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Cutting freight carbon  demands a country-wide approach, say researchers

[ October 18, 2023   //   ]

Efforts to decaronise the UK’s freight industry should be be a a system-wide basis, says the end of project report released today by the Decarbonising UK Freight Transport (DUKFT) Network published on 18 October.

The document, produced by theNetwork, a collection of over 40 academic, policy and industry organisations, and which undertook six research projects and two stakeholder events,  suggests several ways to overcome the chicken-and-egg problems associated with decarbonising road, rail and maritime freight transport.

It says that electrification is a common need across all freight modes and is a ‘no regrets’ low-risk investment from public and private investors. Non-biological renewable fuels such as hydrogen-derived methanol and ammoni have the greatest role in decarbonising domestic and international maritime freight, but may also be important in some niches for road and rail, it says.

The report finds that UK freight decarbonisation strategy can be most efficiently informed by a whole freight system, whole UK analysis capability, which needs to couple detail on both infrastructure and vehicle/vessel fleets with operational and technology specifics.

Professor Phil Greening, DUKFT joint principal investigator and director of  the Centre for Sustainable Road Freight and Centre for Logistics and Sustainability at Edinburgh‘s, Heriot-Watt University underlined the scale and complexity of the task, saying: “There remains a clear need for identifying and articulating the least-cost configuration and strategy for UK freight decarbonisation. New modelling approaches are required to address the challenges of simultaneous wholesale changes across all the transport modes. These models are sophisticated and take time to build but they are the only way of addressing complexity and they offer a low risk, cost effective pathway to reducing uncertainty and accelerating investment.”

Another principal investigator, UCL associate professor Dr Tristan Smith, added: “The research has shown that when effort was invested to bring stakeholders from different parts of freight value chains together (industry, academia, NGO and government stakeholders), there was benefit to identify a shared vision and co-create ideas for both public and private actions aligned with unlocking investment in decarbonisation.”

The report suggests that ports can be key nodes in the UK freight sector’s decarbonisation as not only transport interfaces but also locations where infrastructure and decarbonisation solution synergies are most likely exploited. They are also likely to be hubs for wider offtake of electrification, for example for decarbonising co-located industries.

Co-investigator and project manager, UCL principal research fellow, Dr Nishatabbas Rehmatulla, concluded: “Early movers can mobilise and de-risk investment in the emergence phase of the transition by establishing alliances and initiatives, ahead of regulations. Alliances between cargo owners which aggregate local/regional demand for zero emission fuelled freight services, thereby creating long-term offtake agreements of future fuel usage between fleet operators and suppliers, can be highly valuable kickstart the diffusion of fuels and technologies.”

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