I’ve been working a bit on biomass stuff here in New England and I just got schooled in transportation costs. Trucks vs. Trains? It isn’t much of a battle when there are large weights or long distances involved.
Let’s have a look at the math behind moving a mountain of wood pellets from the Midwest to New England ... and what this all means for our so called "way of life".
Heating oil here in New England is $4.50/gallon and the typical home is going to use a thousand gallons - $4,500 total. If you can afford a pellet boiler you can do the job with five tons of pellets which are going to run you $1,250 all together. Call that motivation.
Pellets are in short supply in New England:
So ... they’re precious here, but sawdust is a waste product in my home state. If you know where to look enough pellets to balance an Aegis cruiser on a scale can be found for half the going rate in New England. There is however a small problem of the 1,200 miles between the two locations.
If you’ve got 10,000 tons of product and you can fit 20 tons into a load that is 500 total truck trips. Modern semis will get 9 mpg so we’re talking 133 gallons per load, or about $360,000 in fuel costs alone.
What happens if you do it using some of these?
A rail car holding 100 tons and covering that distance is about $4,500 or $900/semi load worth of product. A single semi load takes 133 x $5.40 or $718.20 just for fuel alone ... and that is one way ... not counting depreciation or the cost of the driver. I did a little Google research and a $2.00/mile charge would be pretty cheap - $2,400 per truckload or $12,000 to match what a train car can accomplish.
We bear a social cost for the use of trucks above and beyond the dangers The Baculum King describes here. The axle on my Versa has about 1,500 pounds on it and does a certain amount of damage to the roads. The four axles on the semi bearing the load each have 10,000 pounds or 6.66 times as much weight. Highway damage goes up by the fourth power of axle weight; 1,967 times the damage to the roads that my little sedan causes are done every time a load like that passes. If the trucking industry paid for the use they made of roads ... they wouldn’t exist.
Global oil production peaked in May of 2005 and will probably decline continuously into the future. One of the side effects of this is that diesel prices go nowhere but up and that drives road repair cost as most construction equipment is diesel. Diesel being more expensive motivates refiners to crack more of the long chain stuff that comes in crude oil reducing the amount of asphalt made and again raising repair costs. Road repairs are going to get a lot less frequent, too – we’ve seen that every time the economy gets bad and it’s about to do so with a vengeance. It makes nothing but sense to conserve what we’ve already built and avoid any more trouble with bridges.
That $140 billion in bridge repair money would go a long way towards electrifying our national rail infrastructure. The semi gets 180 ton miles per gallon. I hear from a reliable source that for trains it’s about 467 ton miles per gallon. That number goes up a good bit when the train stops being diesel and starts being electric. Part of that electrification would be double tracking single runs and triple track in some spots. Amtrak will need a lot more than the 632 operational passenger cars they have now. The kind of upgrade that $140 billion would get us means trains moving at 110 mph. No, we’re not getting high speed rail, except perhaps in places like the Boston to Washington D.C. corridor or the San Francisco to L.A. run, and that will take amazing politically will; nobody wants their town to be a whistle stop and there are plenty of those in California.
We could screw this stuff up royally. We could buy into the idea that drilling everywhere will make things like they used to be. We could see an expansion of the current resource war in the Middle East in the waning days of the Bush kleptocracy. We could have an instant replay on oil just like Georgia had with water, where those with a vested interest in the way the world used to be forced through rules that simply didn’t fit the facts of the situation.It’s a sad thing to be sitting here and cheering on a crushing depression with the thought that the decrease in consumption coupled with the need for job creation might be the only way we get ourselves pointed in the right direction.
Our assumptions have to change. People say "But rail will never replace air travel!" They’re right; our expectation of flitting from one end of the continent to the other in a day’s time is not going to stand.. That is a week’s journey and not something we’ll be undertaking lightly. We’ve spread ourselves to the four corners of the country; future generations will marvel at our mobility ... but they’ll be sticking closer to home.