Dhe vegan steak at the supermarket counter and the rotors of a wind turbine have one thing in common: They usually reach their destination by truck. Road freight transport is the backbone of a modern, work-sharing economy. However, it also accounts for a quarter of Europe’s transport-related carbon emissions. Making the movement of goods climate-neutral is an important, albeit more difficult task than persuading travelers to switch to electric cars or other modes of transport.
This applies if only because the truck is a means to an end for the haulier and not the end itself. Because the purpose is to make money with every transport. The demands on a commercial vehicle are similar to those that entrepreneurs place on a machine tool. It depends on high availability and low costs; calculated in cents per tonne-kilometre.
If you do this calculation without state subsidies, you will usually still end up with a single drive principle: the diesel engine. With a market share of 99 percent, it not only dominates in heavy commercial vehicles, but can also be found in derived variants in mobile machines, buses and emergency power generators.
New EU directive to guide technical progress
In this situation, the European Commission is preparing a proposal that is intended to significantly tighten the existing guideline for CO2 emissions from commercial vehicles. The publication is expected in the coming days, a pierced draft is already circulating in Brussels and not only there. Is it possible to steer technical progress in such a way that diesel engines can be completely replaced by more climate-friendly alternatives?
In principle, the truck regulation is similar to the system for passenger cars. The average fleet emissions of a manufacturer group are decisive. Only what leaves the exhaust is counted. This means that fuels based on synthetic carbon compounds are out of the question, even if carbon dioxide has been removed from the air for their production. Electricity and hydrogen, on the other hand, are always considered to be climate-neutral, again regardless of how they are produced.
These requirements are to be met by battery-electric drives or the fuel cell, whereby the cell is always designed as a hybrid system and therefore also carries a larger battery. For some applications in certain regions, the battery-electric drive is already competitive, said the head of development at Europe’s largest commercial vehicle manufacturer these days – provided the infrastructure is right. He may have thought of public tender conditions, for example for buses in big cities.
Competitive alternatives are still missing
Future rechargeable batteries, which do not require nickel, manganese and cobalt and are specially designed for commercial vehicles, should improve the cost-benefit calculation. Not a single manufacturer group currently has a competitive fuel cell drive on offer. Alliances such as that between Daimler and Volvo Trucks may change this over the course of the decade.
In this situation, the internal combustion engine has the thankless role of a bridging technology. He should be even cleaner, a new emissions standard is also in preparation. This is forcing manufacturers to make significant investments in a technology that is to be officially phased out in their home market. However, the EU Commission wants to leave a back door open. Commercial vehicles that emit less than one gram of CO2 per ton of payload or per person transported and kilometer traveled are also expected to be emission-free. This limit allows to burn hydrogen in a reciprocating engine.
This regulation is a good step for the often invoked resilience of Europe, because in order to move harvesting machines, recovery cranes or military vehicles, combustion engines are just as indispensable as computer chips. Keeping the knowledge for the development and construction of internal combustion engines in Europe is tantamount to insurance. It makes you less dependent on political blackmail.
The forthcoming guidelines must therefore be designed in such a way that the internal combustion engine can quickly become more climate-friendly through the use of synthetic fuels. Focusing only on batteries and hydrogen would have fallen short. Functioning logistics based on a robust infrastructure is a valuable asset.
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