rolled out in the German state of Lower Saxony. The technology made its debut there in 2018.
In the UK, a hydrogen locomotive, HydroFlex2, is undergoing testing in Long Marston, Warwickshire.
But current methods of storing hydrogen in tanks, as a highly pressurised gas or extremely cold (cryogenic) liquid, are expensive and potentially unsafe. Scientists have long aimed to find ways of storing hydrogen in more inert solid forms.
In H2M’s case, the company has developed a nanomaterial within which hydrogen is stored at relatively low pressure compared to other techniques.
By simply opening a valve and lowering the pressure, the hydrogen comes off, just like when the CO2 in a carbonated drink gets released when you open the bottle, says Ms Quan.
She adds that hydrogen could be especially useful for powering heavy vehicles that go on long journeys, such as trains and lorries, though the company has also developed a hydrogen-powered three-wheeler tuk tuk as a small-scale demonstration.
“Depending on the size of the fuel cell, we could give up to a week’s worth of power,” says Ms Quan of the tuk tuk.
But she adds that sourcing investment funds to develop her firm’s technology has not been easy. And many other solid state hydrogen storage solutions are at an early phase of development.
Though some of them are exciting, the huge challenge they face is to prove that they are commercially viable and worth choosing over, say, batteries for certain applications.
Duncan Gregory at the University of Glasgow says that those working on hydrogen storage technology at the moment are aiming to achieve a density of 5 wt% (weight per cent) or greater within the storage medium. “It’s really difficult to get to that,” he explains.
There’s plenty of effort, though. Take the method that Ian Chen at Deakin University in Australia and colleagues are currently beavering away on.
It involves a technique called ball milling, a sort of grinding process using tiny balls inside a canister. This grinding activity raises pressure levels, encouraging gases to become absorbed by a powder inside the canister.
Prof Chen and his colleagues have found that they can use this to store gases including hydrogen in boron nitride powder.
“We like it because it’s stable, it’s not toxic, it’s lightweight,” says Prof Chen, who adds that 5 wt% should be possible with this method.
In July, the team described how this process could be used to store hydrocarbons in an academic paper. The detail of experiments in which they managed to store hydrogen and other gases such as CO2 and ammonia are yet to be made public.
Prof Chen is enthused by the possibility of storing hydrogen in this form, which simply requires the application of heat to release the gas again. But he admits that a long road lies between this research and commercial success.
The team would need to design large-scale equipment and show that the method would be truly cost-effective at scale. “We don’t claim that we have solved all the major problems,” says Prof Chen.
The cost challenges were underlined in October when the German state of Baden-Württemberg ruled out replacing diesel locomotives with hydrogen-powered trains.
A study commissioned by the state concluded that the installation of overhead electricity lines or battery hybrid trains provided much better value for money over a 30-year period.
Prof Gregory, who is currently working with a separate, undisclosed firm on hydrogen technology, adds that one of the potential issues with the ball milling process is how long it takes. The small-scale experiments reported by Prof Chen and his colleagues so far took 20 hours of milling.
Besides transportation, hydrogen stored in a solid state could have other uses. A trial currently under way in Scotland will test hydrogen generation and storage on one of the Orkney Islands
A machine-learning system will monitor weather patterns and decide when to use electricity from nearby wind turbines to power the electrolysis process, which is how hydrogen is extracted from water.
“It’s a good test bed,” says Enass Abo-Hamed, chief executive and co-founder of H2GO Power. “You could have a week full of wind and then a week with nothing.”
The system will also determine when the hydrogen would best be released or stored, in this case within a powder-like substance. This stored energy would provide a potential resource during wind droughts.
Although it’s not yet certain that the system on Orkney will actually be connected to the local grid during the trial, Dr Abo-Hamed says it is a possibility and, if so, the hydrogen could be used to power up to 70 homes. In the future it could also, in theory, be converted back into a gas state and used for domestic heating.
Hydrogen has potential as a boiler fuel that would be cleaner than natural gas, argues Prof Gregory, though there are significant challenges in implementing this, too.
Recent studies have cast doubt on hydrogen’s potential as a fuel, both in terms of heating and transportation.
Prof Gregory argues that, if someone can crack the hydrogen storage problem, then that could fundamentally change how we power the world’s vehicles – from freight trains to cars.
“I can see in 20 years’ time or whatever, when somebody eventually comes up with a material that will do this job, I reckon batteries could well be superseded by hydrogen,” he says.
Sniffer dogs in Ecuador have found 6.23 tonnes of cocaine hidden in a banana shipment, police say.
The dogs alerted their handlers, who seized 5,630 parcels filled with a white substance that later tested positive for cocaine.
The shipment was destined for Germany, officials said, and would have been worth $224m (£173m) had it reached its destination.
Five people had been arrested following the discovery, according to the prosecutor-general’s office.
Police said they had found the massive cocaine haul during a routine inspection of container stored at Posorja deepwater port south-west of Ecuador’s largest city, Guayaquil.
The cocaine parcels had been hidden beneath crates of bananas destined for export.
One of those arrested in connection to the drug discovery was a representative of the export company responsible for the shipment, whom prosecutors said had been present at the inspection and gave officials the names of the four other suspects.
They include the managers of the banana plantation where the cocaine is suspected to have been added to the fruit shipment, as well as the driver who took the container to the port.
Ecuador has become a major transit country for cocaine produced in neighbouring Peru and Colombia, with transnational criminal gangs using Ecuador’s ports to ship the drug to Europe and the US.
Last year, Ecuadorean security forces seized more than 200 tonnes of drugs, most of it cocaine. Only the US and Colombia seized more drugs in 2023.
Gangs have caused a wave of violent crime in Ecuador, leading President Daniel Noboa to declare a state of emergency and deploy tens of thousands of police officers and soldiers in an effort to combat them.
These security forces have stopped large amounts of cocaine from being shipped to Europe.
In January, officers found the largest stash ever to be seized in Ecuador – 22 tonnes of cocaine – buried in a pig farm.
However, extortion, kidnappings and murders remain high in the Andean country.
Thailand has expanded its visa-free entry scheme to 93 countries and territories as it seeks to revitalize its tourism industry.
Visitors can stay in the South-East Asian nation for up to 60 days under the new scheme that took effect on Monday,
Previously, passport holders from 57 countries were allowed to enter without a visa.
Tourism is a key pillar of the Thai economy, but it has not fully recovered from the pandemic.
Thailand recorded 17.5 million foreign tourists arrivals in the first six months of 2024, up 35% from the same period last year, according to official data. However, the numbers pale in comparison to pre-pandemic levels.
Most of the visitors were from China, Malaysia and India.
Tourism revenue during the same period came in at 858 billion baht ($23.6bn; £18.3bn), less than a quarter of the government’s target.
Millions of tourists flock to Thailand every year for its golden temples, white sand beaches, picturesque mountains and vibrant night life.
The revised visa-free rules are part of a broader plan to boost tourism.
Also on Monday, Thailand introduced a new five-year visa for remote workers, that allows holders to stay for up to 180 days each year.
The country will also allow visiting students, who earn a bachelor’s degree or higher in Thailand, to stay for one year after graduation to find a job or travel.
In June, authorities announced an extension of a waiver on hoteliers’ operating fees for two more years. They also scrapped a proposed tourism fee for visitors flying into the country.
However some stakeholders are concerned that the country’s infrastructure may not be able to keep up with travellers’ demands.
“If more people are coming, it means the country as a whole… has to prepare our resources to welcome them,” said Kantapong Thananuangroj, president of the Thai Tourism Promotion Association.
“If not, [the tourists] may not be impressed with the experience they have in Thailand and we may not get a second chance,” he said.
Chamnan Srisawat, president of the Tourism Council of Thailand, said he foresees a “bottleneck in air traffic as the incoming flights may not increase in time to catch up with the demands of the travellers”.
Some people have also raised safety concerns after rumours that tourists have been kidnapped and sent across the border to work in scam centres in Myanmar or Cambodia.
The prospective new owner of Royal Mail has said he will not walk away from the requirement to deliver letters throughout the UK six days a week, as long as he is running the service.
“As long as I’m alive, I completely exclude this,” Czech billionaire Daniel Kretinsky told the BBC.
Mr Kretinsky has had a £3.6bn offer for Royal Mail accepted by its board.
Shareholders are expected to approve the deal in the coming months, but the government also has a say over whether it goes ahead.
Currently the Universal Service Obligation (USO) requires Royal Mail to deliver letters six days a week throughout the country for the same price. But questions have been raised over whether the service could be reduced in the future.
In an exclusive interview with the BBC, Mr Kretinsky also said he would be willing to share profits with employees, if given the go-ahead to buy the group.
However, he appeared to reject the idea of employees having a stake in Royal Mail, which unions have called for in exchange for their support.
The Royal Mail board agreed a £3.6bn takeover offer from Mr Kretinsky in May for the 500-year-old organisation, which employs more than 150,000 people. Including assumed debts, the offer is worth £5bn.
