ABSTRACT
There is a long tradition of moving solid and liquid fuels by ship, train, or truck. The energy expenditure for moving one ton of oil on a highway is at best 1.25 MJ/km (using a large train-type multiunit motortruck of the kind you meet when you travel on the strictly linear highway from Adelaide to Darwin in Australia), more typically 2-4.25 MJ/km (average heavy trucks), and several times higher if light trucks are used. All of these values are higher than hauling by train, the energy cost of which is about 0.2 MJ/km, and much higher than transport on fuel tankers at sea, with energy costs below 0.05 MJ/km (US DoE 2005; Pootakham and Kumar 2010; Sørensen 2012, chap. 12). Figure 7.1 shows a typical contemporary tanker vessel.
