Ridley Island in Prince Rupert, B.C., is a busy industrial hub that could get a whole lot busier if a proposed cargo sorting and loading facility goes ahead. The Prince Rupert Port Authority wants to build the facility, known as the Ridley Island Export Logistics Park, to support its expanding container shipping business. 

The project would have a footprint of approximately 107 hectares — about a quarter the size of Vancouver’s Stanley Park — and would be built on what is now rainforest and wetlands. 

Ridley Island is on federal land, which means it’s subject to the federal Impact Assessment Act. However, this project isn’t required to undergo a full environmental assessment due to its size and low potential of impacting the environment. Still, locals are concerned about the effects on the environment and human health. 

“The port has been great for the economy and Prince Rupert, that is for certain,” Colleen Fitzpatrick, a member of the Prince Rupert Environmental Society, said in an interview. “However, with it comes a lot of changes to our community.”

The public can comment on the project until Sept. 25. 

The port hopes to start building the Ridley Island Export Logistics Park in 2021, with it going into operation in 2023, according to the project description. 

Here’s what you need to know. 

What is the Ridley Island Export Logistics Park?

The Ridley Island Export Logistics Park would be a receiving, storage and loading centre for a variety of goods such as cereals, grains, metals, minerals and lumber. It would be built at the south end of Ridley Island, across from Lelu Island. 

It would include a facility to receive bulk goods and load them into containers, a facility to receive so-called break-bulk goods like lumber and a large container yard to receive and store empty containers as they return from destinations across North America. All of these facilities would be connected by rail infrastructure that would accommodate full-length trains with 100 to 120 cars.   

Trucks would move containers from the proposed Ridley Island Export Logistics Park to the Fairview Container Terminal for shipment overseas. Photo: Prince Rupert Port Authority

The goods would arrive by train from across Canada, be loaded into containers and be transported by train or truck to the existing Fairview Container Terminal, where they would be shipped overseas. 

The trucks would travel on a port-owned road that follows the shoreline. This road, currently under construction, is being built to reduce industrial traffic through the city, including residential areas. The Ridley Island Connector Corridor is scheduled to be completed next year.

To support the expansion, CN is proposing to build a new rail bridge and causeway to service Ridley Island, increasing total rail capacity and helping offset rail traffic along Prince Rupert’s waterfront. 

Last year, the federal government committed more than $150 million to support work on the rail network and other infrastructure projects to support the port’s proposal and overall expansion plans.  

Why is the Ridley Island Export Logistics Park needed?

The port has been growing steadily since loading its first container ship in 2007.

Capacity in the container business is measured in 20-foot equivalents, or TEUs. The existing Fairview Container Terminal can handle 1.35 million TEUs per year. 

In 2019, the port released a container terminal master plan outlining potential future development — including expanding the existing container terminal and adding a new one — which could add up to seven million TEUs. The Vancouver port, for comparison, can handle about three million TEUs per year.

As more and more goods are shipped through Prince Rupert, the port needs a place to receive raw materials, manage the increased activity and store empty containers.

The port had a record year in 2019, and 2020 is going strong despite the pandemic, Brian Friesen, vice-president of trade development and communications with the port, said in an interview. “We are certainly faring quite well this year to date, from a volume perspective, and with respect to growth and expansion, [the pandemic] has no real impact on projects that are currently under construction or those that are planned.”

The Prince Rupert Port Authority wants to build a cargo sorting and loading facility to accommodate its growing container shipping business. Photo: Prince Rupert Port Authority

The logistic park would allow the port to diversify its business by storing and shipping a wider variety of products. 

The proposed project would also support the port’s goal of having an equal flow of goods in and out. Containers imported from overseas arrive at the port full and are shipped by rail across the continent. “Most of them have to come back through Prince Rupert,” Friesen said. 

When empty containers arrive back at the port, they are stored until they can be filled for export. “Those empty containers provide a real opportunity for Canadian exporters to fill those boxes and access markets overseas, particularly in the Asia Pacific region,” Friesen said. 

How much capacity would the project add to the port?

The proposed project would fill empty containers already moving through the terminal, with the capacity to handle 400,000 TEUs and expand to 900,000 in the second phase.

During the first phase of the project, between 300 and 360 rail cars would arrive at the facility every day, requiring about 1,400 daily round trips by truck to the container shipping terminal. 

If continued growth warranted a second phase, construction could start five to 10 years after completion of the first phase. This would add up to 180 more rail cars and increase the trucking to 2,000 trips every day.  

The Ridley Island Export Logistics Park would increase capacity at the Prince Rupert port by 400,000 20-foot equivalents per year. Photo: Prince Rupert Port Authority

How are the potential environmental impacts being assessed?

Because the project doesn’t meet the threshold to trigger a full environmental assessment and Ridley Island is on federal lands, the Prince Rupert Port Authority is both the proponent and the federal authority responsible for coordinating what’s known as an environmental effects evaluation.

