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Green light | Environment
Why it's so hard to electrify shipping and aviation

Reducing emissions for cargo ships and planes isn’t as simple as sticking a huge battery in them
by Rashida Kamal and Alvin Chang

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Green light | Environment
Why it's so hard to electrify shipping and aviation

Reducing emissions for cargo ships and planes isn’t as simple as sticking a huge battery in them
by Rashida Kamal and Alvin Chang

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This is a Honda Civic – a popular car powered by petrol, or gasoline.

It carries about 77.5lb of fuel.

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It can travel about 360 miles on one tank of fuel.

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This is a Chevrolet Bolt – a car powered by electricity stored in a battery.

If the battery were the same weight as the fuel in the Civic engine ...

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… it could only travel 21 miles.

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That’s because, pound for pound, fuel provides far more energy than batteries.

This is called “energy density".

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Electric cars make up for this low energy density by adding a huge battery and making the car lighter.

Plus, they tend to travel shorter distances on a single charge compared with a full tank of fuel.

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Why can’t we do this with ships and planes?

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A Boeing 747-300 needs about 120,000lb of conventional jet fuel to travel five hours, though it typically carries more in case it needs to stay in the air longer.

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Replacing that energy with a battery would require a battery that is 5.8m pounds – nearly seven times the weight of a fully fueled plane.

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The CMA CGM Benjamin Franklin – a vast ship that transports cargo – carries about 33m pounds of fuel.

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Replacing that energy with a battery would require a battery that is 1.6bn pounds.

That’s far heavier than the ship can carry.

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In short, replacing fuel with a battery just gets too heavy. That’s why decarbonizing ships and planes requires a different kind of innovation.

Read more in our Green light series.

Sources: The Challenge of Decarbonizing Heavy Transport, Brookings Institution; Samantha Gross, Brookings Institution; Simple Flying; Modern Airliners; Honda; Chevrolet; Freight Waves; The Physics Factbook; the-blueprints.com

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