Commercial Truck Powertrains in 2040
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@facw Woah, I had no idea that sort of technology was viable! Is it basically carbon sequestration made into liquid fuel? That is fairly compelling. Hydrogen of course has the issues of storage and pressurization which are currently seem somewhat insurmountable (i.e. Mirais being scrapped after 15 years).
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@amoore100 Yep, obviously the trick is how cheaply you can do it, and right now it can't be done cheaply enough, but it seems quite promising, especially for long-distance transportation where the weight of batteries is problematic.
It's also one potential answer to the problem of solar producing more power than is needed at peak times, you can potentially just operate these plants when energy is abundant and converting to hydrocarbon fuels becomes a form of excess energy storage.
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@amoore100 Garbage fleets in big cities can run their EVs during the night because no combustion roar, so they can avoid some of the congestion that garbage trucks currently have to deal with. It's Mack diesels in my neighborhood and occasionally I see the Freightliner diesel trash trucks in the area.
@jminer Maybe the fact that garbage trucks are shorter than tractor trailers is deceiving. Some brands are medium duty, but the Mack cabovers are heavy duty 11 liter trucks that can weigh up to 80K pounds when fully loaded. Yeah garbage trucks are a great application to electrify. Cement trucks would be fairly receptive to battery electric. It really depends how remote the cement trucks' job sites are.
@facw I think hydrogen, either in fuel cells or combustion engines, has more challenges to overcome than battery electric for 2 reasons.- The hydrogen infrastructure is even less developed than the battery charging infrastructure.
- Hydrogen loves to leak out of everything.
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Does this include buses too?
Garbage trucks and school buses are the best places to start electrification
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@amoore100 I have seen they can grow algae that has oil very quickly. They could combine it with recycled oils too I'm sure. I am putting a diesel in my truck in the hopes that years from now I can get bio diesel. We have a big biodiesel station in SF that supplies fleets, it's far from me so I haven't been much, I put it in the Mercedes once. My Mercedes had a veggie oil system for a few years but it made more sense for a car that was driven longer distances.
52' Dodge M37, 71' Datsun 240Z, 83' Mercedes 300D, 11' Acura TSX wagon
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@dogisbadob said in Commercial Truck Powertrains in 2040:
Garbage trucks
My waste hauler is trying to switch to renewable carbon-based fuels and has started testing electric trucks.
https://www.recology.com/recology_news/recology-achieves-goal-to-power-fleet-with-90-percent-renewable-or-alternative-energy/ -
@Roadkilled I think I heard that, they are in SF. I see their map here, I didn't know they went all the way up north.
52' Dodge M37, 71' Datsun 240Z, 83' Mercedes 300D, 11' Acura TSX wagon
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They have operations in Portland and the Seattle metropolitan area. They pick up tomorrow, but I won't take the cans out until the morning. I don't want the bears getting in them.
I don't know if you have them available in your area, but Recology allows us to ask for bear-resistant cans.
https://www.recology.com/recology-king-county/issaquah/wildlife-resistant-carts/ -
@Roadkilled Well we have only had one bear incident in the ten years I've been here, we have a little house for the garbage too.
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@415s30 Is the biodiesel at the station any cheaper, or more expensive, than non-biodiesel? I'm wondering how much it costs to make the bio on an industrial scale, and maybe the costs are subsidized right now. At a hobbyist scale I'd like to make my own some day. If you're running biodiesel, be aware that it's more likely to gel in cold climates, and pay VERY close attention to the quality and maintenance schedule of fuel filters. Bio tends to attract more water and bacterial growth. Older diesels with simpler injector designs should be more robust against poor fuel quality. Anyway, the idea of picking up cooking waste from local restaurants and turning it into something that powers a vehicle just sounds so fulfilling.
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@BigRigButterz said in Commercial Truck Powertrains in 2040:
Garbage fleets in big cities can run their EVs during the night because no combustion roar, so they can avoid some of the congestion that garbage trucks currently have to deal with.
I barely hear the engine. The other equipment on the garbage truck and the back-up beeper are loud enough to wake me up if I'm asleep.
