As this short article below quickly shows, there is no replacement known for shipping through trucking…. because there is no replacement for oil.
Electric powered cars can’t replace trucking. So let it sink in, there is no replacement known for trucking. And none in sight.
This has been known for some time. In the Bush Jr era, Hirsch showed that in order to avoid catastrophe, society needs at least 20 years to prepare itself before oil production peaks and then starts to decline. But the studies were ignored. When I saw that happen I realized that the Bush Jr. Administration (placed by the true shadow controllers of U.S. policy) ordered the studies, not for the people, but for the government which didn’t care about the people.
Do we see society creating any alternative to trucking when said studies have shown a long preparation is needed? In fact, the plan is for a controlled demolition of population so that there will be less demand. This is the reason there is a depopulation agenda headed by the UN (which was created by the Rothschilds who are the said shadow controllers, funding every war now for 200 years.)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Heads up article from Australia…On the Thermodynamic Black Hole…..
23 September 2016 https://damnthematrix.wordpress.com/2016/09/23/on-the-thermodynamic-black-hole/
I recently heard Dmitry Orlov speaking to Jim Kunstler regarding the Dunbar Number in which he came up with the term ‘Thermodynamic Trap’. As the ERoEI of every energy source known to humanity starts collapsing over the energy cliff, I thought it was more like a thermodynamic black hole, sucking all the energy into itself at an accelerating pace… and if you ever needed proof of this blackhole, then Alice Friedemann’s latest book, “When the trucks stop running” should do the trick.
Chris Martenson interviewed Alice in August 2016 about the future of the trucking industry in the face of Peak Oil, especially now the giant Bakken shale oil field in the US has peaked, joining the conventional oil sources. This podcast is available for download here.
Alice sees no solutions through running trucks with alternative energy sources or fuels. I see an increasing number of stories about electric trucks, but none of them make any sense because the weight of the batteries needed to move such large vehicles, especially the long haul variety, is so great it hardly leaves space for freight.
A semi trailer hauling 40 tonnes 1000km needs 1000L of liquid fuel to achieve the task. That’s 10,000kWh of electric energy equivalent. Just going by the Tesla Wall data sheet, a 6.4kWh battery pack weighs in at 97kg. So at this rate, 10,000kWh would weigh 150 tonnes….. so even to reduce the weight of the battery bank down to the 40 tonne carrying capacity of the truck, efficiency would have to be improved four fold, and you still wouldn’t have space for freight..
There are not enough materials on the entire planet to make enough battery storage to replace oil, except for Sodium Sulfur batteries, a technology I had never heard of before. A quick Google found this…..:
The active materials in a Na/S battery are molten sulfur as the positive electrode and molten sodium as the negative. The electrodes are separated by a solid ceramic, sodium alumina, which also serves as theelectrolyte. This ceramic allows only positively charged sodium-ions to pass through. During discharge electrons are stripped off the sodium metal (one negatively charged electron for every sodium atom) leading to formation of the sodium-ions that then move through the electrolyte to the positive electrode compartment. The electrons that are stripped off the sodium metal move through the circuit and then back into the battery at the positive electrode, where they are taken up by the molten sulfur to form polysulfide. The positively charged sodium-ions moving into the positive electrode compartment balance the electron charge flow. During charge this process is reversed. The battery must be kept hot (typically > 300 ºC) to facilitate the process (i.e., independent heaters are part of the battery system). In general Na/S cells are highly efficient (typically 89%).
Conclusion
Na/S battery technology has been demonstrated at over 190 sites in Japan. More than 270 MW of stored energy suitable for 6 hours of daily peak shaving have been installed. The largest Na/S installation is a 34-MW, 245-MWh unit for wind stabilization in Northern Japan. The demand for Na/S batteries as an effective means of stabilizing renewable energy output and providing ancillary services is expanding. U.S. utilities have deployed 9 MW for peak shaving, backuppower, firming windcapacity, and other applications. Projections indicate that development of an additional 9 MW is in-progress.
I immediately see a problem with keeping batteries at over 300° in a post fossil fuel era… but there’s more….
Alice has worked out that Na/S battery storage for just one day of US electricity generation would weigh 450 million tons, cover 923 square miles (2390km², or roughly the area of the whole of the Australian Capital Territory!), and cost 41 trillion dollars….. and according to European authorities, 6 to 30 days of storage is what would be required in the real world.
The disruption to the supply lines of our ‘just in time’ world, caused by trucks no longer running, is too much to even think about.
Empty supermarket shelves, petrol stations with no petrol, even ATMs with no money and pubs with no beer come to mind.
I remember seeing signs on the Bruce highway back in Queensland stating “Trucks keep Australia going”.
Well, oil keeps trucks running; for how much longer is the real question.
We need common sense smart people of the past to run things, not the present university idiots.
There is enough oil for a thousand years. But we will not need it that long. Nikolai will be shipping it’s first fuel cell trucks in 2018, for which it already has thousands of pre-orders in place, worth billions of dollars. These truck are zero emission, and more powerful than diesel. They are not electric, they are hydrogen fuel cell. Well, as you can see, your thesis is wrong, and I am sure you will now repudiate your position, and apologize for misleading people.
Thanks, and I will repudiate your position. Peak Oil refers to what is affordable to bring out of ground. The reason we are fracking the world to death is that the easy to get affordable oil is disappearing. We are at peak oil production now, and the present rate of production can never again occur on planet Earth. Repeat, we are at the peak. Now we will go into decline. It doesn’t matter if oil is located miles beneath the sea, because it is not affordable.
The idea of fuel cell trucks has same fault as batteries. The one I will mention now is they have to be manufactured which requires mining. Do you want a mine in your back yard polluting ground water? No, so your government will enslave other people and poison their land to mine minerals for your toys. That is how it works. That is what has been going on for over two hundred years.
The problem with above article is to think Trucking will end along with other necessities. Not so. If society has to cut off supply of private vehicles, it will do so to insure trucking. I printed article anyway because it destroys the idea that batteries will save the day.
Your idea is called techno-optimisim. It is a religion in which some tech fix will magically extend the indulgent consumerism of the elite militarized nations, as if this can happen for 7 billion people. It is the religion of the exceptionalists who think the purpose of life is extraction, and that collateral damage simply doesn’t matter. Your fuel cell car is more important than someone else’s ground water. Thanks for adding your two cents.