As part of this evaluation, Environment and Climate Change Canada, Fisheries and Oceans Canada and Transport Canada are working with the port authority to determine if the proposed project is likely to have adverse environmental impacts and prepare a mitigation plan. 

When a proposed project undergoes an environmental assessment, stakeholders, such as First Nations, can access funding to undertake independent studies and provide input to help inform final decisions. These studies will not take place, but numerous studies that were done for previously proposed projects will be considered in the effects evaluation. 

“There’s a lot of in-depth environmental research, baseline studies, et cetera that go along with each one of those projects,” Veldman said. “So even for projects that don’t go forward for whatever reason, the research that’s done within those contributes to a much deeper knowledge.”

What are the potential environmental impacts?

The port identified 14 species listed as threatened, endangered or of special concern under the Species At Risk Act that potentially use the landscape that would be cleared to make way for the project, including the endangered little brown myotis bat, the threatened marbled murrelet and the western toad, a species of special concern. 

The little brown myotis has suffered a sharp decline in population due to the rapid spread of a fungal disease called white-nose syndrome, which has killed 94 per cent of the bat’s Eastern Canada population. In Western Canada, the bats have managed to avoid the syndrome thus far, but according to the federal recovery strategy, the disease is spreading at a rate of 200 to 250 kilometres a day. 

The south end of Ridley Island is designated by Environment Canada as potential critical nesting habitat for the marbled murrelet, but whether the bird actually uses the landscape is unknown. Veldman said the potential impacts on birds like the murrelet can be mitigated by scheduling construction plans to ensure no overlap with the nesting season.

Marbled murrelets nest on land, mostly in trees. Environment Canada has designed the south end of Ridley Island as potential critical nesting habitat for the birds. Photo: Eric Ellingson / Flickr

According to the port’s report on potential impacts, much of the south end of Ridley Island is wetlands, a key habitat for western toads. One of the biggest threats to the species is loss of habitat or fragmentation of habitat due to urbanization and development. 

The Narwhal reached out to Environment and Climate Change Canada with questions about its role in protecting these species but did not receive a response.

When a project has a negative effect on an ecosystem, the port offsets that impact by contributing to conservation and restoration projects elsewhere, whether locally or farther afield. 

“We follow the principle that there will be no net loss in terms of habitat as these kinds of projects move forward,” Veldman said. Two to one is the ratio that we try to get to. So, for example, if you impact one hectare of wetlands, you’re aiming to develop or revitalize two [hectares] in some other area.” 

For wetlands specifically, he said there are few projects in the Prince Rupert area the port can invest in, so in the past it contributed to a wetlands revitalization project on Haida Gwaii. In 2017, for instance, the port funded restoration work on the Delkatla Slough, a tidal wetlands at the north end of the archipelago. 

Because the proposed facility would be on land, the potential impacts on the shoreline and marine life would be minimal, according to the port’s report. However, the project does have the potential to affect fish habitat through the construction of rail infrastructure crossing waterways. These effects would be mitigated by timing construction activities to coincide with low tides. 

How would the project impact human health?

Residents of Prince Rupert and nearby Port Edward have been concerned about the increasing rail traffic and corresponding noise pollution for years. While the proposed project would divert some traffic away from Prince Rupert, the additional activity this project would bring to the area would mean significant increases in industrial noise overall. 

In August, the City of Prince Rupert denied the port’s request for a temporary use permit to develop a 12-hectare container storage facility close to the terminal, in part because of residents’ concerns about noise, air quality and traffic.  

Fitzpatrick, the member of the Prince Rupert Environmental Society who also lives on a street above the waterfront in Prince Rupert, said she is regularly disturbed by all the industrial noise. “Last night, I was awake from one o’clock in the morning ’til about three with the shunting,” she said in an interview. 

Prince Rupert residents are worried about increased noise from rail transportation and other industrial activities associated with the Ridley Island Export Logistics Park. Photo: Prince Rupert Port Authority

Shunting is the process of rolling rail cars together to form a complete train. If not done with perfect precision, it results in loud noises and strong vibrations. Shunting can literally shake a house.  

The port follows guidance from Health Canada to keep its noise levels under maximum allowable decibel levels for day and night activities — 55 and 45 decibels, respectively — but averages those levels over a 24-hour period. People can access real-time noise data through an online monitoring system.

“I’ve had hits of like 100 or 110 dB,” Fitzpatrick said. 

HealthLink BC recommends ear protection for anything above 85 decibels, and lists the sound of a chainsaw as an example of something in the 100 to 110 decibel range. 

Repetitive loud noise can contribute to a range of physical and mental health effects. Headaches, sleep disorders, depression, hearing problems and even cardiovascular disorders have all been linked to noise pollution.

The rail network’s mainline into the area passes right through the town of Port Edward, which sits across Porpoise Harbour from Ridley Island. Veldman said the development would retain a “significant natural buffer” between the proposed project and the town. 