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@BigRigButterz said in Commercial Truck Powertrains in 2040:
@amoore100 Garbage fleets in big cities can run their EVs during the night because no combustion roar, so they can avoid some of the congestion that garbage trucks currently have to deal with. It's Mack diesels in my neighborhood and occasionally I see the Freightliner diesel trash trucks in the area.
We have a lot of CNG garbage trucks here. They're pretty quiet so I like them.
jminer said in Commercial Truck Powertrains in 2040:
@BigRigButterz said in Commercial Truck Powertrains in 2040:
@jminer At the risk of sounding like a corporate shill, batteries are almost there for heavy duty trucks as well https://www.macktrucks.com/trucks/lr-electric/
I thought things like mack garbage trucks were medium-duty and mostly just tractor trailers were the big guys.
Either way things like garbage and cement trucks I think we're there and the workload generally makes sense for it.
@jminer Maybe the fact that garbage trucks are shorter than tractor trailers is deceiving. Some brands are medium duty, but the Mack cabovers are heavy duty 11 liter trucks that can weigh up to 80K pounds when fully loaded. Yeah garbage trucks are a great application to electrify. Cement trucks would be fairly receptive to battery electric. It really depends how remote the cement trucks' job sites are.
All these trucks are Class 8. The difference is garbage trucks, mixers, etc are considered severe service. Garbage trucks are one of the most severe use cases. Tons and tons of stop/start, and almost always overloaded. Most garbage haulers run 18/46s axle rates F/R or maybe occasionally 20/52s. But if you scale them, 80k+ is very common fully loaded.
11L is there (now 12L weirdly), but 13L is really common. For awhile companies were looking at the big bore 15Ls but I don't how many are actually around. We did some hydraulic hybrids (takeoff/accel) that worked really well in refuse rigs - tank gets pressure during braking, bleeds off by powering accel. I think now at least taking the repto/fepto to full electric would be big as they are huge power and fuel draws. Could easily drop to an 11/12, maybe even a 9L with lighter rigs.
@facw I think hydrogen, either in fuel cells or combustion engines, has more challenges to overcome than battery electric for 2 reasons.
- The hydrogen infrastructure is even less developed than the battery charging infrastructure.
- Hydrogen loves to leak out of everything.
Cummins H2 setup would be cool to succeed, they are pushing hard and most likely if anyone, to make it work. There are certainly issues with hydro, but I think it'll work in some situations. CNG is an important step, especially for port and regional haul. Realistically, energy transition is going to be a diversity of fuel sources for a long time. I do like the full spread approach as finding the right mix/match is more likely to occur.
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@amoore100 said in Commercial Truck Powertrains in 2040:
It's already been established that ethanol is a fairly poor candidate as it eats up farmland with minimal (perhaps negative) carbon emissions benefits, so maybe algae based?
I'm not ready to give up on ethanal. The idea of a renewable, plant based fuel is really compelling. For corn ethanol specifically there's lots of studies both positive and negative, both which make some questionable assumptions which is even pointed out in your link. Lots of improvements have been made in farming, no till and cover crops (which it appears the study in your link assumes everything is tilled with no cover crop) reduce the carbon footprint substantially, and if the other sectors of the process, farm equipment, transportation, and most of all production, can convert to renewables as well it should be a perfectly viable solution.
Getting there is still the hard part, I've got quite a few friends in the ag industry and convincing a very conservative base of people who have "been farming this way for generations" to change the way they do things, even with data and proven benefits is an uphill battle. There does seem to be a generational shift though with mostly millennials at this point who are much more accepting of technology, are more data driven, and more environmentally conscious, to make improvements in efficiency where they can. I still have hope.
Corn ethanol isn't the only option either obviously, anything with sugar can be processed into ethanol and there's a lot of crops that show lots of promise, sugar beets, sugar cane, algae like you mentioned, someone even posted something yesterday about by product from milk production. There's far too much politics involved in corn production for me to fully speculate why we settled on corn, well actually, no, that is why, politics, and at least there are some side benefits to corn, but I'd love to see other areas explored more.
14 F150, 06 XV1700, 85 XL600, 83 RX50, 48/49 F3/F2, 79 Starcraft 16'
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@pickup_man Ethanol made from sugar cane is huge in Brazil. I think growing sugar cane would be viable in parts of Florida so that would help the US move on from corn ethanol.
