The most efficient way to lower the carbon footprint of land transportation are electric freight trains, with electricity generated by atomic power stations. Not everybody is ready to hear that...
The most efficient way to lower the carbon footprint of land transportation are electric freight trains, with electricity generated by atomic power stations.
Not everybody is ready to hear that though, and specially not Wall Street.
Also, this thread is better read, I suppose, with that other thread in mind.
I subscribe to this point of view, I do. I would add a few things, if I may. If said trains run only during daylight hours, on sunny days, which would be a huge departure from established...
I subscribe to this point of view, I do.
I would add a few things, if I may.
electric freight trains … solar
If said trains run only during daylight hours, on sunny days, which would be a huge departure from established logistics and would demand another novelty : elastic train schedules.
alternative energy sources
have thus far remained alternative for the same reason as above : unreliable, unpredictible, well, un-industrial.
you're carrying it long distances
Who, exactly, are you ?
We, the citizens-consumers, buy things that are long-hauled. We demand cheap gadgets manufactured on the other side of Earth. We expect the greengrocer around the corner to sell fruits from accross the continent. We must build those railways, if not with our own two hands, at least by pledging to pay the taxes that will see them built.
not quite so, I'm afraid and that's counting only domestic consumption. Add 20 % for the energy that's consumed outside of the UK but ultimately for the UK, typically offshored manufacturing....
wind, and bioenergy are supplying approx. just under 30%) of the UK's energy requirements
and that's counting only domestic consumption. Add 20 % for the energy that's consumed outside of the UK but ultimately for the UK, typically offshored manufacturing.
Pumped storage already exists in the UK, enough to put the kettle on at half-time, but not much more, and as no new mountains are expected any time soon, this will remain so.
As for freight train running on batteries, they've existed for long : toy trains. Cheap toys, that is. Rail modelling enthousiasts would't touch that. As for a real-life freight train doing real transportation business in the UK, you can start with a 3,700 kW Class 90 and see what kind of battery would be needed for a Dover-Sheffield road, and if perchance room remains for some payload.
a diverse mixture of sources
in the UK, that energy mix is driven by the North Sea petroleum and gas field, which, while they passed their peak in the 2000s, still offer some juicy profits for those who pump them, and who, incidently, just love wind and solar, whose intermittency makes natural gas obligatory.
Sorry, the supply chain will never run on thin air and sunshine. We can still make it low-carbon though, provided we stop bouncing silly ideas around.
Sure, rail is more efficient and it handles plenty of freight, but it doesn’t go to every farm, factory, warehouse, and store. We’re still going to need trucks. Often they are combined. It seems...
Sure, rail is more efficient and it handles plenty of freight, but it doesn’t go to every farm, factory, warehouse, and store. We’re still going to need trucks. Often they are combined.
It seems like, if this idea works out well for trucks, it could also apply to diesel-electric by putting a carbon-capture car behind the locomotive, and that could be done sooner than electrifying every railroad?
I guess, but they still need to load and unload containers onto the trains and I assume they’re already doing it when it makes sense. Also, you’re ignoring capital costs. This nice thing about...
I guess, but they still need to load and unload containers onto the trains and I assume they’re already doing it when it makes sense.
Also, you’re ignoring capital costs. This nice thing about this startup’s approach is that they can keep using the same trucks, at least until they need to be replaced.
Given that climate change is an urgent problem, it seems likely quicker to deploy. But we will see. Often, ideas sound good but there are downsides they’re not telling us about.
I don’t mean it’s conceptually hard or hasn’t been done, but there needs to be a crane wherever you want to do the loading or unloading, and someone needs to pay for and maintain it. Logistics is...
I don’t mean it’s conceptually hard or hasn’t been done, but there needs to be a crane wherever you want to do the loading or unloading, and someone needs to pay for and maintain it. Logistics is a whole industry, you know?
It seems like we’ve gotten as far as we’re going to get without using real numbers to look at costs in concrete situations.
… anymore. Used to, before the generalisation of the internal combustion engine. With more and more cities deploying light rail network, rail-to-retail becomes thinkable. Thus, trucking can be...
doesn’t go to every farm, factory, warehouse, and store
… anymore. Used to, before the generalisation of the internal combustion engine. With more and more cities deploying light rail network, rail-to-retail becomes thinkable. Thus, trucking can be limited to first and last miles, battery-electric or even horse-drawn.
