Fossil Fuels Are 40% of Freight Shipping Tonnage, but Half Its Fuel Use

The top graph makes it seem much more dramatic than it is.

Maritime shipping is very efficient, and consists of a very small fraction of overall petroleum usage.

Road transportation uses about 20x as much fuel as ocean shipping, planes use about 2x as much, and trains about the same amount.

The typical rule of thumb is that about 40% of the energy in a barrel of petroleum is lost before it goes into your gas tank. And the two big factors are the energy required to do the refining and delivering the fuel from the refinery to the gas station. Shipping the crude from the oil field to the refinery is a factor, but a small one in comparison.

This 40% is the main reason why driving an EV emits less carbon than driving an equivalently sized gas vehicle even if you're topping up that EV with the dirtiest electricity you can find.

P.S. maritime shipping typically uses very dirty fuel. We'll probably notice the reduction in sulfur pollution more than the reduction in CO2.

P.P.S 3% of a very large number is still itself a large number, so it's still worth looking for solutions.

To summarize: 40% of tonnage but 50% of tonnage-kilometres. I thought freight volume would be measured in ton-kilometres in the first place.

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What the hell is this headline and the article trying to say..?

"40% of horse-drawn carriage cargo is hay, but 50% of what we feed horses is hay".

So what?

The chart at the top of the article makes it clear that the entire thing is pure fantasy