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Fossil Fuels Are 40% of Freight Shipping Tonnage, but Half Its Fuel Use
- netsharc 3mo agoWhat 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?
- halJordan 3mo agoFrom the fucking article: Fossil fuel cargoes travel long distances in very large flows, so their decline removes more than a proportional share of cargo mass. It removes a larger share of the ocean work and the fuel burned to do that work. And if I can get on my soapbox. This same problem (carrying fuel to feed the transportation unit) is well studied in medieval England because it was one of the main determinants of where cities and castles were placed (albeit unknowingly at the time). And we see what happened in England when they were able to get out from under feeding oxen.
- dboreham 3mo agoSee also Coals from Newcastle.
- idontwantthis 3mo agohttps://acoup.blog/2022/07/15/collections-logistics-how-did-they-do-it-part-i-the-problem/ https://acoup.blog/2022/07/15/collections-logistics-how-did-... The Tyranny of the Wagon
- bryanlarsen 3mo agoAre you making a reference to the Tyranny of the Rocket Equation? The Earth's gravity is so large that it's almost at the limit of chemical rockets. A typical rocket is 90% propellant by mass, 8% structure and 2% payload.
- jfengel 3mo agoFTA: "We may call this problem the ‘tyranny of the wagon equation’ as a number of readers have noticed the similarity to the tyranny of the rocket equation."
- idontwantthis 3mo agoGod’s work.
- pfdietz 3mo agoIt's mathematically very similar.
- throwup238 3mo agoYes it’s a reference to the tyranny of the rocket equation. The same principle applies to wagon logistics because the animals and driver are constantly eating the food the wagons carry.
- api 3mo agoI’ve wondered if this belongs on the Fermi paradox pile. Many biospheres may be more massive planets that are so hard to get off that a space enterprise never starts. Meanwhile lighter planets might have trouble holding onto atmospheres.
- zahlman 3mo ago> It removes a larger share of the ocean work and the fuel burned to do that work. Sure, but as long as ratio of fuel moved:fuel used is good enough, people won't care (as demonstrated by historical data). This isn't an argument that leads to change. For those not already convinced of the climate crisis, you'll need to lean on economics.
- megaman821 3mo agoThat 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.
- Spooky23 3mo agoIt’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.
- Danox 3mo agoIt’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.
- Spooky23 3mo agoVery marginal changes in consumption have large impacts on profitability for oil industry stakeholders. Only an idiot would say “solar makes oils and gas go away”, which is why I didn’t say that. Conversely, subsidizing pickup trucks so insecure men feel powerful at 9 mpg doesn’t secure the future of fertilizer and pharma.
- bestouff 3mo agoSo 10% is a lot.
- pfortuny 3mo agoIt is so weird that it makes 40% sense of 50% its length.
- grey-area 3mo agoIt’s trying to say what if we didn’t have to haul energy around from place to place but generate it closer to consumption - we could move more useful stuff instead.
- penteract 3mo agoIt's saying that 40% of the tons of cargo loaded onto ships is fossil fuels, but this makes up about 50% of ton-miles, because fossil fuels travel further on average than other cargo. Not the easiest headline to correctly parse.
- gertlex 3mo agoI read this and another half-dozen replies to the parent comment (but not the article, of course...) and was still confused. This comment was the clearest to getting me to understand it. Example contributors as I presently understand it: - we transport fossil fuels further around world (i.e. Middle East to the US) - we transport most other goods some shorter distances - iron ore transport is "up there" with fossil fuels; high ton-miles of transport. And of course the cost of transport for a good is a function of distance, a la the rocket equation mentioned in other comments. And the article is focused on making this point in the context of the effect of reduced demand for fossil fuels and steel (iron ore) on maritime demand. (which is interesting, and totally not what the article title was leading my brain to think about) Edit: And then I went and actually looked at the figure at the top of the article; guess the real topic is yet a different framing than what I comment on above!
