* Could hydrogen fuel cell trucks drive our sustainable transport future?
Melbourne,VIC,Australia -The Conversation/RMIT University, by Roger Smith - 24 January 2012: -- Truck transport accounts for roughly 25% of energy used in the global transport sector, making it a substantial contributor (2.6%) to worldwide greenhouse gas emissions... As concerns about greenhouse gas emissions continue to escalate, the introduction of zero-emission technologies within the freight industry is vitally important... Australia has some of the highest road lengths and freight levels per capita in the world. In fact, road freight transport is a $35 billion dollar industry here. Given the sheer size of the Australian land mass, the distance between major cities, and the lack of a feasible rail alternative, road freight is crucial to trade and commerce... With the price of diesel fuel rising considerably in the past decade and the possible expansion of the carbon tax to include fuel for trucks, those in charge of the freight industry worry their industry is under threat. Low-carbon alternatives to the current fleet are needed... A possible solution to the problem, and one that we’ve been working towards, is the development of hydrogen fuel cells to replace traditional diesel engines in trucks... Hydrogen fuel cells work by taking hydrogen gas (H₂) and combining it with oxygen (O₂) to generate an electrical current (and water and some heat as byproducts)... The hydrogen gas is produced through a process called electrolysis (or breaking down) of water using electricity from renewable sources such as wind and solar... A zero-emission solution of this kind (in both hydrogen production and consumption) could play a key role in addressing the environmental, economic and social factors that will influence the sustainability of the truck industry in the future... Electric battery technology is another zero-emission option that could potentially be used in the transport sector (if charged using electricity from renewable sources). But this technology might not currently be suitable for the truck industry due its low energy storage capacity. For example, existing battery technology doesn’t allow trucks to cover the distance from Melbourne to Sydney on one charge... Biofuels, including ethanol, various bio-oils and biodiesel, provide another alternative transport fuel. “Second-generation” biofuels are likely to play some role for transport in future, but the amount of crops and land available for biofuel production will be severely limited... Enough crops and land need to be set aside to supply food for a growing world population, and there are also constraints on available land, water and fertilisers needed to grow “second-generation” fuel crops...Labels: biofuels, electric vehicles EV, green trucking industry, hydrogen fuel system
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Commercial Vans
Nice blog. Thanks for sharing
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