“We don’t believe that there’s going to be a significant impact to Port Edward from this development,” he said, adding that the planning process includes an opportunity to look at potential impacts like noise and find ways to mitigate the impacts. 

Fitzpatrick is supportive of the port and development in general but would like to see the noise issue addressed as it continues to expand. “It’s never been about getting rid of the port,” she said. “It’s about trying to live in a common area together.”

What are the connections between this project and others proposed in the area?

Several other projects have been proposed in the vicinity of the Ridley Island Export Logistics Park.

The proposed project overlaps the area that would have been used for the Prince Rupert LNG project, a proposed LNG terminal that was cancelled in 2017. Another project on Ridley Island, the Canpotex potash export terminal, was also axed in 2016, after nearly a decade of planning, investment and environmental assessment.

The proposed Ridley Island Export Logistics Park is close to Lelu Island (middle), which nearly became an LNG export facility, and Flora Bank (bottom right), an important juvenile salmon habitat that’s protected by a development moratorium. Photo: Prince Rupert Port Authority / Facebook

The proposed Vopak bulk liquids terminal, which is currently undergoing a provincial environmental assessment, would be located on Ridley Island, adjacent to the new development. Vopak Pacific Canada would be encircled by the logistics park’s rail and road network but would not otherwise be impacted by the development.

The cumulative impacts of all these developments is what worries residents like Fitzpatrick. “The story is big, big, big. There’s a lot of aspects to it, not just the noise.”

Updated on Sept. 10, 2020, at 11 a.m. PST: A previous version of this article suggested the Ridley Island Export Logistics Park is not undergoing an environmental assessment. While it is not subject to a full independent federal environmental assessment, it is undergoing an environmental effects evaluation. A previous version of this article also incorrectly stated that a second container terminal is expected to be operating by 2028. 

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I was aboard the 364-foot Russian research-cruise ship Akademik Ioffe when it came to a violent stop after grounding on a shoal in a remote region of the Gulf of Boothia in Canada’s Arctic. Fortunately, none of the 102 passengers and 24 crew members were injured. Chemical contaminants that may or may not have been pumped out with the bilge water seemed to be minor.

It could have ended up a lot worse. I was on the ship representing Yale Environment 360, which commissioned me to report on climate change in the Arctic and the research that scientists and students with the U.S. National Foundation sponsored Northwest Passage Project were to be conducting on that three-week voyage.

It took nearly nine hours for a Hercules aircraft to fly in from the Canadian National Defence Joint Rescue Centre in Trenton, Ont., 12 hours for another DND plane to come in from Winnipeg and 20 hours for a Canadian Coast Guard helicopter to fly over. By then we were boarding the Akademik Vavilov, a Russian sister ship that had come to the rescue.

Passengers aboard the Russian research/cruise ship Akademik Ioffe watch a Canadian military aircraft fly overhead as they wait to be rescued after running aground on a shoal in the Arctic. Photo: Edward Struzik

Dangerous scenarios

Had the weather not worked in our favour and had there been thick ice such as the kind we had sailed through hours earlier, we would have faced a number of challenging and potentially dangerous scenarios.

Powerful winds could have spun us around on that rock, possibly ripping a hole into the hull that might have been bigger than the one that was presumably taking in the water we saw being pumped out of the ship. Thick ice grinding up against the ship would have made it almost impossible to get everyone off into lifeboats.

I had warned about a scenario like this in my book Future Arctic, Field Notes from A World On The Edge. Only 10 per cent of the Arctic Ocean in Canada, and less than two per cent of the Arctic Ocean in the United States, is charted. Only 25 per cent of the Canadian paper charts are deemed to be good. Some of the U.S. charts go back to the days of Captains Cook and Vancouver and the time when the Russians owned Alaska.

I’m not the only one who has been raising the red flag. Arctic experts such as Rob Huebert, Whitney Lackenbauer, Michael Byers and the federal Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development have all highlighted the rising risks of shipping in the Arctic, and the formidable challenges associated with timely search and rescues and the staging of oil spill cleanups.

Groundings have increased

Since the catastrophic grounding of the Exxon Valdez off the coast of Alaska in 1989, the list of groundings of fuel tankers, drilling ships, cargo ships and passenger vessels plying the waters of the North American Arctic has risen significantly.

Most notable among them were the cruise ship Hanseatic, which ran aground in the Canadian Arctic in 1996, the Clipper Adventurer which ran aground in Coronation Gulf in 2010 and the Nanny, a fuel tanker that ran aground near Baker Lake in 2012 in an area where marine investigators say there is little margin for error. It was the fifth grounding in that area since 2007.

