Our current global transportation paradigm wastes more than 50% of every gallon of fuel it consumes.
Air & Tare The most shipped commodities on Earth!
Although our current transportation system is the most advanced it has ever been, it is fraught with inefficiencies and consumes more than twice the fuel and time than is required.
As an example, shipping an item today requires it to be boxed, labeled, in some cases palletized, placed in a container or trailer, and then transported.
Each step in this process adds additional weight, also known as “tare,” and volume to the original item, which increases its shipping cost.
Additionally, as displayed by the values in the image above, the transportation mode itself adds tare.
For the purpose of this discussion, tare is the weight of everything required to ship a product but does not include the weight of the product itself.
It’s important to realize that both weight and volume determine fuel consumption in the shipping process.
Because a product’s volume is directly proportional to the overall weight of the equipment required to ship the product, increasing volume results in increasing fuel consumption.
In simpler terms, the product may only be a load of packing peanuts, but if it requires 10 boxcars to transport, then the process will consume the fuel required to move those 10 boxcars at 42 tons each plus the 200-ton locomotive.
All of these costs are passed to the customer.
In the following pie chart, we show a comparison between the 2.1 billion tons of freight moved by the 7 Class I railroad companies in 2019, as reported in their annual R1 reports, and the total weight of the equipment required for this process.
Our calculations are very conservative and based on the ideal scenario, which means a 0% grade, because grade dictates the number of locomotives required, and all boxcars are filled to max weight capacity.
The results clearly demonstrate that the weight of the locomotive and boxcars accounts for at least 40% of the total weight, with the actual freight only making up 60%.
Consider that for a moment.
It could easily be argued that 40% of the fuel consumed by this mode of transportation is for the movement of the equipment alone.
How Grade Impacts Efficiency
The following pie chart utilizes the same data for the 7 Class I railroads but calculates for a 1% grade.
The steepest mainline grade in the US is Raton Pass, New Mexico at 3.3%.
Most mainline grades in the US do not exceed 2% grade.
Notice how the train’s empty weight increased significantly from 1.4 billion tons in the previous example to 2.0 billion tons.
This is a direct result of requiring greater towing capacity, meaning more locomotives are required to tow the same load, which equates to greater fuel and time consumption.
A 1% grade is a mere 12 inches of rise in 100 feet of track but increases towing resistance by a multiple of 4!
Fuel Consumption Comparison
All current transportation technologies have an empty weight (deadweight) component that must be included with the freight weight when calculating fuel consumption.
The cost of transporting this deadweight is also passed to the customer and is included in the freight shipping cost.
Because of the lower rolling friction of steel wheels on steel track, lower grades and a more direct path, the railroad industry has long been considered the most efficient mode of ground transportation for cargo.
In the following pie chart, the total fuel consumption of 3.4 billion gallons for the 7 Class I railroads in 2019, as reported in their annual R1 reports, is broken down based on the previous chart’s ratio of freight-tons to empty weight.
The shocking reality presented by the pie chart is made worse by the realization that its values are conservative in nature and not based on real-world conditions.
Real World Numbers
In a real-world scenario, more than 60% of the railcars making up a train will be loaded either below their max weight capacity or below their max volume capacity, or both. This significantly increases the equipment requirement and therefore fuel consumption.
As an example, in our ideal scenario above, 2.1 billion tons of cargo would only require 21 million fully loaded boxcars at 100 tons of freight per boxcar.
However, the total number of cars used by the 7 Class I railroads in 2019, as reported in their annual R1 reports, was an incredible 54 million!
Additionally, besides grade, there are a myriad of other variables that can significantly affect rail’s overall efficiency, such as:
- Speed
- Curves in the track
- Precipitation on the track
- Wind
- Railcar loading and unloading
- Rail traffic congestion
- Rail yard congestion
- Slow transit speeds through high population zones
Curves and speed have the same negative effect on efficiency as grade.
Precipitation causes loss of traction which decreases total towing capacity and increases time and fuel consumption.
Traffic congestion and slowing for population centers results in loss of momentum.
Rail's Ground Infrastructure Costs
The 7 Class I railroads own and maintain more than 104,000 miles of track and 100,000 bridges.
Since 1980, they have collectively spent more than $700 billion on their infrastructure.
That’s an average of $20 billion per year spent on infrastructure alone!
What about Trucking?
We started this conversation using rail as our example because the scale of the equipment used for that mode of transportation provides a better visual representation of ground transportation’s inefficiencies.
However, when it comes to moving cargo, the trucking industry is considerably less efficient than rail, but far more utilized.
Generally, the trucking industry moves more than 72% of all cargo shipped in the US.
As an example, according to a report issued by the American Trucking Association (ATA) in 2019, the US trucking industry moved 10.23 billion tons of freight versus the railroad’s 2.1 billion tons and consumed 45.6 billion gallons of fuel.
The following pie chart displays the breakdown between trucking’s freight-tons and the empty weight (deadweight) of the equipment required to get the job done.
These are conservative numbers, as our calculations are for the use of Class 8 semi-trucks only. In reality, of the 37.9 million trucks registered in the US, only about 4 million are registered as Class 8.
Trucking Fuel Consumption
The following pie chart displays the breakdown of the 45.6 billion gallons of fuel consumed by the trucking industry in 2019 based on the previous chart’s freight-tons to empty weight ratio.
Again, the fuel consumed as a result of transporting the vehicle’s empty weight is nearly half of the total fuel consumption.
LTA's Advantage
LTA enjoys efficiency superiority over all other transportation technologies for a myriad of reasons.
LTA utilizes the Earth’s atmosphere as its transportation infrastructure, which provides direct-path access to all geographic locations with no land or water boundaries, no congestion and no maintenance cost.
Because buoyancy cancels the effects of gravity, there are no grades with LTA. This is significant because it results in both the airship and freight being virtually weightless.
Therefore, unlike the transportation technologies mentioned above, there is no deadweight fuel consumption with LTA.
Additionally, LTA can utilize the wind’s natural currents to further reduce fuel consumption. No other transportation technology possesses this advantage.
Lighter-than-Air technology will prove itself the most efficient and profitable form of transportation in the 21st Century, beating out all other modes in both time and fuel economy, and by providing an unparalleled passenger experience.
Recommended Presentations
For more information about the concepts discussed on this page, we recommend viewing the following presentations on our “Pitch Deck” page: