How much for green chemicals?
We know we need to decarbonise the chemical industry - its going to be tough, but a pathway now exists to do it in a financially viable way.
Summary: Switching to electric vehicles is not just about passenger cars. Buses and trucks are really important as well. Most people think about trucks as being those massive 40t vehicles that speed up and down our interstates/motorways, but trucks is about way more than that. And most buses and delivery vehicles (a better word than trucks maybe) go back to depot at night or site at a logistics warehouse for extended period - making their charging a lot simpler than you think.
Why this is important: If you live in a city, and to be fair most of us do, you probably think that transport is mostly about cars, plus buses, taxis, and if you live in Asia, LatAm or Africa, motorbikes/scooters. But if you head out into the suburbs or travel on our main roads, you realise that trucks are just as important.
The big theme: Transportation has the highest reliance on fossil fuels of any sector. Approximately 95 percent of its energy comes from them. For 45 percent of countries transport is the largest source of energy related emissions and it is the second largest source for the rest. Changing how we transport ourselves and our goods helps with both climate change and with health and well-being issues and is a rich vein for investment.
The details
When I first started working as a young engineer, I didn't really appreciate how strong the desire is in people to seek simple answers. And the tougher the problem, the greater desire we have for simple solutions. In the district that I looked after we had a steep hill, where we seemed to be constantly repairing the road surface. It was something we had to do roughly every five years, which given that a typical road surface should last 20 years, was just way too frequently. That section of road not only cost us a lot of money, it also had a higher than normal number of accidents.
I wanted to take some time to study why this was happening, so that we could come up with a solution that actually fixed the problem. The pressure however was to find a quick solution, to fix it now. I was lucky, our City Engineer had got tired of spending money on repairs that didn't last, so he was happy to take some time to try out different solutions.
