How will we move the big, heavy things?

The post rebuilds the case for electrification in order to mark where it stops. In 2009, when Tesla launched the Roadster, batteries, biofuels and hydrogen all looked roughly equally plausible, and he admits he was carrying a dog-eared copy of a 2002 book on the hydrogen economy at the time. Batteries won light and medium duty vehicles for unglamorous reasons. Biofuels were never scalable enough, already consuming a worrying share of American corn and soybeans with questionable life-cycle benefits. Hydrogen made by electrolysis is inherently a derivative of the clean power that makes it, so it costs more joule for joule once electrolysis equipment and conversion losses are added, and it is awkward to store, move and handle; the grid, meanwhile, already exists. What closed the remaining gap on up-front cost was not a breakthrough but learning curves, roughly a thousandfold increase in manufacturing scale, mostly in China, with just enough product iteration at each new factory to keep improving. He is careful that the learning is done by people, which is why new American battery plants are joint ventures with experienced Asian manufacturers, and why he thinks the gains are fragile: the biggest risk to electric vehicles is now a schism between the Chinese supply chain and Western markets rather than the pace of technology.

So why not the heavy things too? Two constraints. Energy density is the obvious one, and by itself it would only narrow the field: batteries are far heavier and far bulkier than liquid fuel for the same energy, which light vehicles can absorb and weight-, volume- and range-constrained ones cannot. The second constraint is the one the post is really about, and it sits off the vehicle entirely. Trucks are the near case, and he is explicit that one more leap in battery technology would probably make the vast majority of them viable targets. Most freight trips are already short enough to electrify, but the minority of long trips carries most of the ton-miles, and sizing a truck’s battery for the worst trip it might face implies a charger several times more powerful than today’s fastest, which he notes are rated at less than a fifth of what would be needed. A depot or rest stop full of those draws power like a small city. Aviation makes the point harder still: by his own calculation a single hybridized mid-sized plane charging at one gate would double a small airport’s peak demand, and a study he cites finds that electrifying only the ground equipment and rental cars would roughly quintuple an airport’s peak. At the Port of Long Beach, four of the ten years a cargo-handling electrification project took were the utility building new transmission and substations, and that was before anyone considered a tugboat. Each case is also a chicken-and-egg problem, because operators will not commit to electric fleets until fast charging exists away from the depot, while utilities struggle to win regulatory approval for infrastructure without a clear demand signal.

That is why the argument turns back toward molecules, and the turn rests on scale rather than chemistry. For an ordinary filling station, building hydrogen delivery from scratch is more daunting than upgrading the wires. At a port or a large airport the sheer concentration of demand can level that comparison or tip it, because moving very large quantities of energy as a gas through a pipeline is usually cheaper than moving it as current through a transmission line. Trains fit the pattern best, shuttling between two depots, and three European manufacturers have already launched hydrogen models. Hydrogen still buys range at the cost of volume, so most hydrogen vehicles have to be redesigned from a clean sheet, and he notes that practically nobody is attempting it for cargo ships. Upgrading hydrogen into denser liquids, the category he calls electrofuels, trades further cost for density: ammonia and methanol compete for shipping, while aviation converges on synthetic jet fuel precisely because it changes nothing. It will cost several times its fossil namesake to produce, but it needs no new aircraft, no new operations and no new fuel infrastructure, and he thinks that alone could make it a commercial winner.

He closes by raising an objection he does not answer. A genuinely net-zero synthetic hydrocarbon needs its carbon pulled from the air, and if direct air capture ever becomes cheap enough to supply it, he suggests $200 a ton or less, then the same capture could simply be buried while the world keeps burning fossil fuel, for the same net carbon balance. He says he has wrestled with this since he first encountered the concept, and defers it to the final instalment of his series. What he will commit to is the hub: building the energy infrastructure to serve truck stops, airports and ports will probably be a bigger challenge than designing an entirely new truck, ship or plane.