Trux Solutions – Reducing CO2 Emissions in the Trucking Industry

Leaders around the globe are declaring a state of climate emergency and introducing regulations to reduce CO2 emissions. Meanwhile, the world population is expected to reach 9 billion by 2050 and double the global demand for energy. In the transportation industry, the demand for energy is expected to increase by 70% by this time.

When you think of “green” industries, trucking might not be the first industry that comes to mind, but over the past few years, there have been huge advancements to make trucks more fuel efficient and to reduce their CO2 emissions.

And the trucking industry is exploring several solutions to become even greener.

There are several companies that are helping trucks to become greener through the use of alternative fuels. Even a 1% improvement would equate to a savings of 8.23 billion pounds of CO2 every year.

Options being explored include natural gas, hydrogen cells as well as electric vehicles. Perhaps the most promising of these options is electric. In fact, governments around the world have been strong advocates of putting more electric vehicles on the road with Germany aiming to have an additional 1 million electric vehicles on its streets by next year.

Although hydrogen powered vehicles offer the advantage of faster fueling times and longer drive times in between fill-ups, electric has the advantage of having a power grid that is already in place. To adequately service hydrogen vehicles, the infrastructure would have to be built from scratch.

Of course, reducing CO2 emissions in the trucking industry doesn’t have to rely only on alternative fuel sources. Increasing levels of automation can also help to improve efficiency.

There is still a lot of debate when it comes to automated vehicles however, and it may be some time before autonomous vehicles – particularly trucks – are given the green light from governments.

Being environmentally responsible isn’t the only benefit of reducing energy consumption in the trucking industry either. As gasoline prices have been steadily climbing over the last decade, green technologies are becoming comparatively more affordable and adopting them just makes good business sense.

The race to reduce CO2 emissions is a worthy goal and there is clearly more work to be done, however experts in the trucking industry are certainly among those who are taking up the challenge.