by frog
I am – in a suitably amphibian style – interested in the interface between land and sea transport.The link is not as webbed and tenuous as you may think. After all, as g.blog pointed out today, coastal shipping is the most energy efficient means of moving freight.
A ship consumes 75 – 80 percent less fuel than a truck per tonne hauled. It’s a time honoured way of shifting heavy cargo.
And, my friends, there’s a chance to have your say on this logical and common sense solution to those dangerous road options. Submissions for feedback on the Government Policy Statement on Land Transport Funding close next Thursday April 2 at 5pm. This is the current policy statement so if you think it needs a revamp, then feel free to have your say.
Even the home of truck culture, the United States, finally seems to be understanding the benefits of this ancient form of transport. A Bill before the US Congress, the Marine Highway Bill spearheaded by Stas Margaronis, president of Santa Maria Shipowning & Trading, proposes Congress allocate $50 million a year for five years to finance federal loan guarantees sufficient to build a fleet of 66 ships to ply the Atlantic, Pacific and Gulf coasts. With 300 53-foot containers each, the coastal ships will remove 20,000 truckloads daily off coastal US highways – yes 20,000 truckloads daily! The removal of the trucks will relieve traffic congestion and reduce maintenance, repair and upgrades needed to accommodate those large trucks. And make things safer for smaller, more vulnerable road users.The project will create 20,000 jobs. It’s an ideal Green New Deal project to stimulate the economy at the same time as reducing greenhouse gas emissions and reducing dependence on oil.This sort of project would work well in New Zealand too, as we are a (narrow) island nation where every city has or is close to a port. It is the kind of proposal we should expect to see in the amended Government Policy Statement on Land Transport Funding (for some strange reason, coastal shipping is officially categorised as land transport).Sadly, it seems this is not to be. Sue Bradford took a look at the draft Government Policy Statement this morning, only to discover that funding for domestic sea freight development had been slashed by $27m to just $3m over the next 3 years.
I also find National’s loads of roads approach puzzling, but lead on g.blog, lead on.
It defies all logic, and raises suspicions that they have been unduly influenced by the powerful and well-heeled road transport lobby.
Proposed ratios of spending on roads to alternatives to roads under the document blow out to a maximum of $9 : $1!
But it’s not too late for common sense and logic to prevail.
Get going people! Save Our Ships and you might save (part of) the planet along the way.
Published in Economy, Work, & Welfare by frog on Thu, March 26th, 2009
Tags: gblog, maritime shipping, SOS
on the trolls and those who are unable to keep on topic
do you want to put all those road maintenance workers out of business?
Don’t you know that potholes=jobs!
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Now coastal ships are an interesting alternative.
Would love to see some local studies and numbers…..
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Think about it. The US scheme will create 20,000 jobs, and take 20,000 trucks off the road. i.e. 20,000 jobs lost.
And after the ships are built, I’m pretty sure that there won’t be 20,000 jobs in running just 66 ships.
The “20,000 new jobs” line sounds like spin doctor figures, when the long term truth is most likely the opposite – less jobs.
If coastal freighter are so much more efficient, then why are freight companies not flocking to them here?
Could it be in a small country like New Zealand they are not practical. You have to find say 300 containers in Auckland, that all ned to go to say Napier, that are all ready on the same day. And they might only go once a week.
And the first container needs to wait until the last container is loaded, before it starts on it’s slow journey. At the other end that first container again needs to wait until the other 300 are unloaded, until it can be unloaded.
And are there then 300 containers that need to slowly go back to Auckland?
So coastal freight would be good for goods that can hang around a long time being loaded, and where the delivery time is measured in several days or more, rather than a few hours.
Considering the above, that rules out the majority of freight in NZ.
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Don’t worry Kahikatea, even if every truck and every bus was removed from our roads the frequency of potholes would only reduce by one-third at the most.
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“The amended GPS will need to reflect that $258 million of capital commitments for Wellington rail infrastructure will be funded from the Crown account and not from the National Land Transport Fund, freeing up more revenue generated from road users for road–related activity.”
