6 ms·

The top graph makes it seem much more dramatic than it is. Maritime shipping is very efficient, and consists of a very small fraction of overall petroleum usag

The top graph makes it seem much more dramatic than it is. Maritime shipping is very efficient, and consists of a very small fraction of overall petroleum usage. Road transportation uses about 20x as much fuel as ocean shipping, planes use about 2x as much, and trains about the same amount. The typical rule of thumb is that about 40% of the energy in a barrel of petroleum is lost before it goes into your gas tank. And the two big factors are the energy required to do the refining and delivering the fuel from the refinery to the gas station. Shipping the crude from the oil field to the refinery is a factor, but a small one in comparison. This 40% is the main reason why driving an EV emits less carbon than driving an equivalently sized gas vehicle even if you're topping up that EV with the dirtiest electricity you can find. P.S. maritime shipping typically uses very dirty fuel. We'll probably notice the reduction in sulfur pollution more than the reduction in CO2. P.P.S 3% of a very large number is still itself a large number, so it's still worth looking for solutions.

lukevp 4mo ago
Why is the EV better? Because electricity transmission is more efficient than gas? What about the losses in the electricity transmission and the batteries and the conversion to motive force in the motor? Is it way less than that 40%? And wouldn’t there be more than 0% losses because refinery -> power plant shipping? I’m pro EV by the way, I just want to understand your point better. Being able to go all the way to transportation using clean energy is an obvious benefit of EVs. The “dirty electricity” angle is less obvious to me.
- bruce511 4mo ago
  In an EV about 90% of the energy used is converted into motion. About 10% goes to heat. [1][3] In an ICE engine about 30% of the energy becomes motion. About 70% is heat.[2] In other words electric motors are about 3 times more efficient than ICE. [1] an interesting side effect of this is that in cold climates you can't just harvest waste heat to heat the cabin (or batteries. ) So you end up using some battery energy if you need heat. [2] ICE motors vary in effeciency a lot. 20-30% is typical. The Carnot formula comes into play here. [3] because there is so little heat generated, the cooling systems (EVs still have them) are much smaller. And simpler (for example, no fan, 'cause there's no heat when standing still.)
  - tsss 4mo ago
    Who cares about motor efficiency when you can only take 10% as much fuel. At the end of the day, cost is the only metric that matters.
    - bruce511 4mo ago
      The cost of EV energy (to the driver) is about half that of the cost of gas energy. And that's if you buy electricity at charging stations [1]. If you charge at home it gets less. If you have solar at home it approaches zero. Yes, the cost of the car itself is a factor, but even there prices are dropping all the time. >> when you can only take 10% as much fuel effeciency makes all the difference when we discuss % of fuel. 90% of 100 mj is the same as 30% of 300 mj. So already the "fuel" can be 66% less. Generally though the raw amount of mj isn't a very important number. A better measure (which takes effeciency, and tank size into account) is "range". But even that is somewhat meaningless. At some point range is "enough". For daily commutes that may be 50 miles. For long-distance it might be 500 miles. In only a very few cases would a pickup with 2000 mile range be more useful than one with 1000 mile range. Plus you can also factor in maintenance costs. The cost of ownership of an ev, from a service and maintenance point of view is a lot lower. [1] ymmv somewhat. Although electricity prices vary a lot, so do gas prices. The 50% saving (at worst) is a pretty good rule of thumb though.
      - HPsquared 4mo ago
        Indeed, solar panels and EVs are the way of the self-sufficient rugged individualist. It's an amazing PR and marketing coup to make it the other way around and presented as something for "liberal weaklings" etc.
        tialaramex 4mo ago
        Right, the set of people who actually pump their own oil out of the ground, refine it into something you can put in a modern vehicle engine and drive around on that is likely zero, but the set of people who own panels and storage so they can fill their EV includes my team lead, who is just some guy on a pretty average salary living on a modern housing estate. The bio-fuel people at least make some kind of sense compared to fossil fuel "survivalists" - but again they're portrayed as just tree huggers!
- bruce511 4mo ago
  >> The “dirty electricity” angle is less obvious to me. A power plant typically gets about 60% of energy from a fossil source. A car does about 30%. So even if the electricity comes from say coal, it's still more efficient than buying gas in a car engine. Of course, these days, it's likely that a substantial portion (up to 100% in some cases) is not "fossil electricity" but rather comes from solar, wind, hydro etc. Ie "clean" electricity.
  - cptskippy 4mo ago
    Our energy aggregator is a non-profit Community Choice Aggregator with over 250,000 members that ensures 50% of the energy they purchase comes from renewables and 75% of all energy purchased is carbon free. And for an extra $0.00750 p/kWh you can opt into your consumption coming 100% from renewable sources.
  - wqaatwt 4mo ago
    Coal burns dirtier and and is more Co2 intense than gas though.
  - roelschroeven 4mo ago
    60% efficiency? How do these power plants manage to circumvent the limit set by Carnot efficiency?
    - slavik81 4mo ago
      Natural gas burns at ~2200 K. Ambient temperature is ~300 K. 1 - 300/2200 = 86% as the Carnot limit?
