The US will waste a lot of time, money, and energy on bad decarbonizing transportation approaches and end up less competitive as a result.
The US published a transportation blueprint recently. It has two big chunks. The first deals with shifting transportation to lower carbon models through urban densification and strategies to push freight to rail and water.
Then there’s light trucking and buses. Mostly electric, but with both hydrogen and sustainable fuels represented. There are a couple of data points to make clear what the global leading practice is: China has 600,000 electric buses on the roads of its cities and there are over 400,000 electric trucks doing everything from garbage collection to servicing parks to hauling freight.
A better blueprint wouldn’t have platitudes about mode-shifting to water and rail, but clarity on what is preventing that and strong actions to deal with it. It doesn’t, so road freight will continue to dominate longer distance transportation. Some catenary overhead on key interstate segments, something that’s not unusual in Europe, would go a long way to making long-haul road freight viable quickly, but is deeply unlikely.
An effective policy would be to cut the miles of rail in half, electrify the 80% or so that’s necessary to electrify, and use batteries in standard containers plugged into locomotives to bridge the gaps. Instead, rail is going to be stuck with biofuels which will increase their fuel costs while road trucking goes with cheaper electrons. And, of course, hydrogen has no play in rail despite pretenses and experiments otherwise.
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