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Alternative Truck Fuels to Replace a Dwindling Resource

Trucks carry over two thirds of all of the freight that is transported across America and in doing so they consume almost 70% of all of the energy that is consumed1 for our total transport needs. Fuel is the single largest operating expense for trucks and a single commercial truck can consume as much as 20,000 gallons of diesel per year costing around $70,0002. This is a huge amount of resources especially in an environment where fuel is becoming more expensive as the reserves become increasingly depleted. With an estimated 750,000 interstate motor carriers in the US, finding ways to reduce fuel costs has become an important issue. Late in 2011 President Obama introduced legislation that sets the goal of improving fuel economy in trucks by as much as 20% by 2018. Commercial trucks use around 22 billion gallons of diesel in a year and experts are suggesting that that volume could be cut significantly. While finding more efficient ways to use existing diesel fuels is a significant step forward there are also a number of other initiatives for finding alternative truck fuels currently underway. A long term project in California involving the supermarket chain Raley’s3 has been studying the… read more »