Hit pause while the fuel battle plays

For readers of a certain vintage, the haulage industry stands at a familiar crossroads – and one that will determine tens of billions of pounds of future investment.

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I call it our ‘Betamax moment’: we must choose an energy source other than diesel to power our fleets in the coming decades and, just as in the early 1980s and our choice of video cassette player, we’re waiting to see which way the wind blows.

If, like McDonald’s, you have a guaranteed source of biodiesel in the form of used vegetable oil, then your choice is made for you. But my team and I don’t fry that many burgers, and biodiesel’s wider production is both in its infancy and comes with concerns around food supply and the replacement of rainforest with crops.

What of hydrogen? £2bn is being pumped into the HyNet trials in Ellesmere Port, designed to produce low-carbon hydrogen at an industrial scale, but most of the projected output is slated for consumption by the petrochemicals sector. A smaller proportion will be pumped through the existing gas network to 2,000 nearby homes in a domestic trial, aiming to demonstrate low-cost distribution, but mention of hydrogen’s use in transport is hard to find. In short, don’t expect your local filling station to be offering hydrogen pumps any time soon.

Which leaves electric vehicles. At FDC we’ve already invested in a single tractor unit for use with a key client and we’re monitoring the cost/value/performance equation carefully. Cost is already a concerning factor, however, with tractor units £100,000 more than their diesel equivalent. Assuming a full fleet

As things stand, electric also delivers poorly on range and weight, not to mention charging infrastructure and the grid’s ability to provide the power we’ll need.

There are encouraging signals coming from the development pipeline, however. Over in the US, scientists at the Argonne National Laboratory have identified how to quadruple a battery’s energy density with a lithium-air unit that utilises a solid electrolyte based on nanoparticles. It’s cheaper and lighter than the current methodology and can use sodium-air too – and there are a few centuries of salt deposits in the mines just south of Ellesmere Port.

Better still, these batteries won’t use the environmentally and socially ruinous cobalt found in the Congo. We’ve all seen the images of 10-year-olds on a dollar a day laying waste to vast tracts of pristine land in our headlong rush to appear green. Not great if our industry is serious about environmental responsibility and sustainability.

For us all it’s still a waiting game: which technology will win out? And will it be the best one, across the metrics we’ve discussed here? Betamax, after all, was commonly acknowledged as the superior system, but VHS won for the simple reason it offered longer tapes – two hours, to Betamax’s one. To complete the 1980s analogy, could it be ‘Back to the Future’?

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