“No form of mass transport has more potential to aid in the fight against global warming than rail…It uses 80% less energy than trucks per ton of freight carried and holds a four-to-one advantage over cars in terms of its emissions intensity”
Boston Consulting Group “Riding the Rails to Sustainability”
If you want to reduce your carbon footprint tomorrow, the easiest way to do that is to ship more intermodal freight today.
Rail is the most fuel-efficient form of mass land transit. A steel wheel on a steel rail is far more energy-efficient than rubber on asphalt. A single locomotive engine can pull several hundred times the load capacity of a single over-the-road truck.
The chart below is from the International Energy Agency (IEA). It’s from a modeling exercise they conducted on carbon emissions in 2020. It’s pretty hard to see, but rail transportation emissions are represented by that tiny purple line on the bottom. The IEA projects rail to be completely carbon neutral as early as 2050.
If that seems crazy, it’s not—North American railroads are leading the charge on green energy. Norfolk Southern is piloting a diesel-electric hybrid locomotive, BNSF is collaborating with Caterpillar and Chevron on a hydrogen locomotive, and CPKC currently has a hydrogen locomotive actively in service, with dedicated fueling locations now operational in Canada.
What does that mean for emissions?
I encourage you to do your own math, but I’ll give you some numbers to start. According to the IEA, in 2019, trucking accounted for 1.6 billion metric tons of carbon emissions. That’s the equivalent of supplying electricity to over 201 million homes a year—roughly the combined housing units of Canada, Mexico, and the United States.
If you were to take just 5% of that number—so 80 million metric tons of carbon—and move that same amount of freight via rail (which is 80% more efficient), it would have the same net positive effect as planting over a billion trees.
If that seems crazy, it’s the numbers that are insane. That same study projects that sustainable railroad practices could effectively eliminate the usage of fossil fuels in rail transportation as early as 2050.
These gains, enabled by the existing rail infrastructure, cannot be replicated with electric Class 8 semi-trucks—especially when you consider the investments required to upgrade the electricity grid to make those trucks practical.
Growing the intermodal (IMDL) market share by 5% would have a larger positive environmental impact than tens of thousands of electric trucks on the road.
If you want less pollution, if you want North American energy independence, then you want more and more shipments to go by rail. And we have a tremendous amount of room to grow when it comes to converting truck shipments to rail. We have not yet begun to tap the deep well of intermodal efficiency gains—let alone the safety benefits of taking trucks off the road.
Please read the next blog post to learn more about some of the safety benefits of moving freight by rail.
This blog post was adapted from a presentation given in November 2023 at Loyola University Chicago. For the full original presentation, you can watch it on YouTube by following this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dV3NocGBszU.