    - quickthrowman 4mo ago
      They don’t. they capture the waste heat from the gas turbine and use it to make steam to spin another turbine. A gas turbine is ~40% efficient, add in a HRSG to make a combined cycle plant and you can get up to ~60%. You don’t even need a gas turbine to use a HRSG, any exhaust stream with enough heat will work, a boiler plant or similar. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_recovery_steam_generator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_recovery_steam_generator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined-cycle_power_plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined-cycle_power_plant
- kortilla 4mo ago
  Grid loss is maybe 5%. The important driving factor is that generation becomes more efficient when you can use natural gas to turn turbines directly and then capture the waste heat to boil water and turn turbines with steam. This is called combined cycle if you want to google it to learn more. Another thought exercise, if generating electricity with fossil fuels wasn’t more efficient at scale, why would we bother building a grid in the first place? Every house would just have a gas generator.
- ectoloph 4mo ago
  As I understand it, it's a mix of factors. Charging Lithium, and converting to motive force in motors are both pretty efficient. (Both >90%). An ICE vehicle has an upper limit on efficiency that is lower than what a modern fossil fuel plant can reach, and the ICE is less likely to sit at peak efficiency all the time. The world record, set this year was 48%. Previously, it was 41%. Power plants are much more likely to be kept at or near their peak efficiency and have the space for systems like heat recovery (to recapture waste heat) and emissions controls. For a gas turbine plant, I think the record is ~64% sustained.
- jjk166 4mo ago
  Transmission losses are orders of magnitude lower than transportation energy costs. You both get dramatically less loss per kilometer, and you have way fewer kilometers to travel. Transmission does get less efficient over longer distances; if you had a 20000km long transmission line it would be less efficient than shipping fossil fuels, but you simply don't need to do that. You have conversion losses to generate motion but these are again substantially less than the conversion of chemical energy to motion that occurs inside a combustion engine. Powerplants+electric motors will have conversion efficiencies around 30%; internal combustion engines will have conversion efficiencies around 10%. With the exception of some remote locations or emergency situations with backup generators, you are almost certainly not consuming a fuel that requires refining to generate electricity. If you're burning coal or gas, it's coming from much closer, and it's being transported in bulk to the powerplant. Trucks taking fuels to the local distribution centers and ultimately gas stations are by far the largest transportation energy expense for petrol.
  - AnotherGoodName 4mo ago
    The other nice thing is that the batteries on cars can effectively act as grid energy storage even without v2g. Simple offpeak/low rate charging setups can take the most efficiently generated cheap power. In Australia power prices are often negative in the day due to solar and there's various variable rate plans you can get to take advantage (Australia dwarfs all other nations in per capita solar; even China is nowhere close per capita). I know workplaces that will actively encourage you to charge your car at work. Power prices due to the excess solar keep falling - eg. 10% fall nationwide in July (middle of winter in Aus so not even near peak solar). https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/may/26/power-bills-drop-fall-australia-energy-default-market-offer https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/may/26/power... For all the talk of 'solar can't replace fossil fuels' or 'electricity isn't green' Australia's gone and created a nation wide energy market that encourages rooftop solar and it's found itself with excess daytime energy at a time when the world has an energy crisis in Iran and the datacenters going up everywhere.
    - hvb2 4mo ago
      I don't disagree with you but every country is different. Australia gets a lot of sunshine and is sparsely populated, so plenty of room for solar anyway. This is not the case everywhere though. It can be a good example though of how you overproduce during the day and use that to charge car batteries for example
- Alpha3031 4mo ago
  It's a bit hard to answer the "dirtiest fuel you can find" case specifically, because there are a number of areas where EVs are more efficient. The biggest difference is probably the fact that the internal combustion engine in a car is about 25% efficient, though it depends on the RPM it is running at etc (the reason hybrids can push it up to ~40-ish% depending on how new they are is because the engine is always running at the most efficient RPM when it runs), but the "dirtiest power" specifically would probably be a coal plant which is only about 30% to 40% efficient (9000 to 11000 BTU/kWh in imperial units) due to low temperatures and the inability to run it as a 2-stage, combined-cycle sort of setup (modern combined-cycle gas turbines are ~60% efficient which is one contributing factor to gas-based electricity being cheaper even though gas costs more per GJ, though since the price of natural gas is quite volatile that sometimes changes). Of course the transportation is different depending on which fuel is used for a power plant. In the worst-case scenario, accounting for the ~90% efficiency of the electric motors... Well, Xunmin et al. (2005) estimates 3–36%, so lifecycle emissions could be reduced by as little as 3% if you power it 100% by coal, which would be less than the what you'd get from a hybrid, but... You're not really going to find a power grid that is powered 100% by coal these days, even in China. Really the biggest advantage of a BEV, and any other electrification, is that if there are future investments in the grid (and there will be since generators don't last forever) you don't have to replace the engine of your car for it to automatically reduce emissions. The efficiency gains are just a cherry on top. [Xunmin]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1750583610000745 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S17505...
