Hydrogen: abundant…and elusive.

The hydrogen conversation in commercial trucking has shifted from “when” to “who’s left standing.”

Once a crowded field of competitors racing toward zero-emission freight, the hydrogen fuel cell truck sector in the United States has contracted dramatically in 2025. Nikola filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in February. Hyzon closed its doors permanently the day before. Both companies had spent months searching for buyers or additional funding. Neither found either.

That leaves Hyundai standing alone as the only active supplier of Class 8 hydrogen fuel cell tractors in North America. Legacy manufacturers delayed their hydrogen programs indefinitely, citing infrastructure gaps and profitability concerns.

The irony? Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the known universe. Yet turning that abundance into practical trucking fuel remains expensive and complicated.

The appeal is obvious. Hydrogen fuel cell trucks can match diesel’s range and refueling time — critical factors for long-haul operations (battery electric vehicles still struggle with weight and charging delays). For routes exceeding 500 miles, hydrogen starts making sense, on paper.

Here’s the rub: hydrogen trucks need hydrogen stations. California aimed for 15 to 20 public refueling stations by 2025 to support zero-emission long-haul freight. And that’s for one state. Scaling that nationally translates into billions of dollars in infrastructure investment. Meanwhile, federal support for alternative fuel infrastructure has been reduced.

The technology itself works. Hyundai’s XCIENT trucks are logging real miles globally. The challenge isn’t the engineering. It’s the ecosystem. Even proven technology struggles to gain traction without widespread refueling infrastructure and stable financial support.

For commercial trucking, hydrogen represents a promising option for specific applications, particularly heavy-haul, long-distance freight. But the recent industry shake-up proves that hydrogen won’t replace diesel overnight.

While we don’t predict the future, here’s a decent guess: expect hydrogen to carve out a niche in specialized corridors first, supported by substantial investment. For most carriers, the hydrogen transition is still a few years and a lot of infrastructure dollars away.

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We herd there was a delay.

Rule of Thumb

We measure congestion by time and distance, and with those averages we can get a sense of how much it costs to transport freight from Point A to Point B.

Simple? Yes. And no.

When the cows break through the fence on someone’s property and stand in the middle of the rural route, that’ll bring traffic to a stop for a time…on a lightly used road.

When there’s an accident on a 12-lane highway in Los Angeles, that’ll bring traffic to a stop for a time…on a heavily used road.

Both of these scenarios (and, yes, many other scenarios) affect the bottom line for business. It’ll take longer to reach the destination, and the idling time will add to the fuel cost, and the rates might rise (if not for this load then maybe for future loads), and the carrier might price himself or herself out of the competition for a rotation.

ATRI: Cost of Congestion National Statistics, 2021 – 2022

The details of this carry tremendous weight. As the American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI) study describes it:

“Congestion also leads to wasted diesel fuel, which in turn impacts the environment through excess carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. This problem is augmented by the fact that stop-andgo traffic significantly reduces fuel economy when compared to that of trucks operating at freeflow highway speeds.”

ATRI details congestion costs by region:

ATRI: Percent Increase in Congestion Costs by Region, 2021 – 2022

And ATRI details congestion by state:

ATRI: Top Ten Statewide Congestion Costs, 2022

Are the roads that bad in Texas and California, Florida and New York? That’s subjective (even though hitting a pothole always makes for a compelling argument). Either way, these four states have the largest populations in the nation. That means more traffic, more wear and tear on roads and bridges and tunnels, more repair and replacement. More congestion, more delay.

Is there a solution? Until we master gravity, we’ll likely need to deal with, and try improving, what we have.

The post Measuring Traffic appeared first on NATCO Transport.

The American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI) study, “Cost of Congestion to the Trucking Industry,” highlights the price we all literally pay for congestion throughout the nation.

In 2022, the most recent year of full statistics on this, the financial impact of delay totaled more than $108 billion.

The average per-hour operational cost jumped from $63.66 per hour in 2016 to $90.78 in 2022.

Delay of the Land

ATRI’s description of this:

“The marginal costs to operate a truck include line-items such as fuel, truck and trailer purchases/leases, repair and maintenance, tires, insurance premiums, tolls, permits and licenses, and truck driver wages and benefits. These costs reflect a wide range of economic factors such as freight demand, global oil production, litigation and labor markets.”

Reasons for that surge? In 2022, as we felt the effects and repercussions of COVID-19:

• the transportation industry was reeling from a sharp rise in diesel fuel;
• prices for new, used, and leased trucks, tractors, and components rose as a result of supply chain backlogs for parts;
• fewer available vehicles meant that those in service were driven longer, and that meant higher costs to repair and maintain; and
• compensation for drivers rose apace with the driver shortage and the resulting competition to attract new drivers.

