While waiting for the arrival of electrified heavy trucks, the trucking industry is banking on technology to reduce its carbon footprint.
By looking on his tablet, Martin Simard can follow the forest trucks fleet of The Wood et fils in real time. “We see them walking around the area and we have access to a lot of data, such as user speed and downtime, to do our follow-ups and manage our operations”, explains the general manager of the SME based in Saint -Félicien, in Saguenay, but where most of the forestry activities take place in Ontario.
Equipped with GPS tablets, cameras and telemetry tools, transport trucks are now equipped as never before to collect data in order to optimize performance and reduce fuel costs, specifies François Poulin, technical expert at ISAAC Instruments, a Quebec company equipped with 70% of the major carriers in the province. “Transport companies can thus save a lot of fuel and reduce their carbon footprint by optimizing eco-driving practices,” he says.
The platform makes it possible, for example, to measure all the parameters of the engine and to know when to use the cruise control, when it is preferable to climb a hill more slowly, or simply to limit acceleration. “Drivers can see their eco-driving score in real time,” adds François Poulin. ISAAC Instruments services also make it possible to manage the entire fleet to avoid the return of empty trucks or to optimize the distribution of the workforce, the aim being, again, to reduce fuel consumption.
Thanks to these different tools, new customers can reduce their fuel consumption and therefore their CO emissions.2 very quickly, points out the expert. With an average consumption of 100,000 liters of fuel per truck per year, it can be estimated that the ISAAC solution, which is deployed on more than 30,000 vehicles, has made it possible to reduce the fuel consumption of its customers by 300 million liters. .
These gains are significant, but there is still a lot of work to be done, believes the director of the Innovation Center in Logistics and Sustainable Supply Chain, Jacques Renaud. “The balance per 100 kilometers has greatly improved, but as we transport more equipment and goods than ever, the overall balance of the sector is increasing,” says the professor from Laval University. Result: with approximately 150,000 trucks and tractors on the roads of Quebec, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from heavy vehicles reached 10.5 million tonnes of CO equivalent.2 in 2018 (up 190% from 1990), or 8.4% of the province’s total emissions.
Until now, most of the major players in the industry in Quebec have relied on technology as well as driver training, notes Jacques Renaud, who is also co-director of the Interuniversity Research Center on Business Networks, the logistics and transport (CIRRELT). But there are still thousands of SMEs that have not yet taken this turn, for lack of financial or human resources.
Deliver at night?
In urban areas, traffic remains one of the headaches of the trucking industry. “Major works and congestion add hidden emissions”, observes Jacques Renaud, proposing to increase the number of deliveries at night, “which would make it possible to reduce traffic and improve the efficiency of deliveries”. For now, companies seem little interested in the idea and several pitfalls should be resolved, including access to customer premises. It would also be necessary to find the workforce willing to work at night, given that there is a serious shortage of drivers …
Maximize intermodal
The transport of goods by truck generates more GHGs per kilometer (63.4 g of CO eq.2) than transport by train (14.1 g of CO eq.2) or by boat (11.5 g of CO eq.2), it is also possible to make savings by optimizing each mode of transport.
Groupe Riverin, a major transporter and civil engineering contractor based in Saguenay, opted for diversification in 2014 by launching a maritime subsidiary. The company has acquired a boat with a capacity of 3000 tonnes, which allows 150 to 200 trucks to be removed from the roads by doing cabotage, that is to say coastal maritime transport along the Saguenay, the St. Lawrence and in eastern Canada.
For the moment, this avenue is not common, notes Professor Renaud. “The cost of trucking is still excellent and few companies are ready to wait for the delivery of a container by boat which will add three or four days to the delivery time,” he says.
The electric holy grail
According to him, reducing the carbon impact of heavy transport will necessarily go through electrification. “We are starting to see them arrive in small formats, but we will have to wait at least five years before having a real electric trailer truck,” predicts the expert. Given the astronomical costs of purchasing these trucks, it will take a decade for the impact of electrification to become major, he believes. In the meantime, transportation electrification is still emerging in the city, and small battery-powered delivery vehicles are gaining in popularity.
Until then, could biofuels reduce the GHGs emitted by trucks? It will be difficult, considers Jacques Renaud, because there is no reliable supply network that covers the territory of Quebec. “Some companies have done tests, but profitability was not there. ”
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