- joss82 3mo agoThat is not what I understood from the article. What I understand is: Fossil fuels are 40% of freight tonnage, but transporting them fuels is responsible for 50% of the total freight fuel consumption. I assume 99% of freight uses fossil sources as fuel.
- mithras 3mo agoSo basically a very friendly version of the rocket equation.
- joss82 3mo agoThere is no mention of the amount of fuel used to transport the fuel in the article. From what I know it’s a tiny fraction: boats are efficient at transporting stuff (slowly)
- gertlex 3mo agoI kind of read this > Fossil fuels are roughly 40% of maritime tonnage, but in the model they represent about half of maritime freight energy because coal, oil, and gas are mostly long-haul bulk trades. Moving a ton of scrap metal a short distance and moving a ton of oil or LNG across oceans are not the same transport-energy problem, even if both show up as one ton in a cargo table. as being exactly what was being talked about... more fuel is spent on transporting fuel due to distance it travels. but your comment made me re-visit (i.e. more closely skim...) the article, and it's really about: "as the demand for fossil fuels is projected to decrease, (1) less long-haul shipping is needed and (2) a greater fraction of shipping will be short-haul, which will be practical for other types of freight fueling (i.e. what's shown in the figure at the top of the article) I have no sense of how realistic the figure is. For example, I don't know the current projections for decline of fossil fuel demand over ?? year timeframe.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- sourcegrift 3mo agoThe preposition ("butt") is wrong
- crazygringo 3mo agoI swear to God, I've read the article twice and I've read the comments replying to your question and I still have no idea. I think the problem is that, for any given sentence, it is unclear whether the author is talking about the fuel a ship is burning to move its cargo, or fuel that the ship is transporting to a destination. I do understand that the article is making some kind of distinction between the two, but it is so terribly written that it's just impossible to figure out which one it's talking about at which point. Or at least I certainly don't care to waste my time "solving" the article like it's some kind of linguistic puzzle. I'm not sure I've ever come across an article that needed an editor to improve its clarity more than this one.
- newyankee 3mo agoIt 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
- internet_points 3mo agoIf you stop using horses other places, you don't need to move around hay, so you need even fewer horses. (If the world generally uses less fossil fuels, the demand for shipping goes down as well, since much of shipping is just shuffling around fossil fuels.)
- Danox 3mo agoIt’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.
- softwareseko 3mo ago[flagged]
- metalspot 3mo agoThe chart at the top of the article makes it clear that the entire thing is pure fantasy
- mynegation 3mo agoTo summarize: 40% of tonnage but 50% of tonnage-kilometres. I thought freight volume would be measured in ton-kilometres in the first place.
- braiamp 3mo agoTo further give context: the article is saying that most of the fuel transported around is done for long distances, so when something removes fuel use in the consumer side it has a double dip effect: less fuel consumed and less fuel used to transport the fuel, since long fuel supplies route diminish. It's a third order of thinking and that's why it's confusing. The article then argues that reducing that consumption in the buyers side is more effective: > This is the part that fuel-first narratives tend to miss. In a serious energy transition, coal demand falls, oil demand falls, and gas demand falls. That means fewer bulk carriers and tankers moving fossil energy around the world. The maritime sector does not have to find a one-for-one replacement fuel for all of that work, because a material share of the work should disappear. I would argue that chipping away at all three sides of the equation reducing the amount of fuel used, the amount of fuel used for transport and transporting things using other that fuel are worth pursuing.
- margalabargala 3mo agoI wonder if this actually has the potential to have the opposite effect. If an oil producer electrifies faster than average, for example Norway, then oil that might have been consumed domestically instead is shipped overseas.
- dalyons 3mo agoThere are relatively few oil exporting countries so probably not a big effect
- crote 3mo agoNorway has an abundance of hydro power. They've had an almost-entirely renewable grid even before the energy transition begin. Combine that with their small population and large oil reserves, and they have always exported far more than they have consumed domestically. In theory the small amount of additional available oil due to domestic electrification might become available for export, but I expect that the global drop in demand due to worldwide electrification will make that unlikely: they'll just slow down production to avoid flooding the market and crashing the oil price.