And then, adding insult to injury, as we returned to the roads as COVID restrictions eased the congestion returned. The infrastructure bill paved the way for much-needed work on our nation’s roads, bridges, and tunnels. And yet, the report speculates that maybe the priorities haven’t been thought through fully.

ATRI’s study says that “it is not clear whether all this infrastructure investment was adequately targeted to traffic congestion hotspots and bottlenecks, which is where strategic investments are most needed.”

It’s all about hotspots and bottlenecks. Which sounds like names of nightclubs on Padre Island. That’s where we’re going next time. Not to Padre Island. To the traffic things.

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Our friends at the American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI) just published their latest study, “Cost of Congestion to the Trucking Industry.”

Delayed Traffic is Costly

Why the focus on congestion? Those of us in the industry, and those the industry affects ⏤ from growers and manufacturers to mom & pop shops and end users: we know that traffic flow is central to business.

Delays cause headaches. We’ve all been stuck in traffic. And delays cost time and money.

How much?

A lot.

From the ATRI report: “In 2021, congestion costs exceeded $94 billion. In 2022, congestion’s impact on the trucking industry was more than $108 billion annually.”

Their formula is simple. “When traffic volumes along critical freight corridors exceed highway capacity,” they write, “the ensuing congestion impedes freight movement and creates inflationary increases in the cost of goods and services.”

Part of the focus here is on fuel consumption and air quality. Traffic delays lead to diesel fuel that’s wasted, and that informs excess emission of carbon dioxide. On the financial side, that delay totaled some $32 billion in 2022.

How are we approaching the problem? Since Congress passed the Infrastructure spending bill in 2021, congestion easing has been “a focal point fro collaboration between industry advocates, government, and local communities,” according to the ATRI study.

The federal government spent $52 billion on highway work in 2022, alongside $180 billion state and local governments spent. Here’s the rub: “However, it is not clear whether all this infrastructure investment was adequately targeted to traffic congestion hotspots and bottlenecks, which is where strategic investments are most needed.”

Compounding the issue is operational cost. ATRI has averaged the per-hour cost over the years. We jumped from $63.66 per hour in 2016 to $90.78 in 2022. That’s due to a number of factors, which we’ll spotlight next time. For now, though, ATRI’s report shows a sometimes steep rise in the cost of truck transportation. And that affects wide lanes of the nation’s economy.

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NATCO on Cooking Oil ( ! )

The march toward reducing CO2 emissions in our industry is moving forward, in fairly dramatic ways.

At issue is the pollution from diesel-powered vehicles. Diesel burns dirty. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration:

“In 2022, diesel (distillate) fuel consumption accounted for about 25% (464 million metric tons) of total U.S. transportation sector CO2 emissions and about 10% of total U.S. energy-related CO2 emissions.”

Addressing the problem, the fuel industry has been developing multiple alternatives to diesel. The list is eyebrow-raising in possibilities. Andrew Cullen, senior VP of fuels and facility services at Penske, says:

“When we look at all of this from a fleet perspective, it … seems like fleets are faced with this dizzying array of options to not only meet regulatory requirements but to meet their own sustainability goals or their customers’ sustainability goals.”

Somewhere down the road and in the tank, winners will emerge in this pretty healthy competition for cleaner fuel. Note to file: the winner isn’t always the most viable or economical, and in this case it may not provide the cleanest mass-produced fuel possible. A lot depends on supply-and-demand variables, on marketing strategies, and on consumer adoption.

Still, the net results have many advantages, including:

Fewer emissions. There’s an average of 65% reduction in carbon intensity with renewable diesel compared to petroleum diesel.

Flexibility. Renewable diesel can fully replace diesel or be blended with diesel, which is especially advantageous in a transitional environment.

Compatibility. Renewable diesel doesn’t require vehicle engine rebuilds or replacement.

Renewable diesel is “chemically identical” to petroleum, and that’s what allows it to be mixed with standard fuel. It’s typically derived from used cooking oil, soybean oil, corn oil, canola oil, and tallow.

That’s promising progress . . .

Chart: American Transportation Research Institute

Chart: American Transportation Research Institute

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Seeing the Forest for the Trees

California has long been a couple steps or leaps ahead of much of the rest of the country regarding innovation and her approach to environmental issues.

Part of that is informed by the state’s numbers:

• most people

• highest gross domestic product

• highest personal income

• most venture capital deals made

• second highest value in exports (shout out here to Texas, which leads that arena by $300 billion)

(Some asterisks here: California is also first in the nation in bankruptcies, first in the number of computers with dial-up internet access, and 48th in the nation in production workers percent distribution.)

