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Fossil Fuels Are 40% of Freight Shipping Tonnage, but Half Its Fuel Use

cleantechnica.com

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Re: Fossil Fuels Are 40% of Freight Shipping Tonnage, but Half Its Fuel Use

#111

Post by Danox »

mercutio2 wrote: post #85
kaydub wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've only had an EV 3 months now, but it'll never see a charging station. I pay around $.12/kw and get 4 miles per kw. So my "energy" costs are $.03/mile. I have a Mazda cx50 as well, it gets about 20-22mpg, with the gas prices here in Seattle that's around $.30/mile. Even where gas is cheaper that's still $.20/mile. Literally 10x the cost to run a gas car vs an EV. I'm honestly shocked at how many people have EVs an…

The pacific northwest’s vast hydro capacity makes it maximally attractive to own an EV. The rest of the country isn’t nearly so lucky.

One of the reasons Norway can go all electric (EV’s), but most of the world doesn’t have the hydroelectric resources they have.

Re: Fossil Fuels Are 40% of Freight Shipping Tonnage, but Half Its Fuel Use

#112

Post by gpm »

Gibbon1 wrote: post #109
HPsquared wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, solar panels and EVs are the way of the self-sufficient rugged individualist. It's an amazing PR and marketing coup to make it the other way around and presented as something for "liberal weaklings" etc.

I think 1600 watts of solar panels produces enough energy to drive an EV 12000 miles a year. Your car though would have to be always plugged in during the day. But probably 3200 watts would be enough for a car used for commuting to be charged mornings, evenings, and weekends.

> Your car though would have to be always plugged in during the day

Or just have a second stationary battery to store up the energy while you're away during the day.

Re: Fossil Fuels Are 40% of Freight Shipping Tonnage, but Half Its Fuel Use

#113

Post by Danox »

Fwirt wrote: post #70
kleiba2 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before the Iran war, I did a back of the envelope calculation for the price of gas of your average ICE for a certain fixed range vs. the price of electricity an average EV uses for the same range. This was under the assumption that you buy electricity at a random charging station that you don't have a contract with. Based on these average values I used, EVs fared slightly worse. This was not factoring in costs of pur…

We just bought our first (used) EV, and charging stations are the Wild West right now. Any random station you pull up to might charge close to the local cost of electricity, or some wild sky-high amount. And hopefully they’ll tell you what that is before you have to swipe your card. There the economics can swing towards gas cars depending on how absurd your local charging station prices are. For people filling their…

The Toyota Prius and the Rav hybrids are popular for many of the reasons you mentioned.

Re: Fossil Fuels Are 40% of Freight Shipping Tonnage, but Half Its Fuel Use

#114

Post by Danox »

Y-bar wrote: post #67
hvb2 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree with you but every country is different. Australia gets a lot of sunshine and is sparsely populated, so plenty of room for solar anyway. This is not the case everywhere though. It can be a good example though of how you overproduce during the day and use that to charge car batteries for example

Australia is at about 3,5 persons per square kilometre and as you say one of the most sparsely populated countries on earth. Compare to for example Denmark at 149 persons per square kilometre. Denmark needs about 35 TWh per year in electricity, so about 1,7% of their land area would need to to covered with panels to supply that. (This is obviously napkin math and just a thought exercise) If they were to convert their…

So why is Denmark along with the Swiss currently working on Thorum?

Re: Fossil Fuels Are 40% of Freight Shipping Tonnage, but Half Its Fuel Use

#115

Post by Danox »

netsharc wrote: post #2

What the hell is this headline and the article trying to say..? "40% of horse-drawn carriage cargo is hay, but 50% of what we feed horses is hay". So what?

It’s kind of ironic sometime in the future due to technology advances we’re going regret you burning all of that oil and gas because it’s actually more useful making other things fertilizer, drugs and new type of materials.

