Barging down the Erie II: Return of the freight barge

Your semi-aquatic Minor Heretic took to the Grand Canal once more last week, travelling from Oswego, on Lake Ontario, down the Oswego Canal, onto the Erie Canal, through Rome to Utica, New York. At one point, when we were docked near a lock, a massive construction barge went past, pushed by a tugboat. The barge filled the lock to within a few inches of the sides and nearly end to end. The incident was notable because of the lack of commercial traffic on the barge canal. It started me on a train of thought about the possible return of waterborne freight traffic.

I had spoken a couple of weeks before with a Canal Corporation official about the future of freight traffic, and he offered a few thoughts. A canal barge is 8 times more energy efficient than a tractor-trailer on the highway. $4.50 a gallon for diesel fuel is the economic tipping point between trucks and barges. The Canal Corporation is starting to get inquiries about barge freight. They have also started designing a self-propelled barge to carry up to 60 standard cargo containers.

I’d like to explore the possibilities of barge freight and its environmental impact. Interstate 90 generally parallels the canal across New York State. According to the Department of Transportation, between 2000 and 7000 trucks per day travel I-90 between Albany and Buffalo, depending upon the section of highway.

From my limited time on the canal I have seen that the time it takes to cycle a lock is about 20 minutes. A lock tender told me that his could cycle in 10 minutes if there were two lock tenders on duty. For the purposes of this exercise I’ll assume that the Canal Corp. gears up for freight traffic with two operators per lock, but allocate that saved ten minutes for maneuvering. At 20 minutes per cycle, a lock can pass 72 barges a day. At 60 containers per barge, that is 4320 containers per day. That represents a major percentage of the present I-90 truck traffic.

Of course, no system is perfectly efficient. I’ll arbitrarily assume that the canal is busy, but not packed, with each lock passing two barges per hour, or 2880 containers a day.

The Albany to Buffalo run on I-90 is about 290 miles. A tractor-trailer gets about 7-9 miles per gallon (call it 8), so one would burn 36.25 gallons of diesel on the trip. 2880 trucks would burn 104,400 gallons of diesel, producing 22.384 pounds of CO2 per gallon, or 2,336,889 pounds of CO2.

The ratio between the energy consumption of a barge and a truck is dramatic. There is a unit called the ton/mile, meaning the work of carrying one ton of cargo one mile. A truck gets 59 ton/miles to a gallon of diesel. A freight train gets 202 ton/miles per gallon. A barge gets 514 ton/miles per gallon, 8.71 times that of a truck. Divide 2,336,889 pounds that the truck fleet produced by 8.71 and you get 268,299 pounds, saving 2,068,590 pounds of CO2 per day. The polar bears would be happy about that.

Transferring that much cargo to the canal would also save about 92,400 gallons of diesel fuel a day, or 33,726,000 gallons a year. For comparison, that’s a little over half the annual diesel consumption in Vermont.

It makes sense that 200 years ago people built canals. Dig a ditch, let it fill with water, and gravity gives you a smooth surface. You can then build a wooden box, fill it with 120 tons of cargo, and pull it with three horsepower. Ok, mulepower.

I’m not indulging in nostalgia. As oil prices go up and oil availability gets spotty, we are going to be looking for energy efficient alternatives to the “rolling warehouse.” For items that can take four days to get from Albany to Buffalo instead of one, it is a reasonable alternative. 90% of the population of New York State lives within 20 miles of either a canal or the Hudson River. Vermont’s most populous city, Burlington, is connected to Montreal, Manhattan, and Michigan by water. Obviously we can’t transfer all cargo traffic to the water, but as we face ever rising energy prices we should develop this resource to its practical limits.

Comments

[R. Paul Smith]

Wow! Nice analysis that says a lot about how we will be going forward in a post-peak oil world - soon! Just saw pictures of wind turbine parts on a ship - the perfect combination - efficient transportation for renewable energy sources!

I can see I have a lot of reading to do on this site. Thanks.