  - duskwuff 4mo ago
    Re. "dirtiest power" - coal is dirtiest at the site of consumption, but if you consider the entire supply chain, diesel generators at remote locations might be worse. (Coal is usually supplied directly by train; diesel has to be refined and shipped in by truck.)
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- ak217 4mo ago
  Highly recommend everyone watch this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM Briefly, the most important reason an EV is better because it unlocks energy portability. You gain the flexibility to source your energy in many more ways than with a gas car. Oil energy is about as optimized as it's ever going to get. With electricity, we're just getting started.
- bigfatkitten 4mo ago
  Even if you charged your EV from a diesel genset every day, you’d be burning that fuel much more efficiently running the genset under a constant ~75% load than you would be burning it in an equivalent ICE vehicle.
- plqbfbv 4mo ago
  > What about the losses in the electricity transmission and the batteries and the conversion to motive force in the motor? Is it way less than that 40%? And wouldn’t there be more than 0% losses because refinery -> power plant shipping? I once read this article and I find the diagram at the top conveys the point perfectly: https://insideevs.com/news/332584/efficiency-compared-battery-electric-73-hydrogen-22-ice-13/ https://insideevs.com/news/332584/efficiency-compared-batter... EDIT: I once replied to the occasional "but that's optimistic for EV and pessimistic for ICE" poster: IIRC, making every EV step 10% worse (e.g. 15% energy losses in transport, storage and distribution) still has EV come out on top by a decent margin. That chart also partially tells the reason why hydrogen is not going to be a solution for cars: you'd be swapping gasoline for a much greener but only slightly more efficient fuel, while carrying around bulky tanks and having to redo the entire transport network (oil pipes won't do). Maybe for things were work/mass works in favor (naval shipping would likely be one of those) and/or for storage it may make economic sense. Technology is evolving, so perhaps some day we'll be able to produce and store hydrogen with losses similar to the EV chain, but I doubt it: hydrogen is the simplest gas of all and it's extremely reactive, plus its molecules are tiny (it can leak through metals), so tanks and pipes need to be done with different materials, and I doubt we'll find better containment materials given the physics.
try_the_bass 4mo ago
> We'll probably notice the reduction in sulfur pollution more than the reduction in CO2. I feel like I've read something about the effects of reducing sulfur production already: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/feed/unintended-warming-how-reduced-ship-emissions-may-accelerate-climate-change https://www.climate.gov/news-features/feed/unintended-warmin...
lostlogin 4mo ago
> Road transportation uses about 20x as much fuel as ocean shipping, planes use about 2x as much, and trains about the same amount. I’m misunderstanding something. Planes use twice as much fuel while road uses 20x more?
- crote 4mo ago
  There are way more cars than planes.
  - lostlogin 4mo ago
    Oh, is this a fleet measure rather than a 'per unit moved'?
    - bryanlarsen 4mo ago
      Yes, all road transport together uses 20x as much fuel as all marine transport together.
      - unglaublich 4mo ago
        That's really a strange statement then... Helicopter express transports only use 1% of the fuel of maritime shipping!
        lostlogin 4mo ago
        It’s hard to use too. I want foot traffic in there, as that’s going to be a huge portion of transport.
Animats 4mo ago
> The top graph makes it seem much more dramatic than it is. It's all projections, too. They don't even have a line to show where they are going from actuals to guesses.
- bryanlarsen 4mo ago
  Does "the future is a prediction" actually have to be explicitly stated?
  - Animats 4mo ago
    Yes. It's important to know whose prediction, and what it's based on. ">15% of corporate revenue is expected to come from the metaverse in the next 5 years according to 25% of senior executives" - McKinsey [1] [1] https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-sales/our-insights/value-creation-in-the-metaverse https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-s...
    - bryanlarsen 4mo ago
      The article cites sources.
486sx33 4mo ago
[dead]
silvestrov 4mo ago
> trains about the same amount The nice thing about trains is that they can run on electricity. It does require investing in overhead wires.
- cortesoft 4mo ago
  They aren’t great at shipping things from Europe and Asia to the United States, though.
bilsbie 4mo ago
Wouldn’t water have a lot more drag than wheels?
- AnimalMuppet 4mo ago
  I suspect that the GP's numbers are total, not per ton-mile of cargo (which, to my mind, makes them useless for efficiency discussions). They might make sense for discussion of the actual article, though.
- XorNot 4mo ago
  Yes but it's also buoyant. You can put a lot more stuff on ships, and increased inertia does offset the drag losses versus acceleration losses

