Solutions for the long haul

In the past months, we've seen the prices for food and a lot of consumer goods rise.

While there's been a lot of debate about what's causing this, the rising price of oil is no doubt playing a significant part. 

The fruits and vegetables you find at a typical U.S. grocery store frequently travel more than 1,500 miles from the farm to your shopping cart. And it's not just food. Just about everything we buy, from DVD players to shampoo, travels great distances. 

All this movement of goods requires a huge infrastructure -- and a lot of fuel. 

Pain at the pump
There are many methods for moving freight around: container ships, airplanes, trains. But, domestically, a lot of the stuff we buy at the grocery store or Wal-Mart or anywhere else travels by truck. 

If you thought gas prices were bad last time you filled up your car, imagine having to fill up a 300-gallon tank with diesel fuel that's increased by 60 percent (to $4.71 per gallon nationally) in the last 18 months. That means every fill up could cost up to $1,400, according to Steve Williams, the CEO of Maverick Transportation, and a former president of the American Trucking Association. 

Compound that with the fact that semis average 6.5 miles per gallon and travel 100,000 to 150,000 miles per year when new, and you start to appreciate the magnitude of the problem. 

Transformational trucks
Rather than drill our way out of the problem, as many pundits are suggesting, why not increase the efficiency of our trucks so that they go farther and move more cargo for every gallon of diesel they burn? 

That's the premise behind new research out of RMI's transportation group, MOVE. 

According to the study, the average Class 8 tractor trailer -- the kind of truck you see most often on the Interstate -- gets about 6.5 miles per gallon on the highway when fully loaded. RMI Senior Consultant Michael Ogburn thinks that highway mileage could be increased to 12.3 mpg in the next few years with readily available technology.

Transformational trucks would significantly improve the aerodynamics of current tractor-trailer designs.

Twelve miles per gallon may not sound like a lot compared to your car, but it does represent a near doubling in efficiency. Multiply those savings across the whole U.S. fleet (half a million trucks), says Ogburn, and you've saved 3.8 billion gallons of diesel, or about $15 billion at the Energy Information Administration's forecasted average of $3.94 per gal for 2008. 

And if the economic incentives aren't strong enough, those same improvements could keep about 40 million metric tons of CO₂ emissions out of the air every year. This is the same as keeping 7.5 million cars off U.S. roads. 

To check out the full report and explore other breakthrough ideas about transportation, visit http://move.rmi.org.  

Noah Buhayar is a fellow at Rocky Mountain Institute.