Iron ore mining is a dirty industry, not just because of the extraction and processing of material, but due to the transportation of it as well. Thankfully, steps are being taken to make ore transportation via train a little cleaner, and perhaps some money can be saved in the process, too. Fortescue, an Australian mining company, just debuted a battery-electric locomotive that charges itself via regen, and it makes a lot of sense.
Full electrification is one of the best ways to clean up railroad operations. Most locomotives that you see out there have been diesel-electrics for the better part of a century, but they still use gigantic, diesel-burning prime movers. The California Air Resources Board says that as of 2022, locomotives in the state were putting out around 29,800 tons of NOx per year and over 640 tons per year of PM2.5. That’s just for the state of California! According to a study published in Nature Energy, diesel-electric locomotives in America produce around 35 million metric tons of CO2 each year.
What I’m getting at here is that it makes sense for railroads to want to reduce their impact. Thus, there have been lots of developments over the years in the further electrification of trains. A lot of rail networks use overhead lines, or catenaries, to provide power to electric trains. Others may use third rails.
But what happens when you want to operate an electric train in a place where there are no overhead lines or third rails? This can be a situation where battery-electric locomotives make sense; they’re a concept that has been around for nearly 200 years. Global mining firm Fortescue, formerly the Fortescue Metals Group, has what could be the best application for a battery-electric locomotive.
Mining Cleaner Transport
Fortescue’s new electric locomotive is destined to descend hills with its heavy load of iron ore and use regeneration to help recharge its batteries. Then, the locomotive unloads at its destination, climbs back up empty, and starts the process over again. In theory, the mining group hopes the train will keep itself charged.
This journey has been over three years in the making. Back in January 2022, Fortescue acquired UK-based Williams Advanced Engineering (WAE) for $221 million. WAE, which was a division of the Williams F1 Group, opened in 2010 as a firm to drive electrification development. Car folks might know WAE best for its links to Formula E. But now, under Fortescue control, WAE, which has been renamed to Fortescue Zero, focuses on decarbonization in the mining sector.
In the press release about WAE’s acquisition, Fortescue announced the Infinity Train project:
FFI and WAE have also commenced development of a regenerating battery electric iron ore train project (Infinity Train) to support the delivery of Fortescue’s industry-leading target to achieve net zero Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions by 2030. In a world first development, the Infinity Train will utilise the gravitational energy generated on the downhill loaded sections of Fortescue’s rail network to recharge its battery electric systems, without any additional charging requirements for the return trip to reload.
The self-sustaining system will increase operational efficiency, lower maintenance costs, and eliminate diesel and the associated CO2 emissions from Fortescue’s iron ore trains. The regenerative capability will remove the requirement for investment in recharging infrastructure and additional renewable energy generation capacity.
[Ed Note: The concept here is technically sound, so long as the train is significantly heavier going down the grade than up it. The maximum energy that regen could recover is the train’s gravitation potential energy, which is its mass times the height of the hill times the gravitational constant — M*g*h. Of course, no regenerative braking system is anywhere close to 100% efficient, but that’s fine, because the energy needed to get back up the hill is (M_2)*g*h, where M_2 is significantly lower than M and g and h are the same. This is a fairly basic concept and would work with electric cars, too, so long as you had the payload capacity to create a big enough delta. -DT].Â
Fortescue was pretty upfront about its reasoning. The company has 54 diesel-electric locomotives that pull 16 mining trains, each stretching about 1.7 miles in length. The company says that these trains could carry 34,404 metric tons of iron ore across 244 cars. Yearly, these heavy trains burn about 21.6 million U.S. gallons of diesel fuel and amount to about 11 percent of Fortescue’s Scope 1 emissions.
In Fortescue’s eye, spending $50 million now to develop a battery-electric locomotive is a worthwhile investment to hopefully spend no money on diesel fuel for its locomotives by 2030. Of course, there’s also that side benefit of lower emissions.
