If there is one certainty about warehouse motive power issues it is that environmental concerns, driven partly by legislation, will tip the balance more in favour of one particular power source. To the three main protagonists, diesel, LPG and electric, must now be added CNG and hydrogen fuel cells, with bio-mass gas looking to make an entry soon. Along the way, compromises have been sought, like hybrid trucks using electric and fossil fuel, but these trucks pose problems of higher purchase and maintenance costs. There may, however, be another alternative in the not too distant future whose running costs would leave all other fuels standing – thorium, on which more later.
Few people have a kind word for diesel these days owing to their harmful emissions, despite fitments like catalytic converters and soot filters which drastically cut air contamination. The problem is PM 2.5, particulates which are so small that they lodge in the lungs and migrate to the blood stream and have now been identified as a leading cause of lung cancer and contributor to soaring worldwide asthma rates. They can also lead to black dust deposits on stored goods and for these and other reasons they are shunned in food and pharma warehouses.
Claims have been made that the LPG trucks can be used inside premises, and while cleaner than diesel, especially in relation to particulates, they are not squeaky clean. So far electric is the cleanest by far at point of use, the most quiet, and advances in battery charging technology are improving their case against fossil-fuelled trucks.
A good example of these advances is Fronius’s Ri-charging process, which achieves remarkably high charging efficiency levels of 90%. This means a huge cut in CO2, and battery service life is maximized. Yet these chargers are still overlooked in favour of less efficient 50Hz chargers because, explains Fronius, buyers base their decisions on the specification of the forklift truck and not the battery or charger, when actually the charger plays a major role in governing ongoing operating costs.
If committed to LPG as your energy choice, larger users should consider switching to LPG bulk tanks, which will eliminate the manual handling of gas cylinders, thus improving worker safety. Cylinders are often replaced at the end of a shift and would have anywhere between 5% and 15% of fuel left in the tank.
Interest in LPG is not likely to fade soon. They are generally cheaper to buy and maintain and when compared with diesel their running costs are cheaper on a pence per litre basis. Their economics also stand up against electric because they involve no charging and replacing of batteries. This may be more important in the near future owing to feared blackouts and brownouts in winter from as early as 2015. The fact is nearly nine out of ten UK businesses are worried about the security of their energy supply. OFGEM is warning that spare capacity would fall from today’s 14% to just 4% in three years, owing to the planned closure of some coal and nuclear power stations.
Fear not, however, the white knight of Thorium could thunder to the rescue. Nuclear, you might well ask with trepidation? No need for concern. A prototype car dubbed the Cadillac World Thorium Fuel Concept, is environmentally super friendly, covering 300,000 miles on only eight grams of fuel. Although a low pressure nuclear reaction is involved it’s not the uranium kind, its waste disposal much less problematic, it cannot be used for making nuclear weapons and thorium is thought to be three to four times more abundant than uranium. The technology is not new (it goes back to successful testing in the 1970s) so why has it not been developed to supplant uranium? That is another story for another day, and it is not a noble one.
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