- bryanlarsen 3mo agoThe 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. And the two big factors are the energy required to do the refining and delivering the fuel from the refinery to the gas station. Shipping the crude from the oil field to the refinery is a factor, but a small one in comparison. This 40% is the main reason why driving an EV emits less carbon than driving an equivalently sized gas vehicle even if you're topping up that EV with the dirtiest electricity you can find. P.S. maritime shipping typically uses very dirty fuel. We'll probably notice the reduction in sulfur pollution more than the reduction in CO2. P.P.S 3% of a very large number is still itself a large number, so it's still worth looking for solutions.
- lukevp 3mo agoWhy 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 transportation using clean energy is an obvious benefit of EVs. The “dirty electricity” angle is less obvious to me.
- bruce511 3mo agoIn an EV about 90% of the energy used is converted into motion. About 10% goes to heat. [1][3] In an ICE engine about 30% of the energy becomes motion. About 70% is heat.[2] In other words electric motors are about 3 times more efficient than ICE. [1] an interesting side effect of this is that in cold climates you can't just harvest waste heat to heat the cabin (or batteries. ) So you end up using some battery energy if you need heat. [2] ICE motors vary in effeciency a lot. 20-30% is typical. The Carnot formula comes into play here. [3] because there is so little heat generated, the cooling systems (EVs still have them) are much smaller. And simpler (for example, no fan, 'cause there's no heat when standing still.)
- hedora 3mo agoThe headline is only surprising if shipping is the majority of fuel use. It isn’t. In the limit, if it were 100% of fuel use, then we’d be burning 1.2 gallons of fossil fuel to deliver 1 gallon, which clearly wouldn’t work. A much better question is “what percentage of the embodied carbon for this good is from freight shipping”? The answer is almost always very low because last mile shipping dominates, and so does manufacturing the item. For fossil fuel, those things dominate, and so does the step where the customer burns the fuel. Basically, the entire article is confused because it doesn’t start with the fossil fuel equivalent of Amdahl’s Law.
- epistasis 3mo agoOh 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've been hearing a lot is that ocean freight still needs fossil fuels, that's always going to be a blocker. In reality, it's only ~1% of emissions, and half of it goes away when we stop other uses, so solving that 0.5% of fossil fuel use, or even still emitting it, is really a rounding error. (And methanol or ammonia as well as other synthetic fuels based off hydrogen production have a great chance of stepping into that, especially as we massively scale ammonia production from electrolyzers, which also solves the fertilizer that has been caused by closing the Strait of Hormuz). Fossil fuel based economies are inherently fragile and bound to massive price increase cycles. Changing our economies to be powered by renewables and storage will be far more stable, cheaper, and bring a massive increase in economic output. We can't switch fast enough.
- cptskippy 3mo agoWhere 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%.
- bryanlarsen 3mo agoMaritime shipping is only 1%. Road transport is about 20x that.
- tonfa 3mo agoNot sure if there's more recent stats, but 2020 data: https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions-from-transport https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions-from-transport
- jeffbee 3mo agoThat isn't true about private automobiles and I would be interested to know where you have been hearing it. It must come from some party with a vested interest in making car emissions seem like a non-problem. In reality, car emissions are the main thing that Americans and most other rich countries should be trying to address. Here's a graphic of the latest data available for California, as an example: https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/sites/default/files/images/2023_scoping_plan_sub-category.png https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/sites/default/files/images/2023_scopi...
- danw1979 3mo agoMy 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.
- userbinator 3mo agoAnd >90% of the mass of a rocket is fuel. So what?
- Anounimus 3mo agoAnonymous
- Anounimus 3mo agoAnonymous
- scotty79 3mo agoThat makes me wonder... How much fuel is burned to carry fuel?