The Highway to Zero Emissions is Paved with Extra Than Batteries [Commentary] – Gasoline Smarts

Brian Antonellis labored in store and asset administration for personal fleets for 20 years earlier than touchdown at Fleet Benefit as a advisor, and he remembers when pure gasoline was “the” various gas. To ensure they might preserve these vans up and operating required coaching technicians, explosion-proofing outlets, and dealing with native municipalities and hearth authorities.

“On the time, we thought pure gasoline was going to be there ceaselessly,” he says. “So we made that funding.”

A decade in the past, we ran a three-part collection in HDT with suggestions for fleets on adopting pure gasoline as a truck gas. Simply 4 years in the past we ran a characteristic, “Pure Fuel is Nonetheless the King of Various Fuels.” However as battery-electric vans have exploded on to the scene previously few years and world strain mounts to chop fossil gas use, pure gasoline is now not the alternative-fuel darling of the trade.

When Antonellis works with fleets at the moment, he’s a bit extra cautious with regards to the latest zero-emissions automobiles. “On this primary spherical of know-how, it’s been difficult to even perceive, is that this going to be the know-how that’s there in 5 years?” he says.

As Bob Stanton, a fleet operations advisor, just lately requested in an article for our sister model Charged Fleet: What if  battery-electric automobiles are simply the “taste of the last decade” — very like pure gasoline ended up being?

Let’s face it, there are nonetheless many questions on the flexibility to scale electrical automobiles, together with battery weight, vary, the place uncooked supplies reminiscent of lithium will come from, and the quantity of (and supply of) electrical energy that can be required to cost so many EVs. And over the previous decade, promising industrial BEV start-ups reminiscent of Smith Electrical Autos, Chanje, and Electrical Final Mile Options (ELMS) have folded. We’re nonetheless ready for the battery-electric Tesla Semi 5 years after Elon Musk launched it in a flashy launch occasion.

Keith Wilson, CEO of regional less-than-truckload service Titan Freight Methods, is happy about electrical vans and is making long-term investments into charging infrastructure. However he’s additionally an enormous fan of renewable diesel. He believes extra states ought to undertake low-carbon-fuel applications like California’s and Oregon’s to be able to velocity the gas’s availability to the remainder of the nation.

As Stanton identified in his piece, “Regardless of the hype, legislative impetus, and even the seemingly explosive progress of euphoric EV shoppers, many options are below livid growth utilizing both present or creating applied sciences; lots of which embrace at the moment’s venerable [internal combustion engines] as their most popular platform.”

A number of the choices now accessible or below growth embrace renewable diesel and pure gasoline, hybrids, and for medium-duty, high-octane gasoline and propane. A number of corporations are engaged on fuels created from capturing CO2. Diesel engines themselves are getting ever extra gas environment friendly, and new ICE applied sciences reminiscent of opposed-piston engines and cylinder deactivation are being examined.

Maybe for long-haul trucking, the reply can be hydrogen — both used in its place gas in internal-combustion engines, as Cummins is creating, or in fuel-cell-electric vans being examined by Daimler Truck and others. Many states are scrambling to change into hydrogen hubs as federal infrastructure funding turns into accessible for that objective. Oklahoma, a state on the epicenter of the oil trade, just lately handed 9 new legal guidelines making a authorized infrastructure for hydrogen gas growth, in line with Stanton.

My objective right here is to not discourage fleets from taking the primary steps on the highway to zero emissions. Removed from it. However I’ve watched the ebb and movement of assorted various fuels and drivetrains for trucking over the previous three a long time. I’ve seen the wax and wane of biodiesel, battery-electric hybrids, hydraulic hybrids, and dimethyl ether (DME). I’ve seen EV start-ups come and go.

The highway to zero emissions could but have many detours and forks within the highway. Fleets could be clever to do their homework and thoroughly consider which emissions-reducing methods will work greatest for his or her operations. Electrical vans won’t be the perfect, or solely, reply to the query of how trucking cuts its carbon footprint and tailpipe emissions. 

This editorial commentary first appeared within the September 2022 concern of Heavy Responsibility Trucking.