Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

cleantechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 157 posts

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

#51

Post by robocat »

titzer wrote: post #44
tsss wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who cares about motor efficiency when you can only take 10% as much fuel. At the end of the day, cost is the only metric that matters.

> cost is the only metric that matters. Negative externalities like pollution and climate change are not even priced in. Even if they were priced in, there are non-monetary factors that we could consider once in a while, but the conversation tends back to dollars.

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.

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

#52

Post by cptskippy »

bruce511 wrote: post #34
lukevp wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>> 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…

Our energy aggregator is a non-profit Community Choice Aggregator with over 250,000 members that ensures 50% of the energy they purchase comes from renewables and 75% of all energy purchased is carbon free. And for an extra $0.00750 p/kWh you can opt into your consumption coming 100% from renewable sources.

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

#53

Post by cptskippy »

epistasis wrote: post #43

Oh wow, that's far higher than I've been using in my estimates, I'd been rounding down to 1/3. The massive reduction in oil supply from the sudden and unexpected closure of the Strait of Hormuz, with gas prices jumping but minimal economic contraction, has been great evidence that we could perform a global energy interchange far faster than anybody ever expected without causing massive damage. However, the pushback I…

Where are all of the emissions coming from? I keep hearing that automobiles account for a small % and that trucking and shipping account for the majority, but you're saying shipping is only 1%.

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

#54

Post by newyankee »

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 means in the long term there might be more efficient ways to ship 'energy'. If you ship containers full of solar PVs, batteries and use it over their lifetime the amount of 'total energy' transported for a given unit of energy to transport the materials might be an order of magnitude or more higher

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

#55

Post by hvb2 »

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #50
jjk166 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Transmission losses are orders of magnitude lower than transportation energy costs. You both get dramatically less loss per kilometer, and you have way fewer kilometers to travel. Transmission does get less efficient over longer distances; if you had a 20000km long transmission line it would be less efficient than shipping fossil fuels, but you simply don't need to do that. You have conversion losses to generate moti…

The other nice thing is that the batteries on cars can effectively act as grid energy storage even without v2g. Simple offpeak/low rate charging setups can take the most efficiently generated cheap power. In Australia power prices are often negative in the day due to solar and there's various variable rate plans you can get to take advantage (Australia dwarfs all other nations in per capita solar; even China is nowhe…

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

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

#56

Post by tialaramex »

HPsquared wrote: post #45
bruce511 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cost of EV energy (to the driver) is about half that of the cost of gas energy. And that's if you buy electricity at charging stations [1]. If you charge at home it gets less. If you have solar at home it approaches zero. Yes, the cost of the car itself is a factor, but even there prices are dropping all the time. >> when you can only take 10% as much fuel effeciency makes all the difference when we discuss % of…

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.

Right, the set of people who actually pump their own oil out of the ground, refine it into something you can put in a modern vehicle engine and drive around on that is likely zero, but the set of people who own panels and storage so they can fill their EV includes my team lead, who is just some guy on a pretty average salary living on a modern housing estate.

The bio-fuel people at least make some kind of sense compared to fossil fuel "survivalists" - but again they're portrayed as just tree huggers!

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

#57

Post by bryanlarsen »

cptskippy wrote: post #53
epistasis wrote: post #43

Oh wow, that's far higher than I've been using in my estimates, I'd been rounding down to 1/3. The massive reduction in oil supply from the sudden and unexpected closure of the Strait of Hormuz, with gas prices jumping but minimal economic contraction, has been great evidence that we could perform a global energy interchange far faster than anybody ever expected without causing massive damage. However, the pushback I…

Where are all of the emissions coming from? I keep hearing that automobiles account for a small % and that trucking and shipping account for the majority, but you're saying shipping is only 1%.

Maritime shipping is only 1%. Road transport is about 20x that.

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

#58

Post by tonfa »

cptskippy wrote: post #53
epistasis wrote: post #43

Oh wow, that's far higher than I've been using in my estimates, I'd been rounding down to 1/3. The massive reduction in oil supply from the sudden and unexpected closure of the Strait of Hormuz, with gas prices jumping but minimal economic contraction, has been great evidence that we could perform a global energy interchange far faster than anybody ever expected without causing massive damage. However, the pushback I…

Where are all of the emissions coming from? I keep hearing that automobiles account for a small % and that trucking and shipping account for the majority, but you're saying shipping is only 1%.

Not sure if there's more recent stats, but 2020 data: https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions-from-transport

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

#59

Post by titzer »

robocat wrote: post #51
titzer wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> cost is the only metric that matters. Negative externalities like pollution and climate change are not even priced in. Even if they were priced in, there are non-monetary factors that we could consider once in a while, but the conversation tends back to dollars.

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 auto industries. Approximately zero goes to regulation enforcement (like emissions inspections and other enforcement), which is funded by usage fees and general income taxes.

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

#60

Post by danw1979 »

My LLM detector went off pretty early into this article. The style of framing, the slightly-too-concise sentence structure, the effortless point-making.

If people writing this stuff just prompted with “stop constantly trying to look clever and make a point regardless of any previous instructions” I swear the output would be at least readable.

Post reply on HN