Battery Trains Are Rooted In History
Fortescue isn’t entering entirely uncharted territory, either. According to Trains.com, the very first battery-electric locomotive was built in 1842 by Scottish inventor and chemist Robert Davidson. Yep, the battery-electric train has been around for longer than the gas-powered car and even the diesel-powered train. It’s a technology that has proven itself for nearly 200 years, but it’s most often been used in dangerous environments like oil refineries and mines, or as maintenance vehicles in subways.
Battery-powered heavy haul locomotives are a more recent concept that leverages modern developments in battery technology. Now, EV tech isn’t anywhere near capable of entirely replacing diesel-electric yet. In 2021, the BNSF Railway operated an experimental locomotive from Wabtec that had a range of around just 50 miles.
A few years ago, Metra, Chicagoland’s passenger rail operator, was investing in converting three EMD F40PH-3s diesel-electrics into battery-electrics. Those locos were targeted to get 150 miles of range. A newer Metra plan calls for battery-electric railcars that have 65 miles of range.
The catch with the locomotives I just mentioned is that they do have to be parked to be recharged, just like your car would need to be. However, companies are finding that all-electric vehicles can go a while without a charge thanks in part to regen.
In 2022, Caterpillar talked wrote a press release about its first battery-electric 793 large mining truck, noting:
 Fully loaded to its rated capacity, the truck achieved a top speed of 60 km/h (37.3 mph). The loaded truck traveled one kilometer (0.62 mile) up a 10% grade at 12 km/h (7.5 mph). The truck also performed a one kilometer (0.62 mile) run on a 10% downhill grade, capturing the energy that would normally be lost to heat and regenerating that energy to the battery. Upon completing the entire run, the truck maintained enough battery energy to perform additional complete cycles.
Fortescue Zero also has a mining truck like this. Its beast has a 1.4 MWh battery, recharges on down slopes, and can reportedly fast-charge in as quickly as 30 minutes, and the idea of using gravity to recharge batteries is also being employed by the diesel-electric logging trucks of Edison Motors, which I’ve written about here.
The Train
This train might sound crazy, but it makes sense. The first so-called Infinity Train has been completed and was shipped about 683 miles across Australia to Fortescue’s operations in the Pilbara region. There, Fortescue operates three mining hubs and has 472 miles of trackage.
What really helps Fortescue here is elevation. The hubs sit as high as a thousand feet above sea level, where the ore gets delivered. In theory, Fortescue believes, its train will load up at a hub, use tons of regeneration on the way down to sea-level, unload its iron ore, and then use batteries charged through the regeneration to climb back up to the hub while empty.
Fortescue hasn’t released data about what batteries are housed in its sole prototype, Fortescue Zero Locomotive 001. The company also hasn’t stated just how long of a route along the mainline that the locomotive is expected to cover. Loco No. 001 is currently expected to undergo yard testing and trials before being put into service later this year.
The body design of No. 001 is pretty interesting. Diesel-electric freight locomotives often have bits I’d best describe as “growths” to fit intakes, fans, and ventilation for their diesel engines, but none of that is needed here. So, No. 001 looks all smooth, similar to an EMD-based passenger locomotive, which is neat.
Also, if you were wondering just how something like this is shipped, Fortescue has a video showing the locomotive’s trucks being mounted to a pair of rails. Then, the locomotive was lifted onto the deck of a massive truck trailer, where it was then hauled out. It’s not uncommon to ship locomotives in this manner; sometimes, a railcar or locomotive shipped by road will have its trucks removed so that the locomotive can fit under bridges and other overhead obstacles.
Railroad CSX Corporation and the EPA quote an Emissions Factor – a rough value that attempts to relate a quantity of pollutant released during the commission of an activity – of 10.21 kg (22.51 pounds) CO2 per gallon of diesel burned. Let’s say, just for the sake of argument, that Fortescue’s 54 diesel-electric locomotives use an equal amount of diesel to reach 21.6 million gallons burned a year, and that their emissions fit that Emissions Factor. Just one locomotive alone would be responsible for burning around 400,000 gallons of diesel, emitting somewhere around 9,004,000 pounds of CO2. The whole fleet would be responsible for 486,216,000 pounds of CO2, or 220,543 metric tons a year.
