Barack Obama's Climate Action Plan, announced in June, stirred environmental campaigners and energy executives around the world. At the Copenhagen summit in 2009, the US president pledged that by 2020 America would reduce its greenhouse gas emissions 17% below 2005 levels.
A dampened economy and the switch to natural gas for electric power generation in the meantime are doing the job of cutting GHGs more effectively than any policy or mandate, with carbon emissions at a 20-year low. However, rising emissions in transportation, which already account for 28% of the economy's greenhouse gases, could put those climate targets out of reach.
Globally, the picture is even more critical as world energy consumption is set to rise by 40% by 2030. "That's like creating an entirely new additional energy industry the size of the one we have today, which is mind-boggling," says Eric Olson, senior vice president at Business for Social Responsibility (BSR) in San Francisco.
Driving online deliveries, fresh produce and all the other goods that criss-cross the US already accounts for 17.5% of the country's total transportation CO2 emissions. Despite standards on fuel efficiency for heavy vehicles, miles travelled and energy consumption are projected to grow faster than any other mode of transport, from 241bn vehicle miles in 2007 to 363bn miles in 2035, according to the Energy Information Agency. Meanwhile, fuel efficiency is only expected to increase from 6mpg in 2007 to 7mpg in 2035.
Creating a greener freight sector
During the past year, BSR has convened the Future of Fuels Forum, comprising 184 fleet operators, energy producers, retailers, truck makers, oil companies and environmental advocates to develop a roadmap towards a more sustainable freight sector. Companies include an A-list of leaders in corporate sustainability (Nike, Walmart, Unilever and Coca-Cola) and more controversial categories in fossil fuels such as BP, Shell and Suncor, a Canadian company specialising in oil sands. UPS, Volvo, GE Foundation and the US Department of Defence have also joined the forum.
"Collectively, these companies and society are driving a likely explosion of demand," he says. "This conversation wasn't taking place anywhere else. So the companies that have spearheaded this programme have already made sustainability commitments. It's a long list and as big as our guys are, they're nowhere near a majority of the market. That's something we need to build to."
BSR will this month convene a stakeholder forum in Washington and an all-day workshop at the non-profit's annual conference in San Francisco in November.
Instead of pure carbon reductions, the initiative is aimed at a holistic approach to more sustainable fuel usage through technology development, efficiency as the first "fuel" of choice and a price on carbon.
An energy mix
Oil, natural gas, biofuels and electric vehicles seem like obvious "alternatives" but none of those fuels can achieve sustainable solutions alone, says Olsen.
"The one certainty we do have about the future mix is that we will continue to have a diversified portfolio of energy," he says. "Nobody is suggesting that there is any one source, no matter how clean, that can address all of our needs."
Oil was the first topic of discussion for the stakeholders, simply because it is so deeply embedded in the transport system and likely to get dirtier with increasing supplies of oil sands.
"Oil is the big kahuna," says Olsen. "It's in the interests of heavy oil companies to reduce their energy intensity and other impacts as quickly as possible otherwise they're going to lose economically as well as politically and reputationally."
Steve Leffin, the director of global sustainability at shipping giant UPS, admits that the use of oil is unavoidable for the foreseeable future.
"We use oil – there is no sun 24/7 to fly packages, so you have to use petroleum-based products," he says.
Last year, UPS achieved a 2.1% reduction in emissions, despite a 2.3% increase in shipping volume, with aircraft accounting for about 58% of its GHG emissions.
What are the alternatives to oil?
But when it comes to ground fleet, there are more options, says Leffin. "In the 1930s we had a fleet of electric vehicles. More recently we've tried hydrogen, hydraulic hybrids, diesel hybrids, compressed natural gas and propane. But diesel fuel has the highest energy content along with jet fuel – there's 30% more energy in them than gasoline."
So far, alternatives that were touted by clean energy advocates as magic silver bullets have failed to hit their mark. Even with massively ambitious targets mandated by the US Navy and Marine Corps to source half of its energy from alternatives by 2020, biofuels have struggled to reach a significant scale that could be anything more than a drop in an oil barrel.
"Even people whose livelihoods [are in biofuels] are saying we need 20 years to get this to a really large scale," says Olsen. "That's the conundrum. There is belief that this can be done, the question is are we going to like the result by pushing it through with mandates? We think the answer is probably not."
Natural gas is billowing out of the ground in ever-larger quantities in the US. Butwhen it comes to transportation, potential gas users are on a more cautious journey. Infrastructure for compressed natural gas (CNG) refilling stations is limited and will be expensive to build out – a business risk that only a handful of companies have the resources to test.
"The economic tidal wave is driving this to the point where it almost doesn't matter whether we like gas or not," says Olsen. "Companies are pencilling out a conversion of a big chunk of their fleet to gas. But they are wondering if they will regret it. As we exploit hydrofracked natural gas at an intensity that has never been seen before, the honest answer is we don't know."
Meanwhile, electric vehicles are limited by the range and energy density of their batteries that are no match for the energy conversion of diesel engines, which can pull a 40ft-long truck for 600 miles without refuelling.
However, UPS revealed the deployment this year of 100 electric vans in California, and is expanding its 2,500-strong "rolling laboratory" of fleet alternatives to see what really works in different regions, including a synthetic fuel derived from chicken waste.
In California, EVs make sense because the state's electric grid is relatively clean thanks to large contributions from hydro and natural-gas fired power plants. But in Atlanta that same EV delivery van's energy use would have twice the carbon content because Georgia's grid is powered so heavily by coal.
Natural gas is a tempting option on the face of it because of its lower carbon content compared with gasoline, says Leffin. UPS will have the most extensive LNG fleet in US by end of 2014, with plans to buy 700 LNG heavy-duty trucks and fuelling stations. By 2017, the company will reach one billion miles driven by alternative fuel or advanced technology vehicles.
"With early action you have to be careful," he says. "The first version of some of these technologies is not the version that will deployed at scale but you don't want people to invent new technology and never try them in the field. Someone has to buy it and try it.
"As a result, we move forward, manufacturing moves forward, governments move forward, and society becomes better when technologies are chosen based on which ones do the best job."
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