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October 26 2018 Recently got through 'When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation'[1] by Alice Friedemann. Friedemann was a systems analyst for a large global shipping corporation and has a thorough understanding of the inner working of the freight industry and it's critical support for today's Just-in-Time economy. She also regularly writes about peak oil and related topics on her blog Energy Skeptic[2]. Friedemann is not as gifted a writer as others in the world of peak oil studies. I found the tone of this book too conversational which perhaps reflects the fact that she is mainly a blogger. That aside, the book is very informative and makes a strong case for why the demise of inexpensive liquid hydrocarbon fuels will likely be impossible to replace in the trucking industry at the volumes the world currently uses. Friedemann includes many industries under the term 'trucking'; in addition to the usual 18 wheelers and local delivery trucks, she also counts vehicles used in mining, agriculture, and construction, pretty much anything that runs on diesel fuel. The reason is that these vehicles do a lot of heavy lifting and are thus very poor candidates for electrification. The same goes for the airline and rail industries; the comparatively low energy density and weight of batteries, and the line loss and infrastructure costs of tethering is essentially a show-stopper in any plans for a switch to electric power. Even within the realm of fossil fuels there are emerging supply constraints as much of the light oil coming out of the shale plays has to be "upgraded" prior to refining in conventional oil refineries and is harder to turn into diesel and jet fuel. This added cost coupled with the high cost of fracked oil in general yields a EROI[3] of roughly 10:1 compared to conventional oil's 30:1. Fuels derived from tar sands and plants are even poorer investment. So, despite the writing style, the book is well worth reading for anyone still under the impression that the world can plausibly run the current global web of freight on electricity once fossil fuels become scarcer and much more costly in the coming years (not decades). For those not keen on reading the book but still interested in this issue there is a August 2016 Peak Prosperity interview[4] of Friedemann which covers some of the book's topics. -- [1] https://www.springer.com/us/book/9783319263731 [2] http://energyskeptic.com/ [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_returned_on_energy_invested [4] https://youtu.be/-EKmNgvUw3k