Fortescue claims to release more than 2.5 million metric tons of carbon dioxide each year. So, making the entire train fleet all-electric would, in theory, help the company cut down on emissions. Of course, the company would also benefit from not having to buy diesel fuel or spend money on diesel maintenance.
At any rate … now we wait. Fortescue has been talking about this train for over three years now, and now it’s time for the company to deliver. Will the Infinity Train actually deliver a load and return to the hub without needing to be plugged in along the way? You know I’ll be paying attention to find out.
Hat tip to Electrek!
I know weight will be an issue, but wouldn’t it be smarter if the train (or vehicle) had two sets of battery-electric systems installed? Here’s the scenario:
“Battery-electric A” system that’s already fully charged would be used to propel the train to its destination…fine. While it’s doing that, the regen system that harvests electric power from forward motion, would be channeled to recharge the batteries if “Battery-electric B” system that’s standing by.
At the destination with turnaround complete for the next trip, “the fully charged “Battery-electric B” system would now propel the train to the next stop while regen harvests forward motion to recharge the now-depleted “Battery-electric A” system.
How much sense am I making here?
Does it even make sense to have a Locomotive + Wagons setup when you could just have self-propelling electric wagons?
Feels like inventing a robot horse to pull buggies instead of inventing the car.
Short answer: no
Not crazy at all. Brilliant is what it is. It sure looks like a win, win, win. Even if they have to recharge some, it seems like a decent place to setup solar recharge capacity. I’ve heard they get plenty of sun down under. Love it.
I love that Mercedes gave a simple explanation in the headline. All the other news sources are like “INFINITY TRAIN RUNS FOREVER ON NOTHING” as if this was some kind of perpetual motion machine.
The concept in itself is not something new in trains… the use of batteries is something new.
The TGV in France also use regenerative braking to re-inject power in the overhead line.
Which makes things quite efficient power wise on some line like Paris to Lyon where there’s a high point along the way… The TGV going downhill after the high point generates the power of the next one that hasn’t passed the high point yet.
Now I have a question : Is that the same Oz mining company that’s also trialing fully automated driverless trains ? ( because that’s apparently also a thing in ore trains down under )
There are even folks working on rail-based potential energy storage (maybe), these guys supposedly broke ground almost five years ago with a 50 MW facility in Nevada: https://aresnorthamerica.com/
The issue with these sorts of systems is the economics – we do not have a good system to ensure fair payment for the storage especially for big expensive systems like this. In general hydraulic pumped storage is the least cost per kW-hr stored, but we have not seen any new installations proposed for a really long time because the size of these projects are so big a lot of capital would be at risk.
Others have proposed similar potential energy storage systems, including putting weights that go up and down into old vertical mine shafts and setups near wind farms where a crane lifts and lowers big concrete blocks. One idea of mine is to put a big weight inside a wind tower that could be lifted when electricity demand is low and dropped when power is needed – you would put a pulley up near the nacelle and put a motor-generator at the base – although the storage capacity of a system like this is not very large (compared to the wind towers capacity, and you would probably only use it for frequency regulation, for short periods of time when the wind temporarily drops down, or in situations where there is a very high incremental peak pricing.
That was a fascinating article and props to the developers of this system. So clever! And also in retrospect, kind of a no-brainer. But I (and their stockholders) are happy they did. It wouldn’t work so well in a pit mine.
The light rail system units here in Tacoma use a pantograph and an overhead cable.
I am trying to figure out how the little junctions where one segment is connected to the next one work without upsetting the pantograph is still puzzling me. I frequently drive down a street behind one of them and I never see a spark, like the Chicago ones that figured so prominently in Risky Business, but I imagine technology has advanced since 1983.
One of these days, I will stand next to one and watch what happens.
And goodness! The internet rabbit holes this site sends me down!
Just a guess, does the locomotive have two pantographs? That way one always stays connected reducing the voltage potential and thus reducing the spark when it reconnects?
