California is setting ambitious new environmental goals, but questions remain about whether truckers, marine terminals, and other links in the supply chain will be able to reach those goals, let alone at a price that keeps the state’s ports competitive.
With California setting ambitious new goals to reduce greenhouse gases, as well as pollutants such as sulfur oxides (SOx), nitrogen oxides (NOx) and diesel particulates, the freight transportation industry in the state has its work cut out for it.
A Sustainable Freight Action Plan created by the state calls for 100,000 freight vehicles and equipment capable of zero-emission operation to be deployed by 2030, and regulators have set a target of reducing greenhouse gases to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030 and 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050.
Whether truckers, marine terminals, and other links in the supply chain will be able to reach those goals, let alone at a price that keeps California’s ports competitive, is unclear, but there is strong interest in finding and developing technologies that will make those goals achievable. The California Air Resources Board (CARB) said in May it has invested $599 million in zero-emission vehicles since 2013 using funds from the state’s cap-and-trade program.
Project Portal. This summer, Toyota Motor North America will begin testing a new drayage truck in and around the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach that uses hydrogen as fuel. Other companies such as U.S. Hybrid Corp., BYD, and Hydrogenics have also developed dray trucks or components for tucks that use either electric batteries or hydrogen fuel cells.
Toyota’s truck is equipped with the same fuel cells as those in its hydrogen-powered passenger car, the Mirai.
By combining hydrogen with oxygen from the atmosphere in its onboard fuel cells, the truck is able to generate electricity that is used to power an electric motor and continually charge its battery. The only exhaust is water vapor.
Toyota used a Kenworth “glider”—a truck without power train—as the platform on which to build the vehicle. Four high pressure tanks for the hydrogen, two of the Mirai fuel cell stacks, and two six-kilowatt-hour batteries were installed in the sleeper compartment to drive an electric motor under the hood that generates 670 horsepower and 1325 pound-feet of torque.
Designed for short-haul routes, Toyota says the truck will have the capacity to move 80,000 lbs. (cab, chassis, and container combined) and be able to drive more than 200 miles between fill-ups.
The hydrogen refueling station for the truck will be located at Toyota’s logistics facility at Pier B in the Port of Long Beach, where it receives automobiles from roll-on/ roll-off ships.
“The idea is to have the truck fill up in the morning, run the truck all day long, and then come back and fill up the next day,” said Jana Hartline, a spokeswoman for Toyota.
According to Chris Cannon, the director of environmental management for the Port of Los Angeles, most of the drayage activity associated with the port occurs within 25 miles of its terminals, so the trucks should be able to make at least three trips on a full tank.
One of the advantages of hydrogen-fueled trucks is that they can be refueled rapidly, whereas recharging a battery-electric truck can take several hours.
Toyota announced its plan to test the feasibility of the truck, which it has dubbed “Project Portal,” at a press conference in April with representatives from CARB.
Hartline said Toyota views the project as an experiment to prove the scalability of fuel cell technology, but noted the company has no intention to get involved in manufacturing heavy-duty trucks, and it remains to be seen whether it would get into the business of selling fuel cells to trucking companies. Toyota’s Hino Motors subsidiary last year did launch a line of fuel cell-powered buses and also manufactures a hybrid diesel- electric light-duty truck.
Worthwhile Opportunity. The Port of Los Angeles has worked with manufacturers of more than 30 different on-road drayage trucks and yard tractors for use inside terminals to support their testing of zero-emissions vehicles. Some of these have been battery-electric vehicles and others have used hydrogen fuel cells.
“Initial zero-emission vehicle testing showed mixed results, but more recent progress has been made that reinforces the Harbor Department’s belief that zero- emission container movement technologies show great promise for helping to reduce criteria pollutant and greenhouse gas emissions in the future,” the port said in a 2015 white paper.
But Cannon was quick to point out that battery-electric and hydrogen-fueled trucks are much more expensive than conventional clean diesel trucks—$350,000 to $450,000 compared with $110,000 to $125,000 for a new diesel truck.