Passengers disembark the Akademik Ioffe after the Russian ship ran aground in the Canadian Arctic. Photo: Edward Struzik

As sea ice continues to recede in the Arctic, it provides cruise, cargo and tanker companies with new opportunities, and emboldens small vessels to venture into uncharted areas. A recent analysis suggests that the average Arctic ship route has moved more than 180 miles closer to the North Pole in the past seven years. Mines such as the one at Mary River on Baffin Island are planning to use ships to transport their ore. Bigger cruise ships such as the Crystal Serenity that sailed through the Northwest Passage with 1,000 passengers and 600 crew members in 2017 are beginning to test these opportunities.

No rescue ports

There are other factors portending future disasters. There are no ports in the North American Arctic from which to stage a rescue or an oil spill cleanup.

Icebreakers are few and far between. The U.S. Coast Guard has just one in operation. Canada has a few more, but many of them are well on their way to being decommissioned.

Weather forecasting capabilities are poor due to the shortage of meteorological stations and the increasingly unpredictable nature of Arctic weather. Powerful summers storms such as the record-breaking summer cyclone that tore through the Arctic in 2012 are on the increase. Stable shorefast ice is letting go in unpredictable ways.

Our ship, for example, was forced to make a last-minute change to the starting route because of ice that was blocking passage into Resolute Bay. Recognizing the challenges, two cruise companies reportedly cancelled their expeditions this year on short notice.

There is a lot that can and needs to be done to reduce future risks. The Canadian government could compel ships to use forward looking multi-beam sonar with Bluetooth technology. Charts can and need to be updated rapidly. More weather stations are needed. The dumping of bilge water should be banned. A search and rescue team should be seasonally based in a strategic part of the Arctic. An Arctic port is needed sooner rather than later.

There is also a need to determine what impact future shipping will have on beluga and narwhal migrations.

There is time to play catch-up because there are few signs that shipping companies are in a hurry to exploit the short cuts that the Northwest Passage offers between the Atlantic and the Pacific. But the number of partial transits will increase as cruise ships, mining companies and future oil and gas activity focus their eyes on the Arctic.

As things stand now, we are not prepared.

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On a sunny August afternoon in 2010, the Clipper Adventurer hit an underwater rock shelf near Kugluktuk, Nunavut, carrying 128 Adventure Canada passengers and 69 crew.

The nearest ship capable of responding to the incident was the coast guard icebreaker CCGS Amundsen, 500 kilometres away in the Beaufort Sea, which arrived on scene the following day.

Adventure Canada was fined nearly half a million dollars in 2017 for environmental damage caused by 13 tanks carrying fuel, water and sludge that breached during the incident.

The fines were levied after the company unsuccessfully sued the Canadian government for $13 million over what they claimed was an unmarked shelf — it wasn’t marked on the ship’s charts, having only been discovered three years prior.

“It’s a part of the world where you do your best, but there are blank spots on the map,” Adventure Canada’s owner, Matthew Swan, told CBC at the time of the accident.

It wasn’t the first, nor the last marine incident in the Canadian North; just two years later, the fuel tanker M/V Nanny ran aground in Chesterfield Inlet, Nunavut. It hit bottom again — in the same inlet — two years later. Then, in 2016, a 67 metre fishing boat was torn open by ice off Baffin Island and had to limp across Davis Strait to Greenland.

Shipping and tourism are ramping up across the region, and more incidents are inevitable. That has local communities looking askance at their meagre response plans and capabilities.

“I think it’s widely accepted and widely known that if there was a major spill in the Arctic, the consequence would be devastating,” Andrew Dumbrille, shipping specialist with the World Wildlife Fund, told DeSmog Canada.

Sea ice, unforgiving weather, remoteness and sparse charts are just a few of the complications that responders would face in the event of a spill — challenges that would be daunting for seasoned responders, and much more so for untrained locals.

Dumbrille and a large group, including members of the Coast Guard and other government agencies, spent five days in Resolute in March, working with locals to develop a spill response plan tailored to that community, so that in the case of an accident, the community could contain the damage before it eviscerated the hunting and fishing many community members depend on.

“If there was a spill, the community doesn’t know what to do,” Dumbrille said. “There isn’t a plan in place, there isn’t training, there isn’t updating of any kind of plan or any way to mobilize the community around an event or a spill. So you hear that a lot. They don’t necessarily know who to call or what to do about it.”

Currently the community has a shipping container with some equipment to deal with a spill, but it’s not regularly tested and people in the community aren’t trained in using it.

It’s one of what the Coast Guard calls “environmental response caches,” of which there are 22 across the Arctic. The nearest Coast Guard base, however, is in Hay River, Northwest Territories, more than 1,500 kilometres up the Mackenzie River from the Arctic Ocean.

In an emailed response to questions from DeSmog Canada, the Coast Guard said that as part of the Oceans Protection Plan it was training and creating jobs for Indigenous communities across the Arctic.

That includes expanding the Coast Guard Auxiliary, made up of volunteers who are on standby to respond to incidents like search-and-rescue, though it is not clear if the auxiliary has a dedicated role in spill response.