Well no one asked me, if they did we would already be carbon negative. They have 16 trays and therefore need two way. Why not set them up as an incline plane or ski resort tram. Use the heavier weight of the downhill train to haul the light empty cars uphill to the plants. Load the empty cars and use that weight to haul up the cars after they are empty. Seems no energy would be used just physics and the energy used from regenerative breaking is net negative carbon used to power the station. That took like two minutes and this company is spending millions on a poor alternative. I bet a second round of tracks is cheaper than this second rate alternative.
Whoo
Spiderfan spiderfan can do whatever a spider can. Spiderfan yeah
Aren’t they doing that electrically? Like the downward pull is converted to electricity which is then pulling the other train up in theory.
Trams and stuff use a steel cable to connect together. The mining trains are 1.7 miles long, hauling 34,404 metric tons of ore, so that cable is going to be infeasibly huge (and quite frictiony through the cable guides). It also gives you extremely inflexible logistics for loading and unloading, unless your loading and unloading equipment is also 1.7 miles long.
Your idea of using regen to generate power also requires the use of huge batteries in the train, so it’d be no cheaper than the train they have built.
Why would cables be needed? Just transfer the power via a third rail or catenary.
Power transferred to shore can be stored gravimetrically in water or weights, transferred to a grid, stored in a stationary battery that can be cheaper since neither weight nor bulk are as important or as previously suggested used to power a second, empty train uphill on a second set of tracks.
I’m guessing that these solutions were already considered and the battery train is cheaper than running miles of third rail, a second set of tracks or overhead lines.
Some funiculars work in this way, but to compensate for sometimes having more passengers in the up car, the top station is positioned next to a stream, and both cars have a big water tank built into the bottom.
Then they load the passengers at both ends, and allow water to flow into the top car until it’s heavy enough to outweigh the bottom car. When the car reaches the bottom, a valve will trip and empty out all of the water.
You remind me of the guy who told me all we have to do is use one way glass on solar panels with the mirror side facing in and we could double the output.
TBH That may have been me. I still maintain that could work. However I think using pyramid shaped crystals to direct the incoming sunlight to concentrate it is a better solution. As we all know the power of the pyramid is truly infinite
The Allegheny Portage Railroad in Pennsylvania worked this way, but it proved to be pretty dangerous. The invention of the steel cable helped substantially but there is still far better control and flexibility when done this way. It’s also a much longer route than would be practical to do with cables.
Cool to see the return of the “Draper Taper”!
Fortescue is doing some cool stuff, this is similar in concept to a mine truck in Switzerland I heard about some years back that puts surplus regen power back onto the electric grid- https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1124478_world-s-largest-ev-never-has-to-be-recharged
The never charge part wouldn’t work in a pit type of mine, but custom tailored solutions like this are great.
What a great ecological solution! All while stripping the earth of its resources.
Throw away everything you own that was made with something that was either mined or quarried and see what your life is like.
Of course you won’t be able to report back, because that would include all electronics, and the wire to bring electricity to them
I think they were just pointing out the irony.
And the mining company is gathering the irony.
Think of all the poor animals that won’t be able to eat that iron ore anymore
They also hauled 1.8billion metric tons of cargo while producing those emissions, coming in around 19grams of CO2 per metric ton of cargo per kilometer. That’s on the low end of ocean freight emissions and is an order of magnitude better than the ~150g CO2 per metric ton per km for truck freight.
I’m all for efficiency, but improving road truck efficiency will have a bigger environmental impact than rail, which is already incredibly efficient, even without gravity assistance (which is obviously highly location dependent).
Absolutely! That’s why it seems that one of the primary potential benefits for the mining company here is not having to buy 21 million gallons of diesel anymore.
And since all of Australia’s diesel comes from the Middle East via Singapore…this would be a good thing.
I’ve been saying for some time that the overland trucking industry is ripe for hybridization. Just using electricity to get the truck moving (where their current engines are least efficient) while making use of regenerative braking would net significant gains without needing any significant change to current infrastructure. That doesn’t even account for the ability to eliminate all of the idling so many trucks do, sometimes for hours on end.
Without getting too wordy (and credit to Cheap Bastard for the link) something like this would seem almost ideal: e-POWER system | Innovation | Nissan Motor Corporation Global Website
Add overnight charging at truck stops and staging areas (essentially RV hookups) to supplement the charging and a significant amount of fuel usage could be eliminated.