lukevp 4mo ago

Why is the EV better? Because electricity transmission is more efficient than gas? What about the losses in the electricity transmission and the batteries and the conversion to motive force in the motor? Is it way less than that 40%? And wouldn’t there be more than 0% losses because refinery -> power plant shipping? I’m pro EV by the way, I just want to understand your point better. Being able to go all the way to transportation using clean energy is an obvious benefit of EVs. The “dirty electricity” angle is less obvious to me.

bruce511 4mo ago
In an EV about 90% of the energy used is converted into motion. About 10% goes to heat. [1][3] In an ICE engine about 30% of the energy becomes motion. About 70% is heat.[2] In other words electric motors are about 3 times more efficient than ICE. [1] an interesting side effect of this is that in cold climates you can't just harvest waste heat to heat the cabin (or batteries. ) So you end up using some battery energy if you need heat. [2] ICE motors vary in effeciency a lot. 20-30% is typical. The Carnot formula comes into play here. [3] because there is so little heat generated, the cooling systems (EVs still have them) are much smaller. And simpler (for example, no fan, 'cause there's no heat when standing still.)
- tsss 4mo ago
  Who cares about motor efficiency when you can only take 10% as much fuel. At the end of the day, cost is the only metric that matters.
  - bruce511 4mo ago
    The cost of EV energy (to the driver) is about half that of the cost of gas energy. And that's if you buy electricity at charging stations [1]. If you charge at home it gets less. If you have solar at home it approaches zero. Yes, the cost of the car itself is a factor, but even there prices are dropping all the time. >> when you can only take 10% as much fuel effeciency makes all the difference when we discuss % of fuel. 90% of 100 mj is the same as 30% of 300 mj. So already the "fuel" can be 66% less. Generally though the raw amount of mj isn't a very important number. A better measure (which takes effeciency, and tank size into account) is "range". But even that is somewhat meaningless. At some point range is "enough". For daily commutes that may be 50 miles. For long-distance it might be 500 miles. In only a very few cases would a pickup with 2000 mile range be more useful than one with 1000 mile range. Plus you can also factor in maintenance costs. The cost of ownership of an ev, from a service and maintenance point of view is a lot lower. [1] ymmv somewhat. Although electricity prices vary a lot, so do gas prices. The 50% saving (at worst) is a pretty good rule of thumb though.
    - HPsquared 4mo ago
      Indeed, solar panels and EVs are the way of the self-sufficient rugged individualist. It's an amazing PR and marketing coup to make it the other way around and presented as something for "liberal weaklings" etc.
      - tialaramex 4mo ago
        Right, the set of people who actually pump their own oil out of the ground, refine it into something you can put in a modern vehicle engine and drive around on that is likely zero, but the set of people who own panels and storage so they can fill their EV includes my team lead, who is just some guy on a pretty average salary living on a modern housing estate. The bio-fuel people at least make some kind of sense compared to fossil fuel "survivalists" - but again they're portrayed as just tree huggers!
bruce511 4mo ago
>> The “dirty electricity” angle is less obvious to me. A power plant typically gets about 60% of energy from a fossil source. A car does about 30%. So even if the electricity comes from say coal, it's still more efficient than buying gas in a car engine. Of course, these days, it's likely that a substantial portion (up to 100% in some cases) is not "fossil electricity" but rather comes from solar, wind, hydro etc. Ie "clean" electricity.
- cptskippy 4mo ago
  Our energy aggregator is a non-profit Community Choice Aggregator with over 250,000 members that ensures 50% of the energy they purchase comes from renewables and 75% of all energy purchased is carbon free. And for an extra $0.00750 p/kWh you can opt into your consumption coming 100% from renewable sources.
- wqaatwt 4mo ago
  Coal burns dirtier and and is more Co2 intense than gas though.
- roelschroeven 4mo ago
  60% efficiency? How do these power plants manage to circumvent the limit set by Carnot efficiency?
  - slavik81 4mo ago