The Coast Guard also says it’s working with its American counterparts to develop safer shipping routes through the Arctic, which would try to avoid risk to sensitive areas.

Dumbille says that was a concern raised during community meetings in Resolute: making sure that ship traffic avoids the most at-risk areas, like calving grounds for whales.

“Why don’t we make sure the ships transit away from our most important whale calving areas and migration routes, so that if there is a spill, then it would be far off from those important areas?” Dumbrille says.

The community also emphasized that what they really want is the capacity to respond to an emergency themselves, and to not have to wait for a ship that could be days away. That means proper equipment, regular training and paid responders.

The Clipper Adventurer was part of a much larger growing trend when it comes to ship traffic in the Canadian Arctic.

Between 1984 and 2004, a total of 23 commercial cruise ships transited the Northwest Passage, according to the Arctic Council. But in 2017 alone, Coast Guard numbers show 93 vessels made voyages in the Arctic: 19 passenger ships and 74 cargo ships and tankers.

“It’s not the Panama Canal,” Dumbrille says.

Numbers are still low, but with projects like the Mary River mine, one of the world’s most northernmost mines, adding bulk carriers to the equation (72 voyages in 2017), as well as fishing vessels (142) and tugs (42) now plying the waters of the Arctic, it’s becoming a crowded place.

Worldwide, there were 55 “incidents” in the Arctic in 2014, including one “total loss,” according to a report by insurer Allianz Global. A decade earlier, in 2005, there were three.

Currently, spill response plans are not tailored to each community; they’re developed at a regional scale. Dumbrille says the Resolute plan is still in development, and will act as a template that can be exported and adapted to communities across the Arctic.

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The federal government recently created two marine protected areas in the Pacific region and has committed to increase ocean protection from one per cent to 10 by 2020. But will this be enough?

Canada has the longest coastline of any nation, but our country doesn’t end at its ocean shores. With a 200-nautical-mile economic zone and international obligations, Canada is responsible for almost three million square kilometres of ocean, an area roughly the size of British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba combined.

Although that’s a big area, thinking of the ocean in square kilometres is just skimming the surface. The ocean isn’t just a cold, wet seascape blanketed by howling winds. Below the surface, life thrives throughout the water column, top to bottom, warm or cold, winter or summer.

Northern aquatic food webs are rich with creatures of all shapes and sizes, from tiny plankton, urchins and sea stars to fish, orcas and sea lions. That the world’s largest living creature ever, the blue whale, feeds on some of the smallest, plankton, is astonishing in itself. Yet the plankton thread in the food web doesn’t end in the whale’s stomach; whale poop is also a critical part of the marine food web, cycling nutrients from the surface to creatures at the bottom.

The way otters keep kelp forests healthy by eating sea urchins is one of myriad interconnected relationships in Canadian coastal waters. Although barnacles and clams live in a single location, some whales and fish travel thousands of kilometres within a single season. Salmon don’t even have the ocean as a boundary, swimming far inland to spawn.

How can we understand and manage such complex systems? Natural cycles in Canada’s coastal waters include currents, tides, upwellings, migrations and seasons. Trying to predict how multiple factors like pollution, industrial fishing, climate change, ocean acidification, glass sponge reefs, ships, rights and title claims, kayakers, recreational fishing lodges and renewable energy sites will interact with these cycles is becoming increasingly more complicated, and important, than ever. With all these uncertainties and complexities, how can we know if marine protected areas are effective?

To understand how creating a refuge works, let’s go back to a simple 1936 study of an “ecosystem.” It was a test tube with two microscopic single cell species, prey and predator. In that oversimplified ecosystem, the predatory species ate the prey, and then died because, without prey, they could not survive.

Putting material in the test tube so the prey could hide and multiply changed everything, creating a variety of unpredictable outcomes. However, one pattern emerged: It was far more likely that both prey and predator would survive.

Canada Has the Longest Coastline in the World. Guess How Much is Protected? https://t.co/OfKiHFvPun #bcpoli #cdnpoli #bcelxn17 #YVR #YYJ

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) April 10, 2017

Expanding the concept to marine protected areas, this simple experiment bodes well for one top predator (humans) and prey (fish). Even though science can’t predict whether protected areas will help specific stocks increase, evidence suggests they show promise as “nurseries” for fish and other ocean wildlife and can provide a buffer against our lack of understanding.

Canada’s two new Pacific marine protected areas shield magnificent, fragile glass sponge reefs near Haida Gwaii and important seabird nesting sites on the Scott Islands. Safeguards are in place to protect the glass sponge reefs and the countless species that use them for refuge. However, current protections for the area surrounding the Scott Islands are too vague to reduce threats to the millions of seabirds that depend on the forage area to breed and feed.

