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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

#141

Post by nextaccountic »

pwg wrote: post #75
crote wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> buy electricity at a random charging station Well there's your problem. Try doing the same calculation with the average residential electricity cost. Most car use is for commutes after all, so most people can just charge their EV in their driveway every night. Destination charging and rapid charging are notoriously expensive. It's a luxury product intended for a once-a-year road trip. It is not even remotely repres…

> so most people can just charge their EV in their driveway every night. That does presume that those "most people" have a driveway where they can do charging. I.e., all apartment dwellers with cars in parking lots/garages (excluding those few that may have installed electrical plugs at each parking spot) are cut off, as are city dwellers without driveways who park on the street (or in another garage, again without e…

> until that happens

Maybe society can coordinate that? The CO2 being emitted isn't waiting

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

#142

Post by robocat »

titzer wrote: post #59
robocat wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many countries have high fuel taxes that approximate pricing in the negative externalities. Assuming you think price as a signal is the solution to dealing with those externalities, it doesn't matter what caused the price to be high.

Fuel taxes are "in theory" the mechanism to price these in, but today, they are not, and how this money eventually has the opposite effect! Revenue from fuel taxes is usually funneled to more transportation infrastructure (> 80% to road construction in the US, only 15% to mass transit). The vast (and ironic!) indirect effect is more cars, more car miles, and more consumption--a long-term, indirect subsidy to fuel and…

My underlying point is that money is fungible.

How you account for the tax dollars received doesn't affect the pricing signal.

We have accounting systems to colour tax dollars. However that doesn't mean you can define cause and effect like you are attempting to do. Although I've no idea what we should do.

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

#143

Post by bigfatkitten »

lukevp wrote: post #31
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…

Why is the EV better? Because electricity transmission is more efficient than gas? What about the losses in the electricity transmission and the batteries and the conversion to motive force in the motor? Is it way less than that 40%? And wouldn’t there be more than 0% losses because refinery -> power plant shipping? I’m pro EV by the way, I just want to understand your point better. Being able to go all the way to tr…

Even if you charged your EV from a diesel genset every day, you’d be burning that fuel much more efficiently running the genset under a constant ~75% load than you would be burning it in an equivalent ICE vehicle.

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

#144

Post by robocat »

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.

Is the hydro power already mostly consumed?

What actually matters is where extra generation occurs to handle the marginal new load of new electric vehicles.

Everyone fools themselves because they look at the current percentage of hydropower and think that is what powers their car - when it rarely is.

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

#145

Post by ralferoo »

qsera wrote: post #72
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.

>It's an amazing PR and marketing coup to make it the other way around and presented as something for "liberal weaklings" etc. If there is such a marketing, then people relate to it because EVs are not suited for handling unpredictable situation. You got stuck in a ditch in the middle of nowhere at night, you loss all of your battery getting out of it, and now you are stuck. So you can't take it to unforgiving places…

How often are you driving into ditches at night? Typically this is something that only happens somewhere between never and once to most drivers in their lifetime, and the ones that do end up in a ditch are usually drunk.

Aside from anything else, if you're in a ditch your car probably isn't drivable and needs towing somewhere to get fixed anyway. Whether you've used 100km of EV range trying and failing to get out of the ditch of 100km worth of fuel trying to get out of the ditch is irrelevant. If you need to use that much effort to get out of the ditch before realising it's a stupid plan that's not going to work and the correct solution is to call a tow truck, then you definitely shouldn't be driving that vehicle anyway.

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

#146

Post by plqbfbv »

lukevp wrote: post #31
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…

Why is the EV better? Because electricity transmission is more efficient than gas? What about the losses in the electricity transmission and the batteries and the conversion to motive force in the motor? Is it way less than that 40%? And wouldn’t there be more than 0% losses because refinery -> power plant shipping? I’m pro EV by the way, I just want to understand your point better. Being able to go all the way to tr…

> What about the losses in the electricity transmission and the batteries and the conversion to motive force in the motor? Is it way less than that 40%? And wouldn’t there be more than 0% losses because refinery -> power plant shipping?

I once read this article and I find the diagram at the top conveys the point perfectly: https://insideevs.com/news/332584/efficiency-compared-batter...

EDIT: I once replied to the occasional "but that's optimistic for EV and pessimistic for ICE" poster: IIRC, making every EV step 10% worse (e.g. 15% energy losses in transport, storage and distribution) still has EV come out on top by a decent margin.

That chart also partially tells the reason why hydrogen is not going to be a solution for cars: you'd be swapping gasoline for a much greener but only slightly more efficient fuel, while carrying around bulky tanks and having to redo the entire transport network (oil pipes won't do). Maybe for things were work/mass works in favor (naval shipping would likely be one of those) and/or for storage it may make economic sense.

Technology is evolving, so perhaps some day we'll be able to produce and store hydrogen with losses similar to the EV chain, but I doubt it: hydrogen is the simplest gas of all and it's extremely reactive, plus its molecules are tiny (it can leak through metals), so tanks and pipes need to be done with different materials, and I doubt we'll find better containment materials given the physics.

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

#147

Post by bryanlarsen »

sitkack wrote: post #128
gpm wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Two cars, much cheaper than a second battery pack. And you have a supply of rolling spare parts.

That's no longer the case. You can buy Chinese rack batteries for prices approaching $100/kWh.

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

#148

Post by bryanlarsen »

qsera wrote: post #72
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.

>It's an amazing PR and marketing coup to make it the other way around and presented as something for "liberal weaklings" etc. If there is such a marketing, then people relate to it because EVs are not suited for handling unpredictable situation. You got stuck in a ditch in the middle of nowhere at night, you loss all of your battery getting out of it, and now you are stuck. So you can't take it to unforgiving places…

A standard EV battery can power seat heaters for about a month. If you're "stuck in a ditch" you're better off with an electric car.

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

#149

Post by bryanlarsen »

Animats wrote: post #122
bryanlarsen wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes. It's important to know whose prediction, and what it's based on. ">15% of corporate revenue is expected to come from the metaverse in the next 5 years according to 25% of senior executives" - McKinsey [1] [1] https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-s...

The article cites sources.

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

#150

Post by gpm »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #147
sitkack wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two cars, much cheaper than a second battery pack. And you have a supply of rolling spare parts.

That's no longer the case. You can buy Chinese rack batteries for prices approaching $100/kWh.

Are they UL certified? If so do you have a brand you can point me at by any chance?
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