One obvious corollary is that the tonnage thus transported be less than nowadays, which, anyways, paralels the fact that carbon neutrality demands that we drastically diminish our consumption of manufactured goods.
C&S is inevitable for some industrial processes that cannot be decarbonated, such as cement production or steel smeting. The aforelinked article however is the first where I see this idea applyed to transportation and moving vehicles. I'll just remark that no clue is given as to the business model and how the added cost will increase the consumer prices.
Now, on a worlwide scale, we're talking about 35 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide each year and the corresponding storage capacity simply doesn't exist : C&S is not the answer to everything.
The physics of mitigating climate change is quite simple : don't burn it, it won't emit. What's complicated is the mental shift required for us to depart from everything that's been taken for granted since the late 19^th century.
They talked about the business model a bit on Hacker News. Apparently they are starting out selling CO2 to companies like cement producers that have already decided to try to reduce their carbon...
They talked about the business model a bit on Hacker News. Apparently they are starting out selling CO2 to companies like cement producers that have already decided to try to reduce their carbon footprint.
It’s a brand new startup, though, so it remains to be seen whether it’s a niche, or they grow into a big business.
Producing cement already emits CO2 by calcination of limestone CaCO3 *+ lots of heat* → CaO + CO2 even before considering the furnaces that heat everything at 1,400 °C. It does not use carbon...
selling CO2 to companies like cement producers that have already decided to try to reduce their carbon footprint
Producing cement already emits CO2 by calcination of limestone
CaCO3 *+ lots of heat* → CaO + CO2
even before considering the furnaces that heat everything at 1,400 °C. It does not use carbon dioxide nor sequester it, unless there is some other cement that I'm not aware of.
I would suppose that the aforelinked advertising from Remora omits to mention that they somehow sequester the carbon dioxide they collect and then trade on carbon markets. In that case, cements producers, being huge emiters, are good clients for carbon offset.
In this line of business though, one model is to milk naive investors until they bleed. Remember the Nikola Motor Company ?
Yes, cement production emits lots of CO2. I don’t know that much about it, but it seems that CO2 infused cement might be a way to reduce that a bit? They’re saying they’re going to sell the CO2 to...
Yes, cement production emits lots of CO2. I don’t know that much about it, but it seems that CO2 infused cement might be a way to reduce that a bit? They’re saying they’re going to sell the CO2 to a cement producer, and maybe that’s why the cement producer wants to buy it?
I suppose a cement producer could also capture its own CO2 emissions for this purpose, but maybe that’s harder somehow.
Yes, one way to reduce the carbon footprint of concrete is to put a little less cement in it. As always with the general press, this WaPo article does not gives much numbers. Let's see : of cement...
Yes, one way to reduce the carbon footprint of concrete is to put a little less cement in it.
As always with the general press, this WaPo article does not gives much numbers. Let's see :
that is 2.45 billion metric tonnes, of which we do not knwow how much can be offset by carbon infused curing, which would be done at the site of pouring anyway and not during lime calcination.
And yes, if cement producers needed carbon dioxide, they could capture it from the chimneys of their own furnaces, which is much easier than on a moving vehicle with all the subsequent logistics.
Something like bringing coal to Newcastle, I'd say ;-)
Never underestimate the following facts : understanding climate change and its mitigation is hard. Not roket-surgery-hard, but hard enough that for an engineer with nothing better to do it takes a few tens of hours of dedicated learning to begin and understand what it's all about. For most investors dancing to the tunes of Wall Street, it's all Greek. Said investors are sitting ducks for fraudsters. I'm not saying that Remora is one of those, although thus far I haven't seen any indication of the contrary.
There are apparently different ways to use CO2, and using it during curing is only one of them: I’m not too worried about venture capitalists getting in early on this. They can do their own due...
There are apparently different ways to use CO2, and using it during curing is only one of them:
CO2 can be added in the form of aggregates — or injected during mixing. Carbonation curing, also known as CO2 curing, can also be used after concrete has been cast.
I’m not too worried about venture capitalists getting in early on this. They can do their own due diligence, or not. It’s a hit-driven business. Most startups fail, but they make money when there’s a hit.
For the rest of us, we can wait and see if it amounts to anything.
With the enormous amounts of electrified rail necessary in the US, I wonder if it's realistic to add a small-ish battery to a train so that the train can bridge gaps in electrification. THe...