    Natural gas burns at ~2200 K. Ambient temperature is ~300 K. 1 - 300/2200 = 86% as the Carnot limit?
  - quickthrowman 4mo ago
    They don’t. they capture the waste heat from the gas turbine and use it to make steam to spin another turbine. A gas turbine is ~40% efficient, add in a HRSG to make a combined cycle plant and you can get up to ~60%. You don’t even need a gas turbine to use a HRSG, any exhaust stream with enough heat will work, a boiler plant or similar. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_recovery_steam_generator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_recovery_steam_generator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined-cycle_power_plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined-cycle_power_plant
kortilla 4mo ago
Grid loss is maybe 5%. The important driving factor is that generation becomes more efficient when you can use natural gas to turn turbines directly and then capture the waste heat to boil water and turn turbines with steam. This is called combined cycle if you want to google it to learn more. Another thought exercise, if generating electricity with fossil fuels wasn’t more efficient at scale, why would we bother building a grid in the first place? Every house would just have a gas generator.
ectoloph 4mo ago
As I understand it, it's a mix of factors. Charging Lithium, and converting to motive force in motors are both pretty efficient. (Both >90%). An ICE vehicle has an upper limit on efficiency that is lower than what a modern fossil fuel plant can reach, and the ICE is less likely to sit at peak efficiency all the time. The world record, set this year was 48%. Previously, it was 41%. Power plants are much more likely to be kept at or near their peak efficiency and have the space for systems like heat recovery (to recapture waste heat) and emissions controls. For a gas turbine plant, I think the record is ~64% sustained.
jjk166 4mo ago
Transmission losses are orders of magnitude lower than transportation energy costs. You both get dramatically less loss per kilometer, and you have way fewer kilometers to travel. Transmission does get less efficient over longer distances; if you had a 20000km long transmission line it would be less efficient than shipping fossil fuels, but you simply don't need to do that. You have conversion losses to generate motion but these are again substantially less than the conversion of chemical energy to motion that occurs inside a combustion engine. Powerplants+electric motors will have conversion efficiencies around 30%; internal combustion engines will have conversion efficiencies around 10%. With the exception of some remote locations or emergency situations with backup generators, you are almost certainly not consuming a fuel that requires refining to generate electricity. If you're burning coal or gas, it's coming from much closer, and it's being transported in bulk to the powerplant. Trucks taking fuels to the local distribution centers and ultimately gas stations are by far the largest transportation energy expense for petrol.
- AnotherGoodName 4mo ago
  The other nice thing is that the batteries on cars can effectively act as grid energy storage even without v2g. Simple offpeak/low rate charging setups can take the most efficiently generated cheap power. In Australia power prices are often negative in the day due to solar and there's various variable rate plans you can get to take advantage (Australia dwarfs all other nations in per capita solar; even China is nowhere close per capita). I know workplaces that will actively encourage you to charge your car at work. Power prices due to the excess solar keep falling - eg. 10% fall nationwide in July (middle of winter in Aus so not even near peak solar). https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/may/26/power-bills-drop-fall-australia-energy-default-market-offer https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/may/26/power... For all the talk of 'solar can't replace fossil fuels' or 'electricity isn't green' Australia's gone and created a nation wide energy market that encourages rooftop solar and it's found itself with excess daytime energy at a time when the world has an energy crisis in Iran and the datacenters going up everywhere.
  - hvb2 4mo ago
    I don't disagree with you but every country is different. Australia gets a lot of sunshine and is sparsely populated, so plenty of room for solar anyway. This is not the case everywhere though. It can be a good example though of how you overproduce during the day and use that to charge car batteries for example