Cumulatively, California has the power, money, and momentum to set standards for herself, and that tends to influence the rest of the country, be it through adoption or blowback (i.e., miles per gallon benchmarks).

So, when news breaks that the “first commercial hydrogen fuel station for big-rig trucks in the U.S. is up and running at the Port of Oakland, a baby step toward what hydrogen proponents see as a clean new future for long-haul trucking,” people tend to listen.

Here’s how the Los Angeles Times frames it:

“The small station, now serving 30 hydrogen fuel-cell trucks, could mark the start of a nationwide network for fuel-cell truck refueling. It could also flop.”

Yes, there’s a huge gulf between a nationwide network and a flop. As with so much of innovation, you never know until you send it out and see what sticks. That’s why there’s the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. And hundreds of conventions in hundreds of industries in dozens of cities every year. And, for that matter, someone setting up an exploratory committee to gauge whether or not to run for public office.

Here’s the rub on hydrogen: producing it right now is itself a dirty process that generates greenhouse-gas emissions, which is counterproductive. It’s expensive. And there’s no guarantee that it’ll reach a critical mass sufficient enough to encourage competition, traditionally brings the price down.

And yet, California will outlaw new diesel truck sales by 2036. There’s the red line, and the Golden State has 12 years to find a lasting way to prevent stepping over it.

The post Hydrogen Dreams appeared first on NATCO Transport.

The numbers are eyebrow-raising:

• $94.6 billion: the cost of truck congestion in 2021, resulting in
• 1.27 billion hours of delays, which equals
• 460,000 truck drivers sitting idle for a year, resulting in
• 6.793 billion gallons of wasted fuel.

Waiting…

Those staggering statistics come from American Transportation Research Institute’s “Cost of Congestion to the Trucking Industry” 2023 update. As Freightwaves summarizes ATRI’s report:

“The study pointed out that when the overall congestion cost is distributed across the country’s registered tractor-trailers, the average annual cost per truck is $6,824 — equal to 3% of the average annual revenue generated per truck in the truckload sector in 2021, according to ATRI.”

Fingerpointing is often too easy. Blame it on a too-eager pandemic recovery, with demand outstripping supply. Or on bottlenecks at our ports. Or a depleted truck driver pool. Cumulatively, it’s all that, and more.

Don’t forget new construction and road and bridge repair. Those cause reroutings and delays, too.

Which brings us to the Deadhead Blues.

From ATRI’s 2023 Operational Cost of Trucking Report:

“Deadhead or empty mileage – miles that do not generate revenue and are not covered by fuel surcharges – are a serious financial and productivity drain, especially when fuel prices are high. In 2022, 15.4 percent of non-tanker carriers’ mileage was deadhead mileage on average.”

So, 15.4 percent deadhead mileage for non-tanker carriers.

Tanker carriers? Those logged 41 percent empty. Think about delivering fuel from refinery to market. After they empty, you can’t exactly fill them back up with milk or cookies or TV sets. Those are largely by-necessity deadhead scenarios.

Other deadhead scenarios include, say, a carrier short-hopping a load and needing to drive elsewhere with no desire or time to pick up another load. Or there’s simply nothing available a reasonable distance away.

Does it get better? We’ll wait for updated statistics. In the meantime, thinking about and acting on ways to reduce deadhead losses is not idle speculation.

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It’s All Swirly

In the spirit of the holiday season (well, sort of), we take you back to this time four years ago:

The 2019 year-end roundup of events in our trucking industry projected a fairly robust scenario. As Jim Stinson of Transport Topics summarized it: “If 2018 was one big party for the trucking and freight business, 2019 was the day after the party.”

Stinson described the familiar pattern in the industry: “fleets continued to take on capacity despite slowing freight growth and rising economic uncertainty.” Some of that capacity was borne by adjustment. By Q3, nearly 800 trucking companies had shuttered or gone bankrupt, more than twice the number that did so in 2018.

Demand didn’t change because of reduced availability. Existing companies added to their fleets in order to provide available and reliable supply; Class 8 truck sales reached a record high in September of 2018.

The price of diesel fuel was $3.049 a gallon at the end of December, 11 cents lower than the same time a year before.

The U.S.-China tariff war had the economy on edge, making it even more difficult to gauge the supply-and-demand balance that allowed companies to have steady flow of inventory.

That said, eCommerce was robust, and that created even more demand for final-mile delivery. Transportation companies adjusted and added to their ability to reach not just the warehouse but, increasingly, to our front doors.

