One year after light vehicles, heavy trucks. The California government has voted in favor of a law that will ban the sale of new diesel-powered trucks from 2036. Quebec and Canada are on the lookout.
This may be the beginning of the end for diesel in transportation in North America. Because the economic weight of California is not negligible. It is the US state with the largest economy. If the Golden State were a country, it would, by virtue of its GDP of nearly 3 trillion US dollars, be the fifth most powerful country on the planet. Its transportation industry is one of the ten largest in the world.
In North America, road transport is a highly integrated sector. If California bans heavy-duty diesel trucks, this directive will have an influence across the continent. As far as Canada and Quebec, where the head office of TFI International, one of the ten largest trucking companies on the continent, is located.
Under the new law, called Advanced Clean Fleetsthe California Air Resources Board (CARB) will establish intermediate thresholds for zero-emission heavy-duty vehicles that must be on the road by 2036. There will also be measures for afterward, given that the state’s goal of the Pacific is to have a completely carbon neutral fleet of heavy trucks and buses by 2045.
The challenge is above all climatic. Heavy vehicles represent 6% of all vehicles on California’s generally sunny roads. They are responsible for 35% of nitrogen oxide emissions — a gas whose global warming effect is 265 times greater than that of carbon dioxide — and a quarter of total greenhouse gas emissions. of all road transport.
More broadly, two-thirds of goods moving in North America are transported by trucks. The railway accounts for only about 15% of the entire freight transport sector in second place. The maritime sector takes a good part of what remains.
In short, eliminating polluting emissions from trucking is heavy work. Literally as well as figuratively.
Hydrogen or electric?
If it seems understood that the future of light automobile transport is essentially electric, that of heavy transport has not yet been fully decided. Manufacturers are currently bickering over two technologies: electric and hydrogen.
Electric trucks will obviously need huge batteries to cover the long distances they are used to. If we rely on the Tesla Semi, to name one, we are talking about batteries that will be ten times larger than those of electric cars currently on the road. They may be expensive. They will need a significant charging infrastructure capable of transferring the equivalent of a month’s electricity consumption of a typical North American home into a vehicle’s battery in just a few minutes.
We can not wait to see it.
The other option is hydrogen, which is already in the plans of not just California, but other states and provinces as well, including Canada and Quebec. There is already the beginnings of a commercial hydrogen distribution infrastructure in California, which has been juggling this energy vector for years. Carriers that orbit the Port of Los Angeles have been testing hydrogen trucks since before the pandemic.
As it is mainly the oil companies that are responsible for their supply there, the network essentially distributes hydrogen produced from hydrocarbons, such as natural gas.
It doesn’t really eliminate greenhouse gas emissions from hydrogen vehicles, but it concentrates them at the source, where the gas is produced. Oil companies, as we know because those established in Canada have been dreaming about it for decades, are falling back on carbon capture and sequestration at the source to promise clean energy.
Carbon sequestration is, at the moment, an even more ethereal solution than hydrogen, since it simply does not exist on an industrial scale anywhere on the planet.
We can’t wait to see this even more.
Put the price on it
Predictably, vehicle manufacturers and the trucking industry oppose California’s new law. They consider the deadlines imposed on them to be too short. They foresee a catastrophic increase in transport costs, which will have an impact on the whole economy.
Apparently, they did not know until last week that they would have to tackle the disproportionate share of polluting emissions that fall to them. Or at least they were imitating the rest of the vehicle manufacturers by doing only the bare minimum. But as States are slow to achieve their GHG reduction targets, they must accelerate the transition by all means, including binding measures.
Will Quebec follow California? The province wants to be a North American leader in clean commercial vehicles. The Minister of the Environment and the Fight Against Climate Change, Benoit Charette, was in California last week as part of a conference on clean heavy transport.
Again, we can’t wait to get the answer. But it feels like the end for diesel.