Renewable diesel vs. battery-electric: Which one has lower emissions?

Battery-electric trucks are here and available to purchase from all of the major OEMs, but there are limitations to the technology - range being front and center for the biggest portion of the trucking industry.
What’s also here and available, though mostly just on the West Coast, is renewable diesel, which new research has found can help solve the range issues of battery-electric while also drastically lowering carbon emissions without the large up-front costs.
American Transportation Research Institute Vice President Jeff Short is back on the 10-44 this week to talk about the group’s latest research that compares renewable diesel to battery-electric in a few different areas.
You can read more at
www.ccjdigital.com/
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Contents of this video
00:00 10-44 intro
00:30 Renewable diesel and battery-electric
03:10 What is renewable diesel?
06:55 Biodiesel vs. renewable diesel
08:43 Comparing environmental benefits, operational benefits, and costs
11:21 Operational benefits of renewable diesel
14:04 Cost difference of equipment

[@Arre2011]

What is presented in this video is: Hydrogenated Vegetable Oil (HVO). That is paraffin oils produced from fats including soy bean oil, corn oil, etc. by processing vegetable oils / fats with hydrogen (H2) and catalysts. Paraffin oils have got excellent technical properties. And that includes HVO. The old way to produce diesel fuel products from vegetable oils were to produce ”fatty acid methyl esters ” (FAME) by processing fats with methanol. Then you get a lot of glycerol as a by-product. There are many technical problems with FAME fuel.

[@istvantoppler5999]

All those sources you mention are not available now because the production network is NOT there. Biodiesel while perfectly acceptable for 9 months of the year has major gelling issues come winter across the snow belt. Pure biodiesel has been used at 100% in South America for decades because it's warm.

[@partlysane5382]

The fundamental problem with Biofuels is they still create carbon dioxide when burnt.. Supporters say that this is offset by the fact that the crops used to produce the fuel absorb the same amount of co2 when growing. But that calculation only works if NOTHING organic is crown in the fields used to grow crops to be used for biofuel.. In reality, where organic matter can grow, it will do, whether farmed or not. Furthermore, you need a very large amount of organic matter to make it. It doesn't pollute our air as much but it will make very little difference to global co2 levels