But because Royal Mail is a nationally important company, the government has the power to scrutinise and potentially block the deal.
As well as keeping the new government on side, Mr Kretinsky also faces the task of convincing postal unions that the proposed deal will benefit employees.
The USO is a potential sticking point for both the government and unions.
Royal Mail is required by law to deliver letters six days a week and parcels five days a week to every address in the UK for a fixed price.
How well this has actually been working in practice is a different matter. Ten years ago, 92% of first class post arrived on time. By the end of last year it was down to 74%, according to the regulator Ofcom.
Last year the regulator fined Royal Mail £5.6m for failing to meet its delivery targets.
Royal Mail has been pushing for this obligation to be watered down. It wants to cut second class letter deliveries to every other weekday, saying this will save £300m, and lead to “fewer than 1,000” voluntary redundancies.
‘Unconditional commitment’
Mr Kretinsky has committed in writing to honouring the USO, but only for five years.
And after that, in theory, the new owners could just walk away from it.
However, Mr Kretinsky told the BBC: “As long as I’m alive, I completely exclude this, and I’m sure that anybody that would be my successor would absolutely understand this.
“I say this as an absolutely clear, unconditional commitment: Royal Mail is going to be the provider of Universal Service Obligation in the UK, I would say forever, as long as the service is going to be needed, and as long as we are going to be around.”
Mr Kretinsky added that the written five-year commitment was “the longest commitment that has ever been offered in a situation like this”.
Another potential stumbling block for the deal, however, is how the company will be structured.
Unions would like to see the company renationalised, but Dave Ward, general secretary of the Communication Workers Union (CWU), told the BBC that would be “difficult in the current political and economic environment”.
Instead, what the CWU is pushing for is “a different model of ownership” – that is, where the employees part-own the business.
To get its support for the takeover, the union wants employees to share ownership of the company, along with other concessions including board representation for workers.
It says profit sharing is “not going to be enough to deliver our support and the support of the workforce”.
If the union doesn’t get what it wants, it won’t rule out industrial action, Mr Ward said. Its members went on strike in 2022 and 2023.
Although Mr Kretinsky said he is “very open” to profit sharing, he is not in favour of shared ownership.
“I don’t think the ownership stake is the right model,” he said. “The logic is: share of profit, yes, [but an] ownership structure creates a lot of complexity.
“For instance, what happens if the employee leaves? He has shares, he is leaving, he is not working for the company, he [still] needs remunerating.”
Mr Kretinsky said he didn’t want to create “some anonymous structure” but instead “remunerate the people who are working for the company, and creating value for the company”.
The union is also concerned about job losses and changes to the terms and conditions of postal workers’ contracts.
Mr Kretinsky has guaranteed no compulsory redundancies or changes in terms and conditions but only until 2025.
“If we are more successful, and we have more parcels to be delivered, we need not less people, but we need more people,” he said. “So really, job cuts are not part of our plan at all.”
He said if the management, union and employees work together, “we will be successful”.
Another concern is the potential break-up of the business.
The profit for Royal Mail’s parent company last year was entirely generated by its German and Canadian logistics and parcels business, GLS. Royal Mail itself made a loss.
Mr Kretinsky has promised not to split off GLS or load the parentcompany with excessive debt, although borrowings will rise if the deal goes through.
But he has a way to go to convince the CWU.
“I can’t think of any other country in the world that would just just hand over its entire postal service to an overseas equity investor,” Mr Ward of the CWU said.
However, Mr Kretinsky said that the postal unions “do understand that we are on the same ship, and that we need this ship to be successful, and that if we are there, we don’t have any real problems to deal with, because the sky is blue, and it’s blue for everybody.”
The union cannot stop this deal but the government can block it under the National Security and Investment Act.
Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds has said he will scrutinise the assurances and guarantees given and called on Mr Kretinsky to work constructively with the unions.
Mr Kretinsky may say that he and the unions are ultimately on the same ship but, as things stand, they are not on the same page.
Who is Daniel Kretinsky?
Daniel Kretinsky started his career as a lawyer in his hometown of Brno, before moving to Prague.
He then made serious money in Central and Eastern European energy interests.
This includes Eustream, which transports Russian gas via pipelines that run through Ukraine, the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
He then diversified into other investments, including an almost 10% stake in UK supermarket chain Sainsbury’s and a 27% share in Premier League club West Ham United.
The Czech businessman is worth about £6bn, according to reports.