The most disturbing thing about the proposed GPS is that despite the fact that last year’s road toll 50% above the target set in the Road Safety 2010 Strategy it only gets a token mention. TNZ’s previously announced it’s commitment to install as much rumbles strips this year as in all previous years combined. Apart from allowing that funding the government’s approach to acheiving the Road Safety 2010 Strategy target is the same as Labour – pretend that the target is ‘no more than 300 deaths’ despite the fact that that target was predicated on a continuation of the traffic growth rates of the 1990s. I’m surprised no Green MP has ever spoken out against this blatant deception.
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Cool….now invent a ship that can deliver to my front door and we have a goer…;-)
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James “Cool….now invent a ship that can deliver to my front door and we have a goer…;-)”
Apparently they’re having trouble with the Hamilton – Rotorua- Palmerston North Shipping Route as the captain can’t find his way out of Lake Taupo.
The Greymouth Christchurch Coast to Coast route is facing stiff competition from Steve Gurney, who is a week faster than the ship.
Seriously, it’s a good idea if you can find enough slow boat freight to fill them. But short distance shipping with double handling at each end, is not particualrly efficient, even more so in a place with such a small population.
Just like NZ would have to be one of the worst countries in the world to try to run an efficient railway. We have steep and hilly countryside, a population less than Sydney that is spread out over long distances, living in small cities that could hardly be spread out further away from each other, a gap in the middle where trains can’t go, and a narrow gauge railway so trains have to go slow.
Watch Kiwi Rail – it will be a money vortex, sucking in hundreds of millions of taxpayers money which will not be coming out the other side.
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so how do you think we should transport goods and people around NZ then photonz1 ?
electric trucks and buses? zepplins? we don’t travel and each region becomes self sufficient?
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Stuey wrote “so how do you think we should transport goods and people around NZ then photonz1 ?”
Unfortunately in NZ railways will never be particularly efficient or particularly practical (no matter how well it is managed). Coastal shipping is in a similar position. Both will be a bit more efficient but only in a small part of the freight market that suits them.
More than most other countries, because of our population and topography, we’re pretty much stuck with diesel trucks.
A bit of road improvement might help their efficiency a bit, as will new technolgy. Perhaps we’ll see deisel/electiric one day, like the locomotives.
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Photonz1: How do you think freight was moved around NZ before diesel trucks were so prevalent? I’m not talking about 100 years ago; perhaps 20 or 30 years ago.
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Compare the population of NZ 20 or 30 years ago and the frieght being moved compared to today.
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Samiuela wrote “Photonz1: How do you think freight was moved around NZ before diesel trucks were so prevalent? I’m not talking about 100 years ago; perhaps 20 or 30 years ago.”
Twenty Five years ago some freight was moved around by NZR which ran at massive losses and sucked hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars in subsidies, and even then it still couldn’t compete with trucks.
It would often take two weeks to get freight from the length of the country – that’s if it didn’t go missing of fall off the tracks in a derailment.
Rural lines were being pulled up all over the place, as they were just not efficient enough.
Buying back rail made as much sense as buying sub prime loans of the banks. It always has and always will make a loss. Successful and experienced overseas rail operators havent even been able to make it pay (unless like Toll, you can suck out all the capital, and convince some stupid idiot to buy it for half a billion more than it’s true value).
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photonz1 said: The US scheme will create 20,000 jobs, and take 20,000 trucks off the road. i.e. 20,000 jobs lost.
Apparently they’re having trouble with the Hamilton – Rotorua- Palmerston North Shipping Route as the captain can’t find his way out of Lake Taupo.
Of course there will be some job losses in trucking in the US, but on the coasts truckers would be kept busy on short haul harbor pickups and deliveries. And there will still be long haul trucking required to the land-locked states and between the Pacific and Atlantic coasts where it would take too long to for ships anyway and likely be uneconomic because of the caost of transiting the Panama canal. So, not, there would be nowhere near a net gain of 20,000 jobs (I didn’t say there would in my g.blog post), but there would be a net gain.
As for Hamilton, Rotorua or Palmerston North, rail would be a vastly more energy efficient means than trucks of getting freight from the ports of Auckland, Tauranga and Wellington to these centres, with trucks just being utilised for local distribution.