There are also about 700 drayage trucks in the port that are fueled with natural gas. Cannon said trucks are currently “the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions at the port, and they’re one of the largest sources of criteria pollutants [such as SOx, NOx, and particulates] and health risk potential. So we see fuel cell technology, as well as battery-electric technology, as being an important opportunity to reduce emissions in the future from drayage truck operations.”
However, he also noted that the term “zero-emissions” itself is “kind of a misnomer, because it doesn’t take into consideration the amount of emissions that are needed to generate electricity, or hydrogen, or so forth.
“We believe that those fuel generation emissions must be considered in the overall evaluation of a technology, but so far we have found that even with those fuel generation calculations, battery-electric technology is superior to diesel technology insofar as the carbon footprint is concerned,” he said. “It still is not superior in terms of its performance, and that’s because of the limitations on battery life. That has yet to be proven to be able to equal the performance of a diesel. But the potential is there, and we believe the potential is worth pursuing.”
Cannon says electric motors have greater torque than their diesel counterparts, and battery-electric or fuel cell trucks should be able to perform well as drayage trucks. Trucks operating in Los Angeles and Long Beach need power and torque to be able to climb the Vincent Thomas Bridge or, further out from the city, to get over the steep portion of Interstate 5 commonly referred to as the “Grapevine.”
Chris Shimoda, vice president of government affairs at the California Trucking Association, said there are currently about a dozen demonstration projects of battery-electric or hydrogen fuel cell trucks around the country for Class 8 trucks.
“The Toyota demonstration is exciting,” he said, “Actual implementation and widespread deployment is—I think anyone would acknowledge—a long ways off. You need to put any of these early demonstration projects through pretty rigorous field testing.”
None of the trucks tested in the past decade have resulted in sustainable manufacturing, and neither electrical charging nor hydrogen refueling infrastructure have been “developed to the point where you could actually have a widespread deployment even if the vehicles were there,” said Shimoda.
He said truck manufacturers seem to be focusing their development efforts primarily on medium-duty trucks—Class 2B up to Class 7—as opposed to the heavy-duty Class 8s.
UPS, for example, said in May it would deploy an extended range (125 miles), electric Class 6 medium-duty delivery truck powered by a fuel cell that “meets the same route and range requirements of UPS’s existing conventional fuel vehicles” some time in the third quarter. The first will be deployed in Sacramento and UPS plans to have 17 of the trucks operating in California by the end of 2018. The parcel carrier presently has 122 battery-electric delivery trucks deployed in the U.S. and 141 internationally.
Cautionary Tale. The Port of Los Angeles and Port of Long Beach first adopted a Clean Air Action Plan in 2006 and revised it in 2010. A decade after adoption, the two ports reported diesel particulate matter had been reduced by 85 percent, 97 percent of sulfur dioxides had been eliminated, and nitrogen oxides had been cut in half.
Last year, the Port of Oakland reported similar success. A 2015 emissions inventory showed diesel emissions from trucks serving the port had declined 98 percent and ship emissions had dropped 75 percent since 2005.
Those reductions are in large measure the result of requirements that containerships, reefer vessels, and cruise ships use shore power when docked, rather than generating electricity with their own engines; providing incentives for ships to slow as they approach the port; electrification of terminal equipment; and the use of trucks with clean diesel or liquefied natural gas (LNG) engines.
Shimoda said that in 2013 it was estimated there were 11,000 Class 7 and Class 8 trucks in California fueled with natural gas, a little less than one percent of the total fleet.
The experience of truckers with LNG-fueled trucks is something of a cautionary tale.
“The equipment was not ready for prime time,” said Weston LaBar, executive director of the Harbor Trucking Association (HTA), a group that represents drayage companies. “And when the warranties on those trucks expired, the companies got rid of them. They either liquidated them or traded them in. But many of them have bought newer trucks” equipped with clean diesel engines.
Those LNG trucks had nine-liter engines and were “not able to perform the needs of the drayage community,” said LaBar. “It didn’t have the power. They broke down a lot. So there was a lot of maintenance involved, and quite frankly, it was a bit of a disaster from the point of view of the trucking industry.”