With the enormous amounts of electrified rail necessary in the US, I wonder if it's realistic to add a small-ish battery to a train so that the train can bridge gaps in electrification. THe batteries could naturally be charged on the move, while connected to the grid.
The main problem with that approach could be that you need a good amount of battery size to even supply enough power to keep the train going. And then there's the math of figuring out how much charge you need to bridge what gaps exist.
Oh, absolutely. ELectric rail transport is not all or nothing. Step one: Get as much traffic onto rails as possible, using whatever motorization we have. That is soooo important because rail...
Oh, absolutely. ELectric rail transport is not all or nothing. Step one: Get as much traffic onto rails as possible, using whatever motorization we have. That is soooo important because rail transport is stupid efficient. One or two guys in the cap, a few in the railyards here and there and you can transport a few hundred truck loads worth of goods. By pure physics alone, a train is about 2-8 times more efficient compares to a truck. And we haven't considered air resistance yet, where the frontal cross section of a train is about equal to that of a truck.
Step two: Electrify as much as possible. Use it to power diesel-electric trains.
Step three: Full electrification, electric trains.
I wonder: These diesel engines must be heavy and big. Should give you plenty of room for a battery if you tear em out. Wonder what the range on such a conversion would be.
I just found out that apparently bi-mode trains aren't officially hybrid vehicles, because they still rely on one source of power: Electric power. Guess they are electric vehicles then O.o
Anyway, here's a ballpark guess for range: The Bombardier Traxx I'm looking at has ~8 tons of diesel engines installed. If we replace that, we get, say, 200Wh/kg. Divide by the power rating of the diesel engines, and we get about 45 minutes of off-grid operation. Any ancillary equipment (or extra battery life) could fit where the 2.5t diesel tank used to be. That doesn't even sound bad. At max speed that would be 120km of range, without any compromises yet. The vehicle did not get heavier or slower. Well, probably about 300k$ more expensive. And maybe the electricals would need to be beefed up a bit to allow for underway charging.
Anytime I see a quality big rig image or a nicely customized 18-wheeler (especially with a matching trailer) I think of the old reddit user /u/metsrulesonearth who religiously posted big rigs...
anyone who is a fan of sexy 18-wheelers is going to enjoy the beauty of the pictures on that page, but also the tech they've created.
Anytime I see a quality big rig image or a nicely customized 18-wheeler (especially with a matching trailer) I think of the old reddit user /u/metsrulesonearth who religiously posted big rigs (often Australian road trains) in the early days of /r/pics and, so the story goes, over time received enough flak for it that he deleted his account. Couldn't just let the man like trucks, gotta have the oh-so-high-quality reposts all the time instead.
This has me really hopeful. I grew up around 18-wheelers, mostly with their hoods up, axles off, and their leaf springs pulled apart. I've heard that the new truck controls and emissions...
This has me really hopeful. I grew up around 18-wheelers, mostly with their hoods up, axles off, and their leaf springs pulled apart. I've heard that the new truck controls and emissions restrictions are making trucks far more difficult to repair and it's causing a lot of downtime. Many operators are opting not avoid newer trucks or are specifically getting older trucks/rebuilding engines and getting them properly tuned.
For those that don't know, 18-wheelers used to run with sulfur in the diesel. The sulfur served as a lubricant. Nowadays, the catalytic converters on trucks work in conjunction with the computer: the computer runs the truck rich, then lean, and the catalytic converter captures pollutants in the exhaust. Sulfur poisons these converters, so it is discontinued in the US (and I'm sure in Europe too). The added complexity of the computer and rich/lean scheme makes the trucks hard to repair.
I have no doubt that effective carbon capture would be an excellent way to reduce the complexity of big rigs, and I hope this project really makes it.
The most efficient way to lower the carbon footprint of land transportation are electric freight trains, with electricity generated by atomic power stations.
Not everybody is ready to hear that though, and specially not Wall Street.
Also, this thread is better read, I suppose, with that other thread in mind.
I subscribe to this point of view, I do.
I would add a few things, if I may.
If said trains run only during daylight hours, on sunny days, which would be a huge departure from established logistics and would demand another novelty : elastic train schedules.
have thus far remained alternative for the same reason as above : unreliable, unpredictible, well, un-industrial.