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Coastal shipping requires extra handling, which is a major obstacle – unless that extra handling is required anyway. Neither rail nor trucking can carry inter-island freight alone – they both need the ferries. Perhaps we should look at bringing back the Lyttleton (Christchurch) to Wellington ferry run?
Railway has one advantage over both trucks and shipping – it doesn’t need oil.
Trevor.
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How do you think freight was moved around NZ before diesel trucks were so prevalent? I’m not talking about 100 years ago; perhaps 20 or 30 years ago?
An interesting question,but hardly relevant in today’s society.
20 years ago it was perfectly acceptable for a letter to take 2 weeks to travel between an address in Wellington and on in the UK, today 2 seconds is considered a long time.
20 years ago it was perfectly acceptable for a family to go to a white-wear shop, select their new fridge, and wait three weeks for delivery, today 48 hours is considered too long.
Society has changed vastly in the last 10, 20 and 30 years, I know I’ve watched it and participated (as we are all doing right here and now,) and you can never turn the clock back. The NOW generations are giving way to the RIGHT NOW generation (a phrase my 4 year old grandson likes to use as do his classmates, much to the amusement of my 40 year old daughter – his Aunt). Whatever decisions regarding transport are made now need to reflect the expectations of today’s under 5s, not those who suffer from oldfartitus and think that the ways of the past will be good enough for the future.
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Toad – If you are removing 20,000 long distance trucks, there will not be “some job losses” – there will be lots of job losses.
Similarly if the short local urban trips have to be made, (effectively trucks are removed from highways but not cities) then why will it improve traffic congestion?
Unfortunately with rail efficiency, you tend to look at a very small part of the railways (fuel) and use that as the overall efficioency compared to trucks.
The whole infrastructure behind the railways, the double handling, the fact that the trains end up at a freight yard which may be a long way from it’s destination, means that fuel is only a very minor part of the costs and efficiencies of running trains.
Rail becomes efficient when you get a large anount of freight all coming from the same place at the same time, and going to the same place (i.e bulk coat, wood, steel, aggregate etc, coming form a mine or factory). To get the same sort of efficiency from normal freight needs something NZ doesn’t have – a large population.
Our populartion and topgraphy means rail will never be as efficient in NZ as it is in other countries. And I haven’t even mentioned that it is very slow, meaning it is and alway will be unsuitable for most NZ freight which is time sensitive.
Yes – get as much freight as we can on trains – but be aware that in NZ it is no magic bullet for getting trucks off roads. It has severe limitations and will always only ever play a smaller part in our transport system.
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Trevor
EH?
“Railway has one advantage over both trucks and shipping – it doesn’t need oil”
I don’t think they’ve used wind or coal power on commercial shipping vessels for quite a long time!
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Strings….. Trevor is saying that shipping DOES need oil. Most trains do need oil though, as only the NIMT from Palmy to Hamilton is electrified.
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jarbury
His exact words are in quotes in my post – perhaps there is a grammar problem? I would be interested to know what years Trevor was at school if you are right in what You say He is saying. If however, the problem is in your understanding of his words “doesn’t need”, I wonder when you completed you secondary schooling!
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Railway has an advantage over trucks and shipping.
That advantage is that it doesn’t need oil.
The means that railway doesn’t need oil, but trucks and shipping do need oil.
How is Trevor saying that shipping doesn’t need oil?
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That means, not the means* just for clarification
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Jarbury
The comment on shipping – I guess tongue-in-cheek humour isn’t your strong point. What I was saying was that I wrote commercial shipping instead of commercial railways in my 9:36 post, and I was taking a rise out of myself. Sorry if my humour is too dry.
So let’s get back to it.
How are these railways working if not with oil? Are you or they suggesting they are all going to run on electricity, which we don’t have the capacity to generate enough of already? Or is there another form of energy, besides oil and electricity, in the offing for rail transport?
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Sarcasm or tongue-in-cheek can be tricky to get across in typing. I’m sure you’d recognise that
My 10.05 post actually says that I kind of agree with you that railways don’t really have that advantage at the moment, as most of the network is run by diesel trains.
I think the cost of electrifying the rest of the NZ rail network would be a far bigger hurdle than finding extra power generation capacity. For power generation I’m a huge fan of more geothermal and also of tidal generation in Cook Strait. Both are renewable, environmentally friendly and are predictable about when they generate power – unlike wind & solar. There is potential gigawatts of energy that could be produced from Cook Strait’s tides.
