Fossil Fuels Are 40% of Freight Shipping Tonnage, but Half Its Fuel Use
cleantechnica.com29 points by choult 2 hours ago
29 points by choult 2 hours ago
To summarize: 40% of tonnage but 50% of tonnage-kilometres. I thought freight volume would be measured in ton-kilometres in the first place.
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?
I 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.
From 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.
> 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.
https://acoup.blog/2022/07/15/collections-logistics-how-did-...
The Tyranny of the Wagon
Are 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.
Yes 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.
FTA: "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."
I’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.
It'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.
I 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!
That 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.
So basically a very friendly version of the rocket equation.
There 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)
I 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.
It’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.
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The chart at the top of the article makes it clear that the entire thing is pure fantasy