Who, exactly, are
you?We, the citizens-consumers, buy things that are long-hauled. We demand cheap gadgets manufactured on the other side of Earth. We expect the greengrocer around the corner to sell fruits from accross the continent. We must build those railways, if not with our own two hands, at least by pledging to pay the taxes that will see them built.
not quite so, I'm afraid
and that's counting only domestic consumption. Add 20 % for the energy that's consumed outside of the UK but ultimately for the UK, typically offshored manufacturing.
Pumped storage already exists in the UK, enough to put the kettle on at half-time, but not much more, and as no new mountains are expected any time soon, this will remain so.
As for freight train running on batteries, they've existed for long : toy trains. Cheap toys, that is. Rail modelling enthousiasts would't touch that. As for a real-life freight train doing real transportation business in the UK, you can start with a 3,700 kW Class 90 and see what kind of battery would be needed for a Dover-Sheffield road, and if perchance room remains for some payload.
in the UK, that energy mix is driven by the North Sea petroleum and gas field, which, while they passed their peak in the 2000s, still offer some juicy profits for those who pump them, and who, incidently, just love wind and solar, whose intermittency makes natural gas obligatory.
Sorry, the supply chain will never run on thin air and sunshine. We can still make it low-carbon though, provided we stop bouncing silly ideas around.
Sure, rail is more efficient and it handles plenty of freight, but it doesn’t go to every farm, factory, warehouse, and store. We’re still going to need trucks. Often they are combined.
It seems like, if this idea works out well for trucks, it could also apply to diesel-electric by putting a carbon-capture car behind the locomotive, and that could be done sooner than electrifying every railroad?
I guess, but they still need to load and unload containers onto the trains and I assume they’re already doing it when it makes sense.
Also, you’re ignoring capital costs. This nice thing about this startup’s approach is that they can keep using the same trucks, at least until they need to be replaced.
Given that climate change is an urgent problem, it seems likely quicker to deploy. But we will see. Often, ideas sound good but there are downsides they’re not telling us about.
I don’t mean it’s conceptually hard or hasn’t been done, but there needs to be a crane wherever you want to do the loading or unloading, and someone needs to pay for and maintain it. Logistics is a whole industry, you know?
It seems like we’ve gotten as far as we’re going to get without using real numbers to look at costs in concrete situations.
… anymore. Used to, before the generalisation of the internal combustion engine. With more and more cities deploying light rail network, rail-to-retail becomes thinkable. Thus, trucking can be limited to first and last miles, battery-electric or even horse-drawn.
One obvious corollary is that the tonnage thus transported be less than nowadays, which, anyways, paralels the fact that carbon neutrality demands that we drastically diminish our consumption of manufactured goods.
C&S is inevitable for some industrial processes that cannot be decarbonated, such as cement production or steel smeting. The aforelinked article however is the first where I see this idea applyed to transportation and moving vehicles. I'll just remark that no clue is given as to the business model and how the added cost will increase the consumer prices.
Now, on a worlwide scale, we're talking about 35 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide each year and the corresponding storage capacity simply doesn't exist : C&S is not the answer to everything.
The physics of mitigating climate change is quite simple : don't burn it, it won't emit. What's complicated is the mental shift required for us to depart from everything that's been taken for granted since the late 19^th century.
They talked about the business model a bit on Hacker News. Apparently they are starting out selling CO2 to companies like cement producers that have already decided to try to reduce their carbon footprint.
It’s a brand new startup, though, so it remains to be seen whether it’s a niche, or they grow into a big business.
Producing cement already emits CO2 by calcination of limestone
even before considering the furnaces that heat everything at 1,400 °C. It does not use carbon dioxide nor sequester it, unless there is some other cement that I'm not aware of.
I would suppose that the aforelinked advertising from Remora omits to mention that they somehow sequester the carbon dioxide they collect and then trade on carbon markets. In that case, cements producers, being huge emiters, are good clients for carbon offset.
In this line of business though, one model is to milk naive investors until they bleed. Remember the Nikola Motor Company ?
Yes, cement production emits lots of CO2. I don’t know that much about it, but it seems that CO2 infused cement might be a way to reduce that a bit? They’re saying they’re going to sell the CO2 to a cement producer, and maybe that’s why the cement producer wants to buy it?
I suppose a cement producer could also capture its own CO2 emissions for this purpose, but maybe that’s harder somehow.
Yes, one way to reduce the carbon footprint of concrete is to put a little less cement in it.