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I agree, it is hard to see a cheek!
I happily agree about the vast renewable energy sources we have, especially in and around the cook straight, however, if you look at the challenges that face EVERY SINGLE ATTEMPT to harness some of that energy, you would despair. I certainly don’t want to see my hard earned money paying more and more for renewable – free raw material – electricity because of the cost of getting a resource consent!
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Consenting power plants has become easier lately as Ministers for the Environment have finally clued onto the fact that they’re able to “call in” these types of applications. A few fair windfarms have been consented that way quite quickly in recent times I believe.
For tidal power…. the consenting process might be quite simple as there’d be very few people affected. You secure the turbines to the bottom of the ocean – as long as you take into account effects on marine life then I think such generators would be relatively free from opposition.
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Toad said “Of course there will be some job losses in trucking in the US, but on the coasts truckers would be kept busy on short haul harbor pickups and deliveries. And there will still be long haul trucking required to the land-locked states and between the Pacific and Atlantic coasts where it would take too long to for ships anyway and likely be uneconomic because of the caost of transiting the Panama canal. So, not, there would be nowhere near a net gain of 20,000 jobs (I didn’t say there would in my g.blog post), but there would be a net gain.”
There will be very little long haul trucking required to the land-locked states and between the Pacific and Atlantic coasts. The former is dominated by Mississippi barging and regional railroads and the latter is dominated by the Transcontinental railroads.
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I considered the possible ambiguity in what I wrote, and felt that I left it unambiguous. If you consider my full sentence, you will note that “Railway” is singular and “it doesn’t need oil”, whereas “both trucks and shipping” is plural and therefore not the subject of “it doesn’t need oil”.
Putting all that aside, trains used to run on coal or in some cases wood. In the future, it may be conceivable to run trains on hydrogen. However electrifying more of our lines would be a more efficient option.
I’m in favour of more geothermal plant (to generate power when other sources aren’t generating enough), and both wave and wind to conserve the geothermal and hydro power. Wind because it is cheaper, wave because it varies more slowly and is more predictable.
Trevor.
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The US would be far better off opening its coasts to foreign ships to move domestic freight, as they run from port to port anyway with empty capacity – that would be a true green solution, but wont be supported by many environmentalists who hug the protectionist bandwagon. The Greens in NZ also oppose foreign ships moving domestic cargo, when this is so obviously an environmentally friendly measure.
The shipping industry shouldn’t be subsidised by car users or truck operators, it has an efficient niche of its own which is more disadvantaged by subsidising rail, than anything to do with roads.
The simple truth is that most coastal shipping in NZ is about competing with rail, not road freight.
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What?
“The US would be far better off opening its coasts to foreign ships to move domestic freight”
You would have them abandon protectionism and allow open competition on their freight movement! You libartarian you! ROTFPMSL -_-
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Trevor29
“I considered the possible ambiguity in what I wrote, and felt that I left it unambiguous. If you consider my full sentence, you will note that “Railway” is singular and “it doesn’t need oil”, whereas “both trucks and shipping” is plural and therefore not the subject of “it doesn’t need oil””.
Perfectly grammatically correct – 10/10 Gold Star 10 House Points
However, there are no train “engines” that run on Hydrogen today, and a quick flick through the research Google search does not deliver any practical engineering as yet in this area, General Electric being more focused on extracting better efficiency from diesel than any other fuel.
So the statement “it doesn’t need oil”, while grammatically correct is, sadly, an untruth – 0/10, Black Blob, minus 10 House Points.
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Funny, I didn’t realise that you would count coal, wood and electricity as forms of oil.
I believe hydrogen fuelled trains are more likely than hydrogen fuelled trucks. This doesn’t mean I consider either to be particularly likely, but if we don’t have any other solutions, then I can conceive of the hydrogen fuelled train. After all, the hydrogen would almost certainly be used to generate electricity and we already have both pure electric and diesel-electric locos, so most of the technology is already there. A hydrogen-electric loco could be powered off an electrified track and switch to its hydrogen powered generation only when it moved onto tracks that were not electrified.
