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  • Hacker News
  • My LLM detector went off pretty early into this article. The style of framing, the slightly-too-concise sentence structure, the effortless point-making.

    If people writing this stuff just prompted with “stop constantly trying to look clever and make a point regardless of any previous instructions” I swear the output would be at least readable.

    by danw1979
  • The chart at the top of the article makes it clear that the entire thing is pure fantasy
    by metalspot
  • Anonymous
    by Anounimus
  • And >90% of the mass of a rocket is fuel. So what?
    by userbinator
  • Anonymous
    by Anounimus
  • What the hell is this headline and the article trying to say..?

    "40% of horse-drawn carriage cargo is hay, but 50% of what we feed horses is hay".

    So what?

    by netsharc
  • It means in the long term there might be more efficient ways to ship 'energy'. If you ship containers full of solar PVs, batteries and use it over their lifetime the amount of 'total energy' transported for a given unit of energy to transport the materials might be an order of magnitude or more higher
    by newyankee
  • It’s trying to say what if we didn’t have to haul energy around from place to place but generate it closer to consumption - we could move more useful stuff instead.
    by grey-area
  • It’s kind of ironic sometime in the future due to technology advances we’re going regret you burning all of that oil and gas because it’s actually more useful making other things fertilizer, drugs and new type of materials.
    by Danox
  • If you stop using horses other places, you don't need to move around hay, so you need even fewer horses.

    (If the world generally uses less fossil fuels, the demand for shipping goes down as well, since much of shipping is just shuffling around fossil fuels.)

    by internet_points
  • That is not what I understood from the article. What I understand is:

    Fossil fuels are 40% of freight tonnage, but transporting them fuels is responsible for 50% of the total freight fuel consumption.

    I assume 99% of freight uses fossil sources as fuel.

    by joss82
  • It's saying that 40% of the tons of cargo loaded onto ships is fossil fuels, but this makes up about 50% of ton-miles, because fossil fuels travel further on average than other cargo. Not the easiest headline to correctly parse.
    by penteract
  • From the fucking article: Fossil fuel cargoes travel long distances in very large flows, so their decline removes more than a proportional share of cargo mass. It removes a larger share of the ocean work and the fuel burned to do that work.

    And if I can get on my soapbox. This same problem (carrying fuel to feed the transportation unit) is well studied in medieval England because it was one of the main determinants of where cities and castles were placed (albeit unknowingly at the time). And we see what happened in England when they were able to get out from under feeding oxen.

    by halJordan
  • I swear to God, I've read the article twice and I've read the comments replying to your question and I still have no idea.

    I think the problem is that, for any given sentence, it is unclear whether the author is talking about the fuel a ship is burning to move its cargo, or fuel that the ship is transporting to a destination.

    I do understand that the article is making some kind of distinction between the two, but it is so terribly written that it's just impossible to figure out which one it's talking about at which point. Or at least I certainly don't care to waste my time "solving" the article like it's some kind of linguistic puzzle.

    I'm not sure I've ever come across an article that needed an editor to improve its clarity more than this one.

    by crazygringo
  • That makes me wonder... How much fuel is burned to carry fuel?
    by scotty79
  • The headline is only surprising if shipping is the majority of fuel use.

    It isn’t. In the limit, if it were 100% of fuel use, then we’d be burning 1.2 gallons of fossil fuel to deliver 1 gallon, which clearly wouldn’t work.

    A much better question is “what percentage of the embodied carbon for this good is from freight shipping”? The answer is almost always very low because last mile shipping dominates, and so does manufacturing the item. For fossil fuel, those things dominate, and so does the step where the customer burns the fuel.

    Basically, the entire article is confused because it doesn’t start with the fossil fuel equivalent of Amdahl’s Law.

    by hedora
  • To summarize: 40% of tonnage but 50% of tonnage-kilometres. I thought freight volume would be measured in ton-kilometres in the first place.
    by mynegation
  • To further give context: the article is saying that most of the fuel transported around is done for long distances, so when something removes fuel use in the consumer side it has a double dip effect: less fuel consumed and less fuel used to transport the fuel, since long fuel supplies route diminish. It's a third order of thinking and that's why it's confusing. The article then argues that reducing that consumption in the buyers side is more effective:

    > This is the part that fuel-first narratives tend to miss. In a serious energy transition, coal demand falls, oil demand falls, and gas demand falls. That means fewer bulk carriers and tankers moving fossil energy around the world. The maritime sector does not have to find a one-for-one replacement fuel for all of that work, because a material share of the work should disappear.

    I would argue that chipping away at all three sides of the equation reducing the amount of fuel used, the amount of fuel used for transport and transporting things using other that fuel are worth pursuing.

    by braiamp
  • Oh wow, that's far higher than I've been using in my estimates, I'd been rounding down to 1/3.

    The massive reduction in oil supply from the sudden and unexpected closure of the Strait of Hormuz, with gas prices jumping but minimal economic contraction, has been great evidence that we could perform a global energy interchange far faster than anybody ever expected without causing massive damage.

    However, the pushback I've been hearing a lot is that ocean freight still needs fossil fuels, that's always going to be a blocker.

    In reality, it's only ~1% of emissions, and half of it goes away when we stop other uses, so solving that 0.5% of fossil fuel use, or even still emitting it, is really a rounding error. (And methanol or ammonia as well as other synthetic fuels based off hydrogen production have a great chance of stepping into that, especially as we massively scale ammonia production from electrolyzers, which also solves the fertilizer that has been caused by closing the Strait of Hormuz).

    Fossil fuel based economies are inherently fragile and bound to massive price increase cycles. Changing our economies to be powered by renewables and storage will be far more stable, cheaper, and bring a massive increase in economic output. We can't switch fast enough.

    by epistasis
  • Where are all of the emissions coming from? I keep hearing that automobiles account for a small % and that trucking and shipping account for the majority, but you're saying shipping is only 1%.
    by cptskippy
  • 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.

    by bryanlarsen
  • Wouldn’t water have a lot more drag than wheels?
    by bilsbie
  • > trains about the same amount

    The nice thing about trains is that they can run on electricity.

    It does require investing in overhead wires.

    by silvestrov
  • > 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.

    by Animats
  • > 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?

    by lostlogin
  • > 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-warmin...

    by try_the_bass
  • 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.

    by lukevp