As always with the general press, this WaPo article does not gives much numbers. Let's see :
of cement are produced annually, accounting for
that is 2.45 billion metric tonnes, of which we do not knwow how much can be offset by carbon infused curing, which would be done at the site of pouring anyway and not during lime calcination.
And yes, if cement producers needed carbon dioxide, they could capture it from the chimneys of their own furnaces, which is much easier than on a moving vehicle with all the subsequent logistics.
Something like bringing coal to Newcastle, I'd say ;-)
Never underestimate the following facts : understanding climate change and its mitigation is hard. Not roket-surgery-hard, but hard enough that for an engineer with nothing better to do it takes a few tens of hours of dedicated learning to begin and understand what it's all about. For most investors dancing to the tunes of Wall Street, it's all Greek. Said investors are sitting ducks for fraudsters. I'm not saying that Remora is one of those, although thus far I haven't seen any indication of the contrary.
There are apparently different ways to use CO2, and using it during curing is only one of them:
I’m not too worried about venture capitalists getting in early on this. They can do their own due diligence, or not. It’s a hit-driven business. Most startups fail, but they make money when there’s a hit.
For the rest of us, we can wait and see if it amounts to anything.
With the enormous amounts of electrified rail necessary in the US, I wonder if it's realistic to add a small-ish battery to a train so that the train can bridge gaps in electrification. THe batteries could naturally be charged on the move, while connected to the grid.
The main problem with that approach could be that you need a good amount of battery size to even supply enough power to keep the train going. And then there's the math of figuring out how much charge you need to bridge what gaps exist.
Oh, absolutely. ELectric rail transport is not all or nothing. Step one: Get as much traffic onto rails as possible, using whatever motorization we have. That is soooo important because rail transport is stupid efficient. One or two guys in the cap, a few in the railyards here and there and you can transport a few hundred truck loads worth of goods. By pure physics alone, a train is about 2-8 times more efficient compares to a truck. And we haven't considered air resistance yet, where the frontal cross section of a train is about equal to that of a truck.
Step two: Electrify as much as possible. Use it to power diesel-electric trains.
Step three: Full electrification, electric trains.
I wonder: These diesel engines must be heavy and big. Should give you plenty of room for a battery if you tear em out. Wonder what the range on such a conversion would be.
I just found out that apparently bi-mode trains aren't officially hybrid vehicles, because they still rely on one source of power: Electric power. Guess they are electric vehicles then O.o
Anyway, here's a ballpark guess for range: The Bombardier Traxx I'm looking at has ~8 tons of diesel engines installed. If we replace that, we get, say, 200Wh/kg. Divide by the power rating of the diesel engines, and we get about 45 minutes of off-grid operation. Any ancillary equipment (or extra battery life) could fit where the 2.5t diesel tank used to be. That doesn't even sound bad. At max speed that would be 120km of range, without any compromises yet. The vehicle did not get heavier or slower. Well, probably about 300k$ more expensive. And maybe the electricals would need to be beefed up a bit to allow for underway charging.
Anytime I see a quality big rig image or a nicely customized 18-wheeler (especially with a matching trailer) I think of the old reddit user /u/metsrulesonearth who religiously posted big rigs (often Australian road trains) in the early days of /r/pics and, so the story goes, over time received enough flak for it that he deleted his account. Couldn't just let the man like trucks, gotta have the oh-so-high-quality reposts all the time instead.
One of the founders is answering questions on Hacker News. It sounds like they’ve thought it through.
This has me really hopeful. I grew up around 18-wheelers, mostly with their hoods up, axles off, and their leaf springs pulled apart. I've heard that the new truck controls and emissions restrictions are making trucks far more difficult to repair and it's causing a lot of downtime. Many operators are opting not avoid newer trucks or are specifically getting older trucks/rebuilding engines and getting them properly tuned.
For those that don't know, 18-wheelers used to run with sulfur in the diesel. The sulfur served as a lubricant. Nowadays, the catalytic converters on trucks work in conjunction with the computer: the computer runs the truck rich, then lean, and the catalytic converter captures pollutants in the exhaust. Sulfur poisons these converters, so it is discontinued in the US (and I'm sure in Europe too). The added complexity of the computer and rich/lean scheme makes the trucks hard to repair.
I have no doubt that effective carbon capture would be an excellent way to reduce the complexity of big rigs, and I hope this project really makes it.