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Somhlth t1_irwvbg1 wrote

For those without an account:

Electric trucks are grabbing a lot of headlines lately. Elon Musk announced Tesla Semis will start shipping to PepsiCo in California. Volvo is delivering battery-powered big rigs to Amazon in Germany. But few markets are electrifying quite like China, where EVs have gone from less than 1% of light commercial vehicle sales to 10% in just the last two years. Sales reached a record high of almost 18,000 in August and look likely to keep rising in the final few months of the year.

China is the largest commercial vehicle market in the world, so what happens there moves the needle globally. At 10% electric share, China is well ahead of almost all other countries in this segment. Only South Korea has a higher adoption rate, with more than 20% of its light commercial vehicle sales already electric so far in 2022. The adoption curve for light electric vans and trucks in China has started to look a bit like what happened with passenger vehicles a few years earlier, when the combination of policy support, more model availability and a surge in charging-infrastructure investment led the market to take off. Momentum has continued on the passenger vehicle side, with plug-in vehicles hitting 29% of all sales in September. Full electrics were 22% of the market. The market for electric medium and heavy-duty trucks in China is also picking up. Sales of electric big rigs in that segment rose 224% in July and hit 3.4% of the total market. Deliveries dipped slightly in August, falling to 2% share, but the trend for the year is still strongly up and to the right.

So far, most of these heavy trucks are operating in shorter-range urban duty cycles, rather than long-haul routes, but the picture is changing quickly nonetheless. It’s easy to be dismissive of a few percentage points of market share, but technology adoption stories have a habit of going slowly, right up until they don’t. Earlier this year, I wrote about how China was experimenting with the right mix of policy, technology and economic levers to drive zero-emission options in these heavier vehicle segments, and that things could move quickly once the optimal mix becomes clearer. That point may be arriving now, and the latest data challenges two widely held beliefs in both the transport and energy sectors.

The first is that hydrogen fuel cells are the main, or even the only, way to clean up heavy trucks. The data so far shows that while fuel cells are playing a role, most of the alternative heavy trucks being sold in China are battery-electric. It’s early days and this could still change, but BNEF analysis indicates that at least for urban duty cycles, electric heavy trucks are already much more economically competitive and will remain so even with the expected decline in the cost of hydrogen and fuel cell stacks. The last standing area of contention is long-haul trucking. That segment is still up for grabs, but even there, recent BNEF analysis on planned model launches showed a huge divergence between the number of electric and fuel cell trucks coming to market. There are a lot corporate net-zero targets that are starting to filter down to the supply chain in the next few years that will pressure big logistics fleet operators to start getting zero-emission options on the road. Electric models have a serious head start. China is also experimenting with battery swapping for commercial vehicles, showing there’s more than one way to skin the cat. Data compiled by BNEF shows a 318% increase in the number of commercial battery swap stations set up in China last year, and planned deployment of 34,000 vans and trucks with swappable batteries. A single city, Tagshan, has deployed over 4,400 heavy-duty battery-swapping trucks as of September. That’s more than the entire global heavy duty fuel cell truck fleet. The other orthodoxy that sales data cuts against is that commercial vehicles will keep oil demand in the road transport sector growing steadily in the decades ahead. Most major oil outlooks now acknowledge that passenger vehicle oil demand has either already peaked or will soon. But almost all of them assume steady growth in demand from the commercial vehicle segment as countries get richer and more freight continues to be moved by road. In BNEF’s 2022 Road Fuel Outlook, commercial vehicle growth keeps oil demand growing, but not for long. This year’s outlook has overall road transport oil demand peaking in 2027, but if sales of electric trucks continue to rise sharply in China, that could be pulled forward.

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noelcowardspeaksout t1_irx3ka1 wrote

Interesting. I thought Hydrogen was slated to be the most economic power source for trucks - but I suppose the tech for EV's is a lot simpler and that it is much easier to mass produce and roll out at this early stage. Anyhow whatever wins in the long run it's good to see.

It now costs $1000 dollars to fill up a trailer truck in the US - so I can imagine the electric drive trains won't take long to pay for themselves.

It's good to see US solar slated to ramp up so much, just in time for this transformation in the haulage industry.

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Shot-Job-8841 t1_irx9qh3 wrote

The issue for hydrogen right now is the cost of green hydrogen. No one wants to use green hydrogen if it’s more expensive than gas, since a HFCEV costs more than an ICE vehicle. And there’s no point to grey hydrogen since it’s dirty and harder to transport than oil. Once we have green hydrogen at parity with fossil fuels, then you’ll start to see some changes, bot before then.

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geon2k2 t1_is0au1v wrote

Correct. Hydrogen will become a thing once we have excess electricity, maybe from solar, or maybe that high temperature reactor prototype will eventually fly off. But we are looking at a decade or so until it could become viable and widespread. Sure pioneers and prototypes are welcome in the meantime.

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GoinPuffinBlowin t1_iryodt8 wrote

Hydrogen is fueled as ammonia. EV's are aimed at consumer level vehicles and short trip vehicles. Without huge breakthroughs in charging, capacity, and weight reduction, battery powered will not be suitable for anything long haul like big ships, trains, planes, and semi trucks. The vehicle landscape will look very different in 5 years

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Shot-Job-8841 t1_iryzlwp wrote

As far as I am aware, ammonia production uses hydrogen as a reactant. Meaning that the cost of green hydrogen is relevant to ammonia being used as an energy source.

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GoinPuffinBlowin t1_is86q37 wrote

I don't know what that has to do with what I said. I said EV's aren't a solution to big business or big shipping, and you went all in on one sentence, ignoring the point of the post. You said no one wants to use green hydrogen, and I said the biggest companies in the world are actively researching how they can utilize hydrogen fuel instead of batteries. I guess "no one" didn't include companies like Caterpillar, Amtrak, Boeing, GE, and Toyota/BMW?

Edit: of course you downvote me because you disagree. You don't understand that the arrows are meant to encourage discussion, not silence dissenting opinions. On the note of opinions, I am a chemical engineer for DOW, working on alternative fuels. I can tell you with absolute certainty that your opinion is wrong. Uniformed at the best, and willfully ignorant at worst.

The production of ammonia, whether you believe it to be "green" or not, is far less damaging to the environment than mining precious metals. The industry already has solutions that I can't openly discuss, but if you read anything beyond Elon Musk's tweets you'd know BP and FS are building their ammonia pipelines as we speak because hydrogen, not batteries, is the future

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Shot-Job-8841 t1_is8yvlc wrote

Those companies are mostly using grey and blue hydrogen, because it’s 𝗰𝘂𝗿𝗿𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗹𝘆 much more cost effective.

You mentioned ammonia and I responded that ammonia production usually requires you to produce hydrogen first.

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