Why electric trucks, not hydrogen, will corner semi market and replace diesel

Dutch electric vehicle expert Auke Hoekstra has taken to Twitter to explain why he believes electric trucks such as the Tesla Semi, rather than hydrogen-powered trucks, will corner the majority of the 40-tonne semi trailer and trucking market and replace diesel.

Hoekstra is a researcher at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands and the founder of Zenmo simulations, a zero-emission Energy & Mobility simulations lab seeking to provide scientific knowledge about energy and mobility systems. Hoekstra regularly takes to Twitter and YouTube to debunk EV myths and cheerlead the electric vehicle transition.

In a recent Twitter thread he responds to Bloomberg New Energy Finance founder Michael Liebreich’s comments about Daimler killing its hydrogen fuel cell car program, saying it was done “because the economics and poor efficiency will simply never make sense.”

Liebreich, conversely, believes that Daimler’s recent announcement that it was teaming up with Volvo Group to develop hydrogen fuel cells for heavy-duty and long-haul transport makes more sense.

Liebreich’s contention is that while “Short-range trucking is going electric … long range hydrogen trucks have a chance of working” as against trucks fuelled by bio or synthetic fuels and battery electric vehicle or pantograph combinations. Liebreich then handballed to Auke Hoekstra on the specific value and suitability of catenary and pantograph solutions.

Hoekstra’s main contention that electric trucks will corner the semi-trucking market goes back to his debunking of “the future of trucks” findings published by the International Energy Agency in 2017, which failed to include electric trucks (but which has since been updated, a point Hoekstra makes up front).

Adding a scenario of an electric truck with a 400 kilometre range, Hoekstra found that “it blew diesel and hydrogen out of the water with very little downsides” while adding that “Catenary is great too but requires international institutional cooperation” – a result Hoekstra is not holding his breath over.

The conclusion of Hoekstra’s research, based on a modern truck needing on average 1.3kWh/km and studies of how companies around the Port of Rotterdam drive, was that “a 1.3*750=975 kWh or 1 MWh battery can provide almost all trucks with the means to drive all day and charge overnight in the garage.”

This of course warrants questions about weight, but by redesigning trucks with electric motors close to the wheels, you save 3 tonnes using a 1MWh battery weighing in at 6 tonnes.

But as most trucks don’t need maximum capacity and with 40-tonne trucks causing the most CO2 emissions of all freight transport types, electrifying semi-trucks with batteries saves what Hoekstra describes as “an unparalleled amount of CO2 (and money!) per kWh of battery.”

While it will be important not to necessarily cast all alternatives to the wind in a fit of battery electric vehicle pride and exuberance, and acknowledging the niche uses for hydrogen fuel cells – such as long-haul trucking – it is not difficult to see a future where a majority of medium- to large-sized trucking is powered by batteries.

This, of course, only reinforces the need to ensure the mining of base metals required for EV batteries is done as sustainably as possible, which points back to recent research which shows that mining these metals from polymetallic nodules from the deep seafloor of the Pacific Ocean would be less environmentally dangerous than relying on ores mined from traditional sources.

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