Fossil Fuels Are 40% of Freight Shipping Tonnage, but Half Its Fuel Use

https://cleantechnica.com/2026/06/16/shipping-freight-energy-fossil-cargo/

by choult • 1 month ago

157 150 1 month ago

cleantechnica.com

netsharc• 1 month ago

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?

halJordan• 1 month ago

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.

idontwantthis2• 1 month ago

https://acoup.blog/2022/07/15/collections-logistics-how-did-...

The Tyranny of the Wagon

zahlman• 1 month ago

It removes a larger share of the ocean work and the fuel burned to do that work.

Sure, but as long as ratio of fuel moved:fuel used is good enough, people won't care (as demonstrated by historical data). This isn't an argument that leads to change. For those not already convinced of the climate crisis, you'll need to lean on economics.

dboreham• 1 month ago

See also Coals from Newcastle.

bestouff• 1 month ago

So 10% is a lot.

pfortuny• 1 month ago

It is so weird that it makes 40% sense of 50% its length.

penteract• 1 month ago

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.

gertlex2• 1 month ago

I read this and another half-dozen replies to the parent comment (but not the article, of course...) and was still confused. This comment was the clearest to getting me to understand it.

Example contributors as I presently understand it:

- we transport fossil fuels further around world (i.e. Middle East to the US)

- we transport most other goods some shorter distances

- iron ore transport is "up there" with fossil fuels; high ton-miles of transport.

And of course the cost of transport for a good is a function of distance, a la the rocket equation mentioned in other comments.

And the article is focused on making this point in the context of the effect of reduced demand for fossil fuels and steel (iron ore) on maritime demand. (which is interesting, and totally not what the article title was leading my brain to think about)

Edit: And then I went and actually looked at the figure at the top of the article; guess the real topic is yet a different framing than what I comment on above!

grey-area• 1 month ago

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.

joss822• 1 month ago

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.

mithras• 1 month ago

So basically a very friendly version of the rocket equation.

sourcegrift• 1 month ago

The preposition ("butt") is wrong

crazygringo• 1 month ago

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.

newyankee• 1 month ago

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

internet_points• 1 month ago

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.)

Danox5• 1 month ago

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.

metalspot• 1 month ago

The chart at the top of the article makes it clear that the entire thing is pure fantasy

mynegation• 1 month ago

To summarize: 40% of tonnage but 50% of tonnage-kilometres. I thought freight volume would be measured in ton-kilometres in the first place.

braiamp• 1 month ago

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.

margalabargala2• 1 month ago

I wonder if this actually has the potential to have the opposite effect.

If an oil producer electrifies faster than average, for example Norway, then oil that might have been consumed domestically instead is shipped overseas.

bryanlarsen9• 1 month ago

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• 1 month 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.

bruce5116• 1 month 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.)

bruce5116• 1 month 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.

kortilla• 1 month 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• 1 month 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• 1 month 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.

Alpha3031• 1 month 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/S17505...

ak217• 1 month ago

Highly recommend everyone watch this video 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• 1 month 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• 1 month 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-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• 1 month 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-warmin...

lostlogin4• 1 month 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?

crote3• 1 month ago

There are way more cars than planes.

Animats2• 1 month 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.

bryanlarsen9• 1 month ago

Does "the future is a prediction" actually have to be explicitly stated?

silvestrov• 1 month 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• 1 month ago

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

bilsbie• 1 month ago

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

AnimalMuppet• 1 month 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.

XorNot2• 1 month 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

hedora• 1 month ago

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.

epistasis2• 1 month ago

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.

cptskippy2• 1 month ago

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%.

bryanlarsen9• 1 month ago

Maritime shipping is only 1%. Road transport is about 20x that.

tonfa• 1 month ago

Not sure if there's more recent stats, but 2020 data: https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions-from-transport

jeffbee2• 1 month ago

That isn't true about private automobiles and I would be interested to know where you have been hearing it. It must come from some party with a vested interest in making car emissions seem like a non-problem. In reality, car emissions are the main thing that Americans and most other rich countries should be trying to address.

Here's a graphic of the latest data available for California, as an example: https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/sites/default/files/images/2023_scopi...

epistasis2• 1 month ago

There are two ways of doing the accounting, and the more common one is from the producer side such as by industry, by country, by use.

Our world in data is linked in a sibling comment, for the breakdown of the transport side. As is the California ARB inventory. There are other national inventories.

One thing to be very careful about is people making arguments for a national or local policy, that uses worldwide inventory numbers rather than an inventory applicable to where the policy applies. I see this a lot with local old New Leftists trying to argue that their old Toyota Tacoma isn't a big deal, but everybody had better become vegetarian right away, because worldwide beef accounts for a much larger proportion than cars (but locally cars dwarf anything from food production)

And the production side inventories are very poor at making consumption level decisions, because people always complain that we've merely shipped all our production emissions from manufacturing to China. In reality there are great Our World In Data pages showing that yes, cars really are much bigger emitters for Americans than exporting emissions to Chinese manufacturers.

So my favorite inventories of climate emissions are consumption based, and show that lifestyle is one of the biggest drivers of climate emissions in the US:

https://coolclimate.berkeley.edu/maps

There are rich cores of cities that are very low emission, surrounded by wealthy suburbs with sky-high emissions, and then rural areas with very low emissions. EVs have the chance to change high emission wealthy suburb life into low emissions. But if we simply legalized more housing in the wealthy city cores, it would allow a lot more people to choose to have lower emission lifestyles right now without technology change, while also spurring massive economic growth.

danw1979• 1 month ago

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.

userbinator• 1 month ago

And >90% of the mass of a rocket is fuel. So what?

Anounimus2• 1 month ago

Anonymous

Anounimus2• 1 month ago

Anonymous

scotty79• 1 month ago

That makes me wonder... How much fuel is burned to carry fuel?

Fossil Fuels Are 40% of Freight Shipping Tonnage, but Half Its Fuel Use

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