Alternative fuels in heavy-duty truck transport for a sustainable future

Abstract

Since the last decade, climate change and environmental awareness has received increasingly more attention from politicians and companies. In order to preserve earth’s climate, a lot has to be changed in current industry standards. In 2018, heavy-duty road transport was responsible for 680 million tonnes kg in transported commodities in the Netherlands (CBS, 2019). This resulted in 10.176 million tonnes of emitted CO2 in the same year (CBS, 2020). As these transportation activities are a big part of the current pollution, there is a lot to be gained in this area. Therefore, industries are investigating to make their transportation activities more sustainable.Large manufacturing plants often apply specific supply chain strategies in order to reduce waste. One of those wastes are warehousing costs. Just-in-Time (JIT) and Just-in-Sequence (JIS) are supply chain strategies that aim to reduce these costs (Bányai & Bányai, 2017). A JIT supply chain strategy refers to a strategy where commonly used parts are delivered at the plant when needed, therefore reducing storage capacity. A JIS strategy goes even further. When products are customizable, a JISstrategy ensures that the required parts are delivered in the sequence of production.Upon till now, a lot has been researched with regard to alternative fuels in heavy-duty transport, especially in the hydrogen and battery electric area. However, these studies often stay on a general logistics level. Specific concepts such as JIT and JIS may influence choices for alternative fuels due to more important time constraints such as a predefined and strict pearl chain horizon. Therefore, the aim of this thesis was to research the feasiblity ranking of alternative fuels (hydrogen, battery electric, HVO and LNG) in a JIT/JIS supply chain.