Manufacturers are now equipping LNG-fueled trucks with 12-liter engines, which they say are more powerful and better suited for drayage operations, but LaBar says, “It’s going to take a while for folks in the industry to feel comfortable investing in that technology again.”
Fred Johring, the president of drayage provider Golden State Express and chair- man of the HTA, said in a recent speech at a hydrogen fuel conference manufacturers should “use a lot of caution in approaching this market because of the bad taste that people…have for alternative energy. The bad taste comes from not properly vetting a piece of equipment before you put it into the market.
“I hate to be a naysayer,” he said. “I think hydrogen offers a great alternative when they are able to get the pricing down of the fuel cell to where it’s marketable. Because if you think about it, with an electric truck, so many of your moving parts have gone away. The bane for truck owners is the constant replacement of parts on these diesel engines.”
Useful Life. LaBar said for the trucking industry, “the game has changed a little bit here recently with the passage of SB 1,” a 10-year $52.4 billion highway infrastructure program signed into law by California Gov. Jerry Brown in April.
A provision in the law “guarantees what’s called ‘useful life’ for a trucker of newly purchased equipment of 13 years or 800,000 miles, not to exceed 18 years,” he said.
“What this basically does is it says you can’t continuously move the goal posts on the industry,” explained LaBar. “And the result of that from our observation is that CARB and the South Coast Air Quality Management District have backed off of truck regulations.”
He said the state is “still looking at indirect source rules, better known as ‘facility caps,’ for different things like warehouses and ports.” It’s unclear how those regulations would work, but LaBar says his understanding is that these cannot be used to subvert the “useful life” provision in SB 1.
Other provisions in SB 1 will increase the excise tax on diesel fuel from 16 cents to 36 cents per gallon and the sales tax on diesel from 1.75 percent to 5.75 percent starting on Nov. 1, 2017.
LaBar said he believes there was an understanding on the part of the governor and state legislature that “if you’re going to use the diesel excise tax to fund road repairs and infrastructure maintenance, then you need people to consume diesel.
“The other thing is that these are not inexpensive pieces of equipment,” he noted.
When industry invests in newer, cleaner technology, “you have to allow them to recoup the useful life of that equipment.”
CARB is requiring trucks registered in California to meet standards set in 2010, and LaBar estimates “at least half or more already meet those standards.”
But Thomas Jelenic, a vice president of the Pacific Merchant Shipping Association (PMSA), says planned revisions to the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach’s Clean Air Action Plan could pose major problems for shipping companies and terminals in the years ahead.
A draft discussion agreement of the revised plan was released last fall, and Jelenic says he is concerned that portions of the port’s draft discussion agreement were adopted by CARB in March.
“Basically, CARB scooped the ports at this point,” he said, by directing its staff to develop rules to expand wider use of shore power by ships, also known as “cold ironing,” and mandating electric cargo handling equipment.
Jelenic, who worked for the Port of Long Beach for 15 years and authored the 2006 and 2010 Clean Air Action Plan, said he believes CARB’s goals are neither afford- able nor technologically achievable.
A study PMSA commissioned from engineering firm Moffatt & Nichol pegged the capital cost of having all terminals in the two ports use automated zero-emission technologies—similar to those being used OOCL’s Long Beach Container Terminal— at $18 billion over 30 years and billions more in added operating costs.
That’s simply not affordable, said Jelenic, especially in a port whose volumes are just now recovering to the levels seen before the Great Recession.
It may be possible at some point to develop electrical versions of the sort of equipment currently in use at Los Angeles and Long Beach terminals, namely yard hostlers and top picks. But prior attempts to develop an electric hostler have been unsuccessful, and only now are companies beginning to try to build an electric top pick.
This is not to say that the demonstration projects to date have been worthless. Information and knowledge have been gained, but “none have been successful where they have gotten to the point that we can replace diesel equipment,” said Jelenic.
In a recent article in the PMSA’s newsletter, Jelenic called on regulators to work with the transportation industry to plan for the future needs of the Southern California cargo gateway “in a manner that preserves its competitiveness and achieves real emission reductions that are not founded on a system of speculative technology.”