The federal government deserves credit for beginning to develop a network of marine protected areas. They’re an essential part of keeping ocean ecosystems healthy, but they must have meaningful safeguards. Protected areas are just one aspect of keeping coastal ecosystems healthy. Responsible stewardship also requires effective fisheries management, strong penalties for polluters and a global carbon emissions reduction.

With pollution, climate change and increased shipping and development along Canada’s coast, it’s more important than ever to reduce the risks to ecosystems that provide us with the fish we eat, the air we breathe and the bounty of nature we love. Marine protected areas on their own won’t be enough to do all that, but with strong regulations and safeguards, they’re one piece of the intricate, multidimensional puzzle.

David Suzuki is a scientist, broadcaster, author and co-founder of the David Suzuki Foundation. Written with contributions from David Suzuki Foundation Communications Specialist Panos Grames.

Learn more at www.davidsuzuki.org.

Image: Murchison and Faraday Islands, Gwaii Hanaas National Park Reserve, British Columbia, Canada. Photo: by David Will/Island Conservation via Flickr

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Last week, in my quest to see whether British Columbia could become a 100 per cent renewable energy region, I looked at personal transportation. This week I take on the far more challenging task of long-distance trucking, boats, ferries and planes.

Ponder this: a typical eighteen-wheeler truck has a 400-horse-power engine. It burns stored solar energy from ancient, 300-million-year-old marine organisms. If you used horses to pull that much load, you’d need 400 of them, and 400 hectares of land to keep the horses pastured.[view:in_this_series=block_1]

Which is Better: Slaves, Horses or Fossil Fuels?

Alternatively, you could use 4,000 humans—and a hundred overseers with whips to keep them pulling. Maybe this is why slavery was so common before we discovered the concentrated energy of fossil fuels—the true ‘concentrated solar.’ Any particular coalmine, gas-field or oil-well might embody twenty million years of stored solar radiation, and we are exhausting it in twenty years, giving an effective solar concentration rate of fifty thousand: releasing a million years of accumulated carbon ever year.

Using this incredible supply of energy, we have been able to develop our modern world with its highly advanced science and engineering, its automated factories and its global transportation network, shipping vast quantities of stuff around the world.

Holland, with 17 million people, ships 1.6 billion tonnes of cargo a year, half by road and a third by water—all using fossil fuels. That’s a hundred tonnes (seven shipping containers) per person per year. If B.C. (with 4.6 million people) has a similar consumption pattern, we are shipping 460 million tonnes of cargo a year.

So the challenge of making British Columbia a 100 per cent renewable energy region has a huge cultural dimension, as well as a fuel dimension.

How much stuff do we really need to consume?

How much stuff do we really need to consume? 20 per cent? 50 per cent? With our current shopping habits we are literally consuming the planet to pieces, turning GDP into Gross Depletion of the Planet.

• How much less stuff would we need if we embraced a sharing economy, with shared vehicles, shared food gardens, and shared tools and equipment?
• How much less raw material would we need if we made an all-out effort to convert B.C.’s economy into a circular economy, with zero waste, and 100 per cent recyclability for everything we buy?
• Could 3-D printing reduce the amount of global trade and usher in a more localized economy? In China, a company has 3-D printed an entire house using cement and construction wastes for just $5,000. The future might see the 3-D printing of furniture, office supplies, medical supplies, prosthetic limbs, machine tools, play equipment, boats, shoes—even aircraft wings, propellers and small fuselages.
• Could we build a zero-growth economy that meets our fundamental needs, while still enabling people to increase their happiness and fulfillment?
• Would a 4-day working week help us get there?
• Would we consume less if we had a change to more cooperative ownership of businesses, more B Corporations, and more cooperative, values-based banking, which might be less driven to make us buy, buy, buy?
• Or do we simply need far more affordable housing, so that people would not need to work so hard stoking the economy simply to pay the monthly rent or mortgage?   

These are all important questions that we need to ponder. I am not aware of any study that looks at all these factors together. If one has been done, please let me know.

The 100 per cent renewable energy problem

So now I’ll put my BCSEA hat on and explore the technical dimension of the problem: how can we switch B.C.’s freight transportation from diesel and gasoline to 100 per cent renewable energy?

Some local urban delivery could go electric right now, using electric cargo bikes. In Europe, Cycle Logistics has estimated that 51 per cent of Europe’s city freight could be shipped by bike. For heavier loads, a Smith Newton electric truck can carry up to 12 tonnes, with a 150 kilometres range.

As soon as we move out of the city, however, we run into major challenges. There are many ways to make trucks more fuel efficient, and trucking companies can engage in load-sharing and freight-matching to reduce mileage—20 per cent of the trucks on Germany’s roads travel empty, and maybe it’s the same here in B.C. A University of Arkansas research project estimates that one-in-six trucks could be taken off the road with no loss in utility.

Can rail take the freight?

