ATRI Touts Benefits of Alternative Diesel Fuels

With the estimated cost of turning America’s entire big rig fleet into electric vehicles standing at around one trillion dollars, it goes without saying that it is not economically viable. The American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI) suggests an alternative solution: keeping diesel as the king of the road, but using it in a different way in order to reduce its negative effects on the environment.

Details

In the report, ATRI mentions two different types of alternative diesel:

• Biodiesel, which uses vegetable and animal fats to be mixed in with standard diesel at a rate of 20-80, which can cut down diesel use by up to 20%.
• Renewable diesel, which is indistinguishable from regular diesel fuel except it is created in a factory or laboratory from organic matter.

Converting organic materials that would otherwise be left to rot in a landfill would convert the resulting waste from methane to carbon dioxide. Considering that methane has a global warming potential of at least 27 times that of carbon dioxide, using organic waste for this purpose would still result in pollution, but in far less than what is currently being done when landfills and trucking are grouped together.

The other upside ATRI brings up in its proposal to push alternative diesel, is how much easier it would be to do so than electric vehicles. “To achieve similar CO2 benefits with renewable diesel, ATRI estimates a price tag of $203 billion, a significant cost savings for achieving the same environmental benefits. Since renewable diesel is considerably more scalable than battery-electric vehicles and can be deployed immediately in trucks without modifications, it is likely that CO2 benefits using RD can be achieved on a much shorter timeline than with a BEV transition.”

Conclusion

Likely, this transition would take some amount of regulation to work well, such as requiring food waste to be separated at restaurants and then given to processing plants, but on a massive scale it is much less burdensome and better for the environment than transitioning to full electric, especially when considering the energy source makeup of electricity, where a decent portion is comprised of burning coal.

The report makes for quite an interesting read at about 50 pages, if you wish to download it from the ATRI.

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