I wonder if it is worth taking out a patent?
Trevor.
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A Short Video of the Dangers of Shipping –
http://www.savecentral.org/images/thefrontfelloff.wmv
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“I didn’t realise that you would count coal, wood and electricity as forms of oil”
The machinery used to extract, process and transport coal to the rail yards, and then from the bin to the engine, all require fuel oil to operate, and the pollution from burning coal in an existing technology train engine is more than from a diesel powered one. The same goes for wood.
Generating the extra electricity to operate trains that have the power necessary to shift vast tonnage of goods, if not done by a diesel electric motor (which of course converts oil into electricity at the point of use) would require significant new generating capacity, as well as a substantial investment in line electrification – both of which would consume vast amounts of oil.
At the bottom line of the discussion, irrespective of which of these fuels is used we would end up in a position where there might be a 2% ish reduction in OPERATING oil use, (remember everything except the long-haul transport would be done now by smaller, less efficient engined, oil fuelled vehicles) to recover a large CAPITAL oil use in establishing the capability and (in 2 out of three cases) a vast increase in POLLUTION.
Now. What are we doing this again??
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Sorry – that should be WHY are we doing this, not What are we doing this.
me baaaaad
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Yes, further generation capacity would be needed to power electric trains. No, this would not require vast amounts of oil. The extra capacity is not huge, so significantly more oil would be saved. Similarly the oil required to electrify more lines would be a small fraction of the oil saved.
Yes, coal trains pollute, but I am not seriously suggesting their use unless we get into real trouble with oil shortages and can’t electrify certain lines. Coal is mined then shipped by rail, with few oil-powered vehicles being used along the way.
Trevor.
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I have heard that trains don’t really require that much electricity to power them, as when they’re rolling downhill off the central volcanic plateau of the North Island they can actually feed some electricity back into the system.
There are plenty of power generation options in NZ. Geothermal and tidal are my two favourites.
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According to an article in today’s Marlborough Express, Fonterra is lobbying for at least two ports to be upgraded to handle container ships with double the current ship’s capacity. The NZ Shipping Council estimates that this will save the economy $2b a year. The article doesn’t say how much the upgrades will cost or where that money will come from. However Fonterra says there is no point upgrading post unless the railways are also upgraded to be able to move this volume of containers from two ports to the rest of the country. This will undermine the viability of smaller ports by taking away much of their current container traffic. This will hurt coastal shipping more than implementing the proposed GPS will.
Having most containers arrive at just two ports means that the current enviromental benefits of shipping to the nearest port to the customer could be foregone if the bigger container ship’s fuel efficient per tonne km isn’t sufficiently better than current ships to offset the extra tonne/kms moved by rail. In a presentation to Environment Waikato t authors of the National Freight Study stated that rail produced almost twice as much co2 per tonne/km as shipping does.
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“The research showed that for emissions of carbon dioxide in grams per tonne/km, road produced 123, heavy road 93, rail 23 and coastal shipping 14.”
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Containers could be shipped from the two ports services by the really big ships to ports closer to the customer.
Trevor.
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Trevor, Did you mean to say “Containers could be shipped from the two ports serviced by the really big ships to other ports closer to the customer.”?
If so I agree but I wonder if anybody knows what proportion of freight moved from Auckland to other cities is currently carried on ships that have just delivered containers to Auckland and are on their way to whichever port will load the majority of their export containers. The Sea Change Strategy has a graph of import and export tonnage at each port which pretty much explains why container ships always visit Auckland and Wellington first to unload their Chinese Imports then head to Napier or South Island ports to pickup containers of food to feed the world.
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Oops – well spotted. Yes, that is what I intended. (Who put the S and D keys so close together? I’m always hitting the wrong one!)
Which ports would be most likely to be upgraded to take the really big ships?
Trevor.
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Tauranga and Lyttleton are the strongest candidates although Auckland and Timaru are also candidates. These are the only ports with convenient rail access to the Auckland importers and Canterbury exporters.
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I think you will find that Wellington wouldn’t need an upgrade as it is already a deep-water port with a single extended-length dock. There might be a need to extend the reach of the Hurricranes, but that would not be a particularly huge expense I wouldn’t think.
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