Clearly, electrified railways could be a partial solution, and with less use of coal, rail capacity would be freed up. In Canada, coal accounts for 13 per cent of rail freight traffic; in America, it is an incredible 44 per cent of the annual tonnage. Eighty per cent of Canada’s coal is exported from Vancouver’s North Shore and Roberts Bank terminals, and from Prince Rupert, and when B.C. no longer exports coal there will be capacity freed up along the routes. For every destination to which rail can carry freight, however, there are dozens of destinations to which it can’t.

So could we lay new electrified railway tracks alongside flat highway routes? It is really unlikely.

Alongside rail, there are three possibilities for using 100 per cent renewable transportation energy for trucking: 

Will it be hydrogen?

There is a strong consensus that regular cars and light trucks will be electric, but that does not apply to heavy-duty trucks. Mark Jacobson and his team at The Solutions Project at Stanford University, California have mapped out how every state in the U.S. could achieve 100 per cent renewable energy using sun, wind and water. They are assuming the use of hydrogen for long-distance trucking, using renewable electricity to generate the hydrogen by splitting water, which is then used in a fuel cell to generate electricity for an electric drive. (Most of today’s hydrogen is derived from natural gas, which is clearly not a renewable solution).

Using hydrogen requires three times more electricity than direct electric drive, but the technology is known, and on-site electrolysis, which is already happening in Holland, California and sixteen other states in the U.S. would eliminate the need to ship or pipe hydrogen around the province. Every truck would need to be a fuel cell truck, however, which makes it far more complex than biofuel, which works with existing vehicles. 

Blue Fuel, a B.C. company linked to Aeolis, one of B.C.’s major wind energy companies, knowing how much wind energy potential there is in the northeast of the province, has developed a partnership with Siemens Canada to create the world’s largest hydrogen electrolysis infrastructure on 400 hectares of land near Chetwynd, with a view to producing green hydrogen.

Will it happen? Many people have written off hydrogen because they think about cars, not trucks, and the car of the future is clearly electric. Joe Romm, who is extremely knowledgeable on practical responses to climate change, says Tesla Trumps Toyota—but for trucking, hydrogen may yet be the answer.

Will it be biofuel?

First generation biofuel, such as ethanol made from corn, requires the use of good farmland, and its production is so carbon intensive that it hardly reduces greenhouse gas emissions at all. Corn ethanol is seen by some as being part of the problem, not the solution.

The holy grail is second generation cellulosic biofuel made from switchgrass, corn stover (the leaves and stalk of maize crops), wood wastes, wheat straw or municipal wastes, but the reality has lagged far behind the hopes. In the U.S., instead of a billion gallons of cellulosic ethanol being produced by 2013, as mandated, progress has been really slow, and production was a thousand times less than required at under a million gallons.

Hopes for the production of biofuel from algae have withered, too. To make it productive, algae needs a constant stream of CO2—and if it comes from fossil fuels, via carbon capture, fossil carbon will still be released when the algae fuel is burnt. Effective progress in the algae direction is almost zero, as we learnt from Dr. John Benemann in our BCSEA Webinar in 2013.

In Finland, which has extensive forest coverage, their Roadmap to a Renewable Methane Economy envisions biomethane from municipal and forest wastes as providing 60 per cent of the fuel for heavy road transport by 2050, the rest coming from electricity (5 per cent), hydrogen (10 per cent) and bio-dimethyl ether (20 per cent). The Finnish Biogas Association estimates that there is enough available biomethane from wastes to cover 40 per cent of total transportation needs, including 60 per cent for trucking.

There is also another approach that may work. BioRoot Energy, based in Montana, has a technology that can make higher mixed alcohol biofuel from any kind of waste, including municipal solid waste, sewage sludge, construction debris, industrial waste, liquid waste and woody biomass waste, using a rotary kiln gasifier to convert the waste into a liquid fuel and a slag residue, yielding syngas that is then converted into a liquid fuel for use in any vehicle. Plastic wastes will release fossil carbon, but biogenic wastes will not.

Or will it be direct electric drive?

The third possibility is that there will be sufficient advances in electric drive and battery technology to make long-distance electric trucking possible, using one of five possible recharging possibilities: plug-in ultrafast charging, battery switching, overhead charging through wires, dynamic in-motion charging from the road below, or stationary inductive charging from above.

Ultrafast charging for larger vehicles is already happening in Geneva, Switzerland, where the multinational corporation ABB is rolling out a 400 kw 15-second flash-charge at bus-stops on large capacity electric buses. In Britain, there’s a trial happening in Milton Keynes, with buses driving a 24-kilometre route that includes two 120 kw stationary recharging strips. ABB feels confident that the future of mobility is electric—but will it extend to trucks?

Battery switching is another possibility, demonstrated by Tesla to be quicker for a car than refueling at a gas station. Might a future electric truck pull into a pit-stop and switch to a new battery while the driver relaxes over coffee?

