The Road to Zero Emissions

As part of its examination of the future development of alternative fuels for the trucking industry, PowerTorque looks at the road to zero emissions.

Although there is an inevitability about the trucking industry moving to a zero emissions model, there is no defined plan or timeline for the us to follow. There is no clear picture of what the technology mix will be, and no idea which technology will achieve the desired emission reduction. 

At the moment there are a number of competing technologies being developed, but little knowledge about how those technologies will play out, which will succeed and which will fall by the wayside. Battery electric trucks are going to predominate in shorter freight transport tasks, but where the cut-off point, between electric and other technologies like hydrogen fuel cell, hydrogen internal combustion engines (ICE) and fuels like biodiesel, is impossible to estimate, at this time.

One thing is certain, and that is uncertainty, the time period between the introduction of the first zero emission vehicles and the point at which the fog of uncertainty about the effectiveness of each technology clears is going to be a long one, the length of which we can only guess at, in 2023.

The North American Council for Freight Efficiency (NACFE) has come up with the term the ‘messy middle’ for that uncertainty, the period when road transport fleets will be faced with a number of powertrain options including advanced diesel, renewable fuels, natural gas, hydrogen, hybrids, battery electric power and hydrogen fuel cells.

There will be no single right solution and the variety of choices will make it difficult for operations to work out which options are suitable for their particular freight task.

“While this period can be complicated, NACFE regards it as a time where trucking will have to evaluate many options and look beyond just the truck to the infrastructure needed to support that truck,” says NACFE in its ‘The Messy Middle – A Time For Action’ report. 

“It is critical that fleets have reliable data on which to base their decisions in order to make proper choices. There are new dynamics at play in the trucking industry including changing customer and stakeholder expectations, the introduction of new engines, regulations and incentives, operational changes, and other factors including fuel price instability and uncertainty about the second life of some of the alternative fuelled vehicles.”

There are a number of factors trucking operations will have to get up to speed on: the maturity of the technologies, the range of the vehicles and route flexibility, infrastructure, vehicle integration, and available incentives.