© Sharavsin86
Written by Charlie Bartlett 09/25/2023
At a time when EC FuelEU is sidelining biofuels on environmental grounds, the trucking industry is beginning to push to increase its adoption of road transport in the UK.
The UK’s Department for Energy Security and Net Zero released its Biomass Strategy in August, which states that with limited supply available, biomass should be allocated to sectors that are difficult to decarbonise, such as energy, heating and transport.
However, which transportation sectors are most deserving remains an open question. Although there are many all-electric truck options on the market, including from Volvo and Tesla, experts in the trucking industry are still not satisfied.
“The launch of the biofuels strategy is a promising development for alternative fuels, at a time when some companies are trialling solar and kinetic energy vehicles to fuel their fleets,” said Lyall Cresswell, CEO of Transport Exchange Group, who added that the batteries. Electric trucks “do not provide enough reliability and efficiency to meet consumer demands.”
“If there is further rise in fuel prices in the coming months, we can expect more operators to explore alternative fuels,” he said. Road transport prices have fallen this month, but any upcoming increases in fuel prices may change that.
Biomass, and the biofuel that can be extracted from it as transportation fuel, is limited, as many “sustainable” crop biofuel farming operations can do more harm than good. Burning palm oil for fuel, with the indirect effect of clearing forests to make way for palm plantations, is far more harmful than continuing to burn fossil fuels, Transport and Environment (T&E) noted in a report.
But the question of what constitutes a “difficult to decarbonize sector worthy of a limited supply of sustainable biofuels” is preoccupying environmentalists. Although it is generally difficult to decarbonise, EU marine fuel legislation calls for biofuel supplies to be redirected away from shipping, in favor of trucking.
However, the bill said: “It is necessary to minimize this shift, as road transport currently remains by far the most polluting transport sector, and maritime transport currently uses fuels of mostly fossil origin.”
In the UK, biodiesel has seen uptake in rail shipments, despite being the easiest sector to decarbonise with century-old overhead electric cable technology.
And in air freight, the hardest sector to decarbonise of all, not everyone is happy with the growing appetite for “sustainable aviation fuels” (SAF), Opportunity Green CEO Aoife O’Leary told The Loadstar this month. He vaguely defined that there is “no such thing.”
She added: “The Sudanese Armed Forces are Everything from elusive palm oil and other fuels resulting from deforestation; You have some used cooking oil in there, there’s a wide selection. But it is poured as if it were one fuel.”