Overhead cabling seems unlikely due to the long rural distances that truckers need to drive in addition to highway travel. In Sweden, Volvo is developing a magnetic resonance system that enables a truck to charge up as it drives along the road, but widespread adoption would run into the same problem as overhead cabling—the need for universal, country-wide coverage. Trucks in B.C. need to get to Prince Rupert and Fort St. John, as well as Hope and Nanaimo. Maybe engineers will design an electric truck of the future that can recharge through all three means: rapid ultra-charging, in-road charging and battery swap.

Which will it be?

Electric technology for long-distance trucking is the least developed, but progress in battery technology is happening far faster than progress in hydrogen or biofuels. If you hear that Tesla’s Elon Musk is investing in a trucking company, that might be a smart time to invest.

Biofuel is a complex field with various fuel pathways, some of which seem to be going nowhere while others promise progress. Its big advantage is that it can be used by the existing fleet; the downside is the slow speed of progress.

Hydrogen for fuel cell electric drive is a proven technology, but it requires the large-scale production of renewable electricity to make the hydrogen, and an entire fleet of new hydrogen trucks, such as the Tyrano, which Vision Motor Corp., based in California, is making.

It will be one of the three—but trucking is a transcontinental affair, and B.C. could never get there alone. There are a host of initiatives that a lively government that was committed to the cause could initiate or join. B.C.’s universities could push ahead on the technology; the provincial government could work with California, Oregon and Washington State in the Pacific Coast Collaborative to make renewable energy trucking a priority; we could host a major conference on the future of trucking to identify the problem and explore the solutions. It’s all better than nothing, which is the government’s current approach.

Ferries, boats, and ocean shipping

The same basket of choices applies to water and air transportation. Simon Fawkes of Blue Coral Charters operates the Aerial Sea, a 42’ sailing catamaran. In July 2014 they crossed the Strait of Georgia on 2 kw of solar electric power with a team of students from York University’s Faculty of Environmental Studies. Another catamaran, the 115 ft. Planet Solar, with a massive 20 kw solar system, is currently cruising the Mediterranean at 5 knots as part of a world tour. In Bristol, England, a 12 passenger 12 kW hydrogen fuel celled boat is cruising local waters.

But what about B.C. Ferries, or the big contained ships? In Japan, the NYK Group is planning a futuristic container ship: the Super Eco Ship 2030 will be powered by hydrogen fuel cells, wind, and up to 9 MW of superconductive solar, and be packed full of innovations.

To make the hydrogen, it will use liquefied natural gas, since no-one has found a way to do electrolysis at sea, which needs a constant flow of renewable electricity. If there was a battery breakthrough sufficient to carry a ship across the ocean, it would not need hydrogen. One alternative might be to use a biofuel as the source for the hydrogen. As planned, the ship will achieve a 70 per cent fall in carbon emissions.

B.C. Ferries, meanwhile, has just ordered three new ferries from Poland which will be designed to run on natural gas as well as diesel. No progress there.

In 2012, the Dutch consultancy group EcoFys studied the use of different biofuels for the European Maritime Safety Agency. They looked at tankers and container ships, ferries and cruise ships, and found that it was technically possible, and that there was a market. The barriers were regulatory and policy-related.

Europe has a Renewable Fuels Directive, for instance, which requires that 20 per cent of all energy must be renewable by 2020; but it needs to apply to ship bunkering parties, as well as to energy suppliers. If a future Canadian government gathered up the political courage to bring in a similar directive, it would have a very forceful effect on development.  

Flying into a green future on…what?

So far, most bets for future green flying are on biofuel, with many major airlines doing trials for biofuel feedstocks such as cellulosic crops, algae, camelina, jatropha, municipal solid waste, and halophytes, which can live on salt water irrigation in a desert environment. CNN reports that “since aviation biofuel was approved for use in 2011, more than 1,500 commercial flights have been powered by a blend of traditional fuel and biofuels,” and there have also been 100 per cent biofuel flights. The Sustainable Aviation Biofuels Users Group lists a lot of famous aviation names—but is the commitment really there?

In summary, this is not an easy game. But nor were electric vehicles, ten years ago. I am totally confident that the change will happen. There are at least 193 truck manufacturers in the world, including two Canada: Hino, whose Woodstock assembly plant makes Japanese trucks; and Paccar, based in St-Therese, Quebec, which makes Kenworth, Peterbilt and DAF trucks.

 When it comes to alternative fuels, Paccar looks to biodiesel and natural gas, and Hino has developed a diesel-electric hybrid truck which leads the world. Will Hino/Toyota produce the breakthrough all-electric or all-hydrogen heavy-duty truck? Or will biofuels prevail? Only time will tell.

Next Week: In Part 4 I will explore the all-important question—what will it take to make it happen?

This series originally appeared on the B.C. Sustainable Energy Association website.

Image Credit: Planet Solar cuts through the Corinth Canal via Instagram.

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