The through line of business for, oh, only a couple thousand years or so: economic uncertainty. Trade wars, actual wars, manufacturing capacity, consumer demand, and product and delivery innovations all contribute to that uncertainty. Economists prognosticate, and a number of them gather enough past performance indicators to speculate to the point of being in the general ballpark without guaranteeing future results.

As for 2019, that economic uncertainty didn’t cancel the relative success of business throughout the country. What could possibly go wrong?

From the CDC Timeline: “December 12, 2019 • A cluster of patients in China’s Hubei Province, in the city of Wuhan, begin to experience the symptoms of an atypical pneumonia-like illness that does not respond well to standard treatments.”

And then it was 2020.

The post Back to the Future appeared first on NATCO Transport.

Alternative Oil

Getting There

Two hundred countries just concluded the United Nations Climate Change Conference ⏤  COP28 this year ⏤ and produced a remarkable agreement.

The compromise deal “called on” all nations to “transition away” from fossil fuels ” in a just, orderly and equitable manner,” in order to prevent the worst outcome of climate change, while also “accelerating action in this critical decade, so as to achieve net zero by 2050 in keeping with the science.”

Even more remarkable: COP28 took place in, of all places, the United Arab Emirates, which sits on the world’s sixth-largest oil reserves.

That phrase “called on” is a couched term. It’s non-binding yet demonstrates the seriousness with which the world’s governments are moving toward that net zero goal.

Sometimes we reach tipping points through policy: guard rails established by local, state, and national governments that become laws.

Think of how the national speed limit laws have changed over the decades. From the Washington Post, February 1979:

“Congress imposed the 55-mph limit in 1974 as a fuel-conservation measure, which it is; federal officials estimate it conserves about 9 million gallons of gasoline a day. But the speed limit has also turned out to be a major public health measure, perhaps the most effective life-saver ever passed by Congress. The best estimate is that it has helped save the lives of about 36,000 people in the last five years.”

And sometimes we reach tipping points as a result of consumer and business trends. These often outpace government regulation.

Think of how Artificial Intelligence like ChatGPT andGoogle Bard seemingly came out of nowhere (years and years in development). And then think of how governments are now trying to catch up and establish guard rails on A.I. so it doesn’t take over the world.

All of this makes for a complicated and fascinating mix of consumer-driven and policy-driven goods and services. An old, gas-guzzling truck next to a hybrid SUV next to an all-electric car. All of them idling. Waiting for a crew to move its equipment into place so a section of roadway can get widened.

Natch, to ease traffic congestion.

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Bumps en Route to a Smoother Roll

Gotham’s Trucking Upgrades.

Our friends at Land Line report that the New York City Council has approved a redesign of the city’s truck routes. This will be the first major upgrade since the city’s 1,300 miles of truck routes were created in the 1970s.

The redesign is to include improved safety, increased visibility, implementing plans to reduce both congestion and miles traveled. This is an important step, not least because New York City has a really large population; combine that with relatively narrow roadways (especially final-mile routes) and you get a traffic jam mess on even the “best” of driving days.

The city has seen a huge uptick in final-mile deliveries since the pandemic, with some 3.5 million packages delivered per year since 2021. That translates into about 365 million cargo tons moving in, through, and from the five boroughs every year, with 90% of that on trucks.

Predatory Towing.

The American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI) released a new report focusing on the predatory towing problem. That’s where drivers and companies needing a tow are somehow boxed out from ordering their own tow services, and the results are typically excessive rates and unwarranted extra service charges.

More than 80 percent of motor carriers needing that assistance have experienced predatory towing. The goal of ATRI’s report is “improving the relationship between the towing and trucking industries.”

As Shawn Brown, VP of Safety for Cargo Transporters, says, “With reliable data analysis and a thorough regulatory review, ATRI’s report sheds light on the sources of the problem and paths forward for addressing it by both regulators and trucking fleets.”

Driver Compensation.

American Trucking Associations (ATA) “is leading opposition to legislation in Congress aiming at recasting how certain commercial drivers are compensated,” reports our friends at Transport Topics. ATA’s view is that the Guaranteeing Overtime for Truckers Act “would disrupt existing compensation structures between an employer and employee.”

ATA President Chris Spear describes the legislation as being misguided, with the results likely including “supply chain chaos and the inflationary consequences for consumers.” He recommends instead focusing, for a start, on “fixing the nationwide truck parking shortage that costs drivers on average $5,500 in lost earnings annually.”

If enacted, the bill wouldn’t affect owner-operators. The Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association supports the bill.

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