Re: Fossil Fuels Are 40% of Freight Shipping Tonnage, but Half Its Fuel Use

#116

Post by Danox »

Spooky23 wrote: post #30
megaman821 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is orthogonal to the point. Shipping is considered a hard industry to reduce CO2 emissions, like aviation, but unlike aviation, 50% of the distance ships are traveling are just delivering fuel. So solving non-shipping fuel use solves nearly half of shipping fuel use. The remaining uses of shipping are also much more tractable to electrify.

It’s also a clue as to why there’s such serious political opposition to wind and solar and to some extent nuclear for electric generation. Point of use generation is disruptive to many industries… not just petroleum but automotive, trucking, various services that serve both, etc. There’s a significant portion of the population employed by schlepping oil around and doing things with it to support those activities.

It’s called civilization and with 8 billion people on the planet oil and gas isn’t going away fertilizer and drugs aren’t gonna go out of style.

Re: Fossil Fuels Are 40% of Freight Shipping Tonnage, but Half Its Fuel Use

#117

Post by bryanlarsen »

Animats wrote: post #74
bryanlarsen wrote: post #27

The top graph makes it seem much more dramatic than it is. Maritime shipping is very efficient, and consists of a very small fraction of overall petroleum usage. Road transportation uses about 20x as much fuel as ocean shipping, planes use about 2x as much, and trains about the same amount. The typical rule of thumb is that about 40% of the energy in a barrel of petroleum is lost before it goes into your gas tank. An…

> The top graph makes it seem much more dramatic than it is. It's all projections, too. They don't even have a line to show where they are going from actuals to guesses.

Does "the future is a prediction" actually have to be explicitly stated?

Re: Fossil Fuels Are 40% of Freight Shipping Tonnage, but Half Its Fuel Use

#118

Post by tialaramex »

sarchertech wrote: post #66
kleiba2 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before the Iran war, I did a back of the envelope calculation for the price of gas of your average ICE for a certain fixed range vs. the price of electricity an average EV uses for the same range. This was under the assumption that you buy electricity at a random charging station that you don't have a contract with. Based on these average values I used, EVs fared slightly worse. This was not factoring in costs of pur…

Were you using DC fast charging stations or level 2? Fast charging is about 2x the price.

If you think about it as "buying fuel" rather than as just a routine part of owning the vehicle I think the "fast charging" seems like how you'd do it. Like how at the turn of the century people bought a mobile telephone to make telephone calls. What do mean it's a computer? Why would you want a handheld computer?

Humans are like this about a lot of things, imagine what it was like before widespread universal literacy. Why are we teaching everybody to read? What are they going to do with that skill? Until you've tried it, the fact that your entire populace can read doesn't seem like it would make a big difference.

Re: Fossil Fuels Are 40% of Freight Shipping Tonnage, but Half Its Fuel Use

#119

Post by bryanlarsen »

lostlogin wrote: post #89
crote wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are way more cars than planes.

Oh, is this a fleet measure rather than a 'per unit moved'?

Yes, all road transport together uses 20x as much fuel as all marine transport together.

Re: Fossil Fuels Are 40% of Freight Shipping Tonnage, but Half Its Fuel Use

#120

Post by quickthrowman »

roelschroeven wrote: post #87
bruce511 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> The “dirty electricity” angle is less obvious to me. A power plant typically gets about 60% of energy from a fossil source. A car does about 30%. So even if the electricity comes from say coal, it's still more efficient than buying gas in a car engine. Of course, these days, it's likely that a substantial portion (up to 100% in some cases) is not "fossil electricity" but rather comes from solar, wind, hydro etc. I…

60% efficiency? How do these power plants manage to circumvent the limit set by Carnot efficiency?

They don’t. they capture the waste heat from the gas turbine and use it to make steam to spin another turbine. A gas turbine is ~40% efficient, add in a HRSG to make a combined cycle plant and you can get up to ~60%. You don’t even need a gas turbine to use a HRSG, any exhaust stream with enough heat will work, a boiler plant or similar.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_recovery_steam_generator

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined-cycle_power_plant

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