Alpha3031 4mo ago
It's a bit hard to answer the "dirtiest fuel you can find" case specifically, because there are a number of areas where EVs are more efficient. The biggest difference is probably the fact that the internal combustion engine in a car is about 25% efficient, though it depends on the RPM it is running at etc (the reason hybrids can push it up to ~40-ish% depending on how new they are is because the engine is always running at the most efficient RPM when it runs), but the "dirtiest power" specifically would probably be a coal plant which is only about 30% to 40% efficient (9000 to 11000 BTU/kWh in imperial units) due to low temperatures and the inability to run it as a 2-stage, combined-cycle sort of setup (modern combined-cycle gas turbines are ~60% efficient which is one contributing factor to gas-based electricity being cheaper even though gas costs more per GJ, though since the price of natural gas is quite volatile that sometimes changes). Of course the transportation is different depending on which fuel is used for a power plant. In the worst-case scenario, accounting for the ~90% efficiency of the electric motors... Well, Xunmin et al. (2005) estimates 3–36%, so lifecycle emissions could be reduced by as little as 3% if you power it 100% by coal, which would be less than the what you'd get from a hybrid, but... You're not really going to find a power grid that is powered 100% by coal these days, even in China. Really the biggest advantage of a BEV, and any other electrification, is that if there are future investments in the grid (and there will be since generators don't last forever) you don't have to replace the engine of your car for it to automatically reduce emissions. The efficiency gains are just a cherry on top. [Xunmin]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1750583610000745 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S17505...
- duskwuff 4mo ago
  Re. "dirtiest power" - coal is dirtiest at the site of consumption, but if you consider the entire supply chain, diesel generators at remote locations might be worse. (Coal is usually supplied directly by train; diesel has to be refined and shipped in by truck.)
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
ak217 4mo ago
Highly recommend everyone watch this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM Briefly, the most important reason an EV is better because it unlocks energy portability. You gain the flexibility to source your energy in many more ways than with a gas car. Oil energy is about as optimized as it's ever going to get. With electricity, we're just getting started.
bigfatkitten 4mo ago
Even if you charged your EV from a diesel genset every day, you’d be burning that fuel much more efficiently running the genset under a constant ~75% load than you would be burning it in an equivalent ICE vehicle.
plqbfbv 4mo ago
> What about the losses in the electricity transmission and the batteries and the conversion to motive force in the motor? Is it way less than that 40%? And wouldn’t there be more than 0% losses because refinery -> power plant shipping? I once read this article and I find the diagram at the top conveys the point perfectly: https://insideevs.com/news/332584/efficiency-compared-battery-electric-73-hydrogen-22-ice-13/ https://insideevs.com/news/332584/efficiency-compared-batter... EDIT: I once replied to the occasional "but that's optimistic for EV and pessimistic for ICE" poster: IIRC, making every EV step 10% worse (e.g. 15% energy losses in transport, storage and distribution) still has EV come out on top by a decent margin. That chart also partially tells the reason why hydrogen is not going to be a solution for cars: you'd be swapping gasoline for a much greener but only slightly more efficient fuel, while carrying around bulky tanks and having to redo the entire transport network (oil pipes won't do). Maybe for things were work/mass works in favor (naval shipping would likely be one of those) and/or for storage it may make economic sense. Technology is evolving, so perhaps some day we'll be able to produce and store hydrogen with losses similar to the EV chain, but I doubt it: hydrogen is the simplest gas of all and it's extremely reactive, plus its molecules are tiny (it can leak through metals), so tanks and pipes need to be done with different materials, and I doubt we'll find better containment materials given the physics.

