- Advanced Batteries
- Clean Transportation
- Decarbonization
- Electric Vehicles
Three Transportation Sectors with No Direct Path to Meaningful Emissions Reduction
In April, attended the Advanced Clean Transportation Expo to learn about some of the new solutions for transportation emissions reductions. To date, light duty (LD) vehicle electrification has largely been the focal point of regulators and manufacturers. This focus has paid off; electrification for almost the entire global LD fleet is relatively attainable from a technological and economic standpoint if declining battery cost projections are realized. Most LD use cases can be sufficiently met by current lithium ion batteries that can slow charge overnight anywhere with the equivalent of a household plug, and cross-country fast charging networks are being developed to support regional travel.
With the LD use case more or less solved, attention is turning toward medium duty (MD) and heavy duty (HD) vehicles with highly predictable routes. Many of the same technologies used for the LD sector are scaling up to meet the use case demands of MD and predictable HD vehicles. This includes larger battery packs of the same chemistry and higher level depot charging with supplemental on-route charging in specific cases.
The Challenges Electrification Cannot Address
However, HD trucks used for long-haul freight, aviation, and shipping each have fundamental use case challenges that current electrification technologies cannot address, which needs to be reckoned. Each use case will need a fundamentally new technology transformation for decarbonization:
- Long-haul freight: Long-haul trucks can travel approximately 600 miles in between rest periods—the exact range Elon Musk and Tesla have promised in their upcoming battery electric semi (production is now delayed until 2020). However, no other manufacturer has yet announced intentions for truck models that can achieve near that range. The weight of the battery pack required to achieve 600 miles may likely eat into the available weight for the payload. Additionally, even with decreasing battery costs, the size of the battery packs remains a prohibitive factor. Furthermore, there is no comprehensive charging network that can supply power at speeds required to keep downtime to a minimum—and even if there were, these charging networks would have an additional host of problems related to grid infrastructure. It is worth noting that both Tesla and Daimler are currently investing in >1 MW level charging for HD trucks.
- Aviation: Aircraft electrification has gained some of the media spotlight. Harbour Air, a company based in Vancouver, British Columbia, will begin electrifying their fleet (which primarily provides short-haul and tourism services) this year, and OSM Aviation placed an order for 60 of Bye Aerospace’s eFlyer 2. Other companies are also investing in electric hybrid technologies. Though new and environmentally conscious, electrifying these applications is a drop in the bucket compared to the rest of the commercial flight industry, which consumed almost 26 billion gallons of jet fuel in 2017 in the US alone. Current chemistry battery pack sizes required to support current flights would weigh approximately 15-20 times the weight of the aircraft.
- Shipping: There are many challenges to decarbonizing maritime shipping. One is the difference in energy density between fuel used and commercially available battery chemistries. This is compounded by the fact that container ships often spend weeks at a time between ports with nowhere to recharge along the way. Electrification in the future has potential in niche applications of short distance shipping, hybridization, and near-port operations. Rather, emissions reductions are more likely to come from bio-LNG.
The path to decreasing emissions in these sectors is not straightforward. Manufacturers and policymakers may have to look to other alternative fuel sources for opportunities to meet increasingly strict global emissions reduction requirements.