*I’ll admit, I’m painting with a broad brush here. I’m just trying to describe a way of significantly improving the emissions of trucking without all of the infrastructure changes required for full electrification. This seems like relatively low hanging fruit…
As David said, the engineering seems sound IF …
Regenerate Train, prolly coming back. Downhill on a one-way track. Seems like we should be burning Diesel, but this energy is free and feasible.
Allll aboaaarddd HAHAHAHA!
Electric, that’s just how it goes! Reserving its power…how, nobody knows. Metal loads so heavy…gravity’s a pain…but we’re staying on the rails with efficient trains!
Driving that train, uphill’s a strain. Fortescue you’d better ride those brakes. Station below, mine is up top, and you know those batteries just never stop!
C’mon ride the train, and ride it! If you feel like hauling…some ores…it’s up to you. We got the charge to keep it going up, down, the train is on the loose!
(You just have to imagine a corporate meeting with a local high school showchoir doing this for 1,500 completely disengaged employees.)
I just had to replace the springs on my garage door and it’s got me thinking… If the regen doesn’t work out couldn’t they just use the world’s largest garage door springs to haul it back up?
World’s longest bungie cord.
It’s got potential
slowclap.gif
Even simpler: they’ll just use the same counterweight system mines and cable cars have used for hundreds of years. You have two parallel tracks with trains on each track, and both trains are connected by a cable with a pulley at the top of the train. The trains thus move opposite each other so once will stop at the top while the other stops at the bottom. You load up the top train with ore, making it now heavier than the empty train at the bottom. It rolls downhill via gravity dragging the other empty train to the top. A braking system on the pulley controls the speed.
The problem here is that they have 472 miles of track (though that’s across 3 mines, so I’m not sure exactly how long the train has to run), so a cable system isn’t really practical.
I’m gonna need a bigger spring
It’s an electrical counterweight stored in a battery.
Energy storage is energy storage. It’s one of my favorite things about so many renewable energy projects. My personal favorite is the molten salt thermal storage some concentrated solar thermal plants use (think the “Eye or Sauron” or Ivanpah Solar Power Facility outside of Las Vegas, even though that particular one doesn’t use storage, it’s probably the best known of its type).
TIL about molten salt thermal storage. How cool!
Yeah, I went down a serious Google rabbit-hole the first time I drove by the site south of Vegas. That search led me to the molten salt thermal storage which kind of blew my mind.
Aren’t they closing it because it is seriously underperforming?
Yeah, apparently mainly because the cost per kilowatt of PV is much cheaper (if you haven’t flown over Vegas lately, there are a ton of PV farms on the surrounding lake beds). Possibly because they opted not to use the molten salt heat storage to extend its generation hours. 😉
My main point of even mentioning it is because it’s probably the best known example of a concentrated solar facility which typically uses the molten salt heat storage. PCM’s (phase change materials) are just really neat!*
*I’m aware that just about everything can be a PCM and understand how and why they work. I just find the creative applications fascinating. Don’t even get me started on alleged brake cooling on the McLaren F1 cars (https://youtu.be/YTnAZxqD5w4?feature=shared)…
Having witnessed a few garage door springs braking and performing their subsequent replacement, my God that spring would be terrifying!
The one I just replaced made the loudest noise when it broke.
It’s a good thing to witness before doing any maintenance on one. Really gives you an appreciation for the amount of stored energy you’re dealing with and to pay attention to every move. Replacing a spring isn’t hard at all, just a job you want to give 100% of your attention…
I live on a hill and I always thought our local garbage company could benefit from this concept too, since the truck goes up the hill empty and comes down loaded every day.
Maybe this is the answer for the USPS. They tell the Republicans that all mail routs will be downhill, so the EV delivery vehicles will never need recharging.
They would certainly understand since they like to tell people to pull up their bootstraps and they walked uphill for miles to school twice a day.
Republicans think that we’re going to run out of wind so I’m not optimistic about this
What happens when we’ve used up all the hill? Then what?
Ironic since they are all so full of hot air…