try_the_bass 4mo ago

> We'll probably notice the reduction in sulfur pollution more than the reduction in CO2. I feel like I've read something about the effects of reducing sulfur production already: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/feed/unintended-warming-how-reduced-ship-emissions-may-accelerate-climate-change https://www.climate.gov/news-features/feed/unintended-warmin...

lostlogin 4mo ago

> Road transportation uses about 20x as much fuel as ocean shipping, planes use about 2x as much, and trains about the same amount. I’m misunderstanding something. Planes use twice as much fuel while road uses 20x more?

crote 4mo ago
There are way more cars than planes.
- lostlogin 4mo ago
  Oh, is this a fleet measure rather than a 'per unit moved'?
  - bryanlarsen 4mo ago
    Yes, all road transport together uses 20x as much fuel as all marine transport together.
    - unglaublich 4mo ago
      That's really a strange statement then... Helicopter express transports only use 1% of the fuel of maritime shipping!
      - lostlogin 4mo ago
        It’s hard to use too. I want foot traffic in there, as that’s going to be a huge portion of transport.

Animats 4mo ago

> The top graph makes it seem much more dramatic than it is. It's all projections, too. They don't even have a line to show where they are going from actuals to guesses.

bryanlarsen 4mo ago
Does "the future is a prediction" actually have to be explicitly stated?
- Animats 4mo ago
  Yes. It's important to know whose prediction, and what it's based on. ">15% of corporate revenue is expected to come from the metaverse in the next 5 years according to 25% of senior executives" - McKinsey [1] [1] https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-sales/our-insights/value-creation-in-the-metaverse https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-s...
  - bryanlarsen 4mo ago
    The article cites sources.

486sx33 4mo ago

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silvestrov 4mo ago

> trains about the same amount The nice thing about trains is that they can run on electricity. It does require investing in overhead wires.

cortesoft 4mo ago
They aren’t great at shipping things from Europe and Asia to the United States, though.

bilsbie 4mo ago

Wouldn’t water have a lot more drag than wheels?

AnimalMuppet 4mo ago
I suspect that the GP's numbers are total, not per ton-mile of cargo (which, to my mind, makes them useless for efficiency discussions). They might make sense for discussion of the actual article, though.
XorNot 4mo ago
Yes but it's also buoyant. You can put a lot more stuff on ships, and increased inertia does offset the drag losses versus acceleration losses