Professor Alice Larkin, University of Manchester: Alternatives to air travel

Speaker 1: Okay. Just making sure I got the technology right here. Ah, Okay. So that's me. So I'm Alice, I'm from the University of Manchester, also from the [inaudible 00:00:11] centre for Climate Change Research. My task today is to talk about some of the alternatives to air travel. I can't go into the detail of all the alternatives around, for example, car transport. I know you've had a lot of information already on car transport, so I'm going to take some of that information as a given. But when we're thinking about UK residents and what we can do as alternatives to air travel I've just briefly broken it down into three different categories. Many of the options in these categories are actually the same. But if you're thinking about alternatives to domestic travel, so flying by air within the UK, talking about rail, road, ferry, so between small islands, for example. But I've also put their virtual. So what I mean by virtual travel there-- I need a slowing down there, sorry, too enthusiastic. And too loud? Oh, sorry. Okay. Yes. Sorry. Sorry. I'm a wanderer.

So virtual travel, when talk about virtual travel what I mean there is actually using some sort of video communication, you might be familiar with something like Skype and that kind of communication where you you actually have your interaction, but you don't actually go to do your trip. So that's what I mean. And I took a little bit more about that later.

Within the EU I'm talking about-- added to that list high speed rail. Principally they're talking about things like Eurostar, but also accessing high speed rail on the continent within Europe, so they're sort of TGV trains. The other thing that I've added there is alternative destination. So what I'm thinking there is that you might choose to, at the moment, travel by air to somewhere within Europe. But at the same time, if you were then not going to fly, you might actually choose to go somewhere else. So it's not just about the substitution of one technology for another, it might actually be thinking about doing something differently or doing something different.

Outside the EU, so we're talking now about what we typically call long haul flying, so anything that's outside of the European continent. Again, the same sort of options there have added ship meaning oceangoing shipping so you could take a ship to America if you so wanted. I suppose the big issue on outside the EU is if you're going to take an alternative to air travel and you actually wanted to still take the trip rather than go somewhere else, then you might think that this is actually quite an unusual thing to do or quite a not particularly appealing thing to do. So it might appeal to some people to travel slowly around the world, but actually it's not something that is typically thought of as an alternative. So again, you might think of on alternative destination if you weren't going to fly so far away.

So I'm going to focus firstly on sea travel. Actually, most of this this presentation focus is a little bit on sea, and then I'm going to talk about rail. So in terms of UK passengers in 2018 we've got about 43 million domestic sea travel passengers. Now, it might come as a bit of a surprise, but about half of that is on river ferries, so we do quite a lot of travel by river ferries. But also the other half is, is largely inter-island, so travelling domestically between islands in the UK. If we're talking then about international, about 22 million people will travel by International sea travel. So of our residents, this is again, typically largely short sea shipping. So basically, what I mean by that is about 50% is Dover-Calais, for example. So talking about ferries that get us to France, get us to Belgium and so forth. And then also cruise passengers has also counted as obviously sea travel, but that's more the actual holiday that people are taking rather than travelling from A to B as such. The Channel Tunnel I've put on here, now obviously that's not sea travel, but it's crossing the channel either using-- well using cars on the shuttle or you can also use the euro star as a passenger and is just a flag that this is now currently as popular as international short sea shipping. So about 20 million people, roughly, are travelling by the shuttle and by the channel.

In terms of ships and their carbon intensity, so I think Jim has already shown you a list of the different modes of transport and how they compare, and shipping is already very CO2 efficient, it's quite a low carbon form of transport, partly because it also carries a lot of freight around. So there's a mixture between a freight and passenger, which kind of makes this issue a little bit more complicated. But ships actually burn some of the dirtiest fuel that we currently have. They have diesel engines a d they burn heavy fuel oil, so he's sound like they're very dirty and they are in terms of local pollution, but in terms of energy efficiency, they're quite good. Nevertheless, if you're using shipping, there's also a wide range of options for cutting their CO2 and this is why it's a sort of interesting topic of research. So not unlike aviation or aircraft, not unlike planes, ships last a long time, probably a little bit longer than planes, 30 to 40 years. But one of the big differences between planes and what Owen has just been talking about in that lag in changing the technology and ships is that you can retrofit ships, so even the ships that have already been been constructed you could actually had different technologies to those ships to de-carbonise them. There's also an interesting relationship between the speed that a ship goes on the fuel that's required. So if you were to half the speed the ship's travelling at, you actually more than half the amount of fuel that you use. So one intervention or one thing you can do right now is if we asked our ships to go a little bit slower, we would immediately save CO2 which gives us some carbon benefit straightaway .

There are other unusual technologies currently being researched as well that you could retrofit to the ships. Now it might sound really backwards, but I'm talking here about wind proportion. So about sails, they're called wind assist technology sales. Flet in the rotors is another kind of technology. Also kites. Now, if your ship is already going a bit slower, doesn't need quite as much energy, and you put one of these technologies on as well to reduce the energy further, then that can give you some CO2 benefits. Now, when we're talking about alternatives for UK residents, we do have to think that the voyage length really matters. So while some of these technologies might be really important for some of our longer journeys, here in this room were probably focusing on some of the more short haul-type alternatives and shorter voyages. Battery power and hybrid electric is a is a real positive option that already exists for shipping but requires more investment in new ships. I'm not going to go through this diagram, this table here, in detail, I just want to flag a couple of things here. So here are some of the different options. Slow steaming is the term for slowing down the ships. When we look at things like ammonia fuel, hydrogen, biofuel and we've listed those there as being technologies for the future. One of the big challenges when you're travelling internationally is if your ship is going somewhere, it needs to know that it can refuel when it gets there. So if there isn't that fuel available, the infrastructure at the port for you to refuel your ship with ammonia or hydrogen or some sort of bio fuel et cetera, then then you're not going to get very far. So this whole infrastructure would need to be set up to support the de-carbonisation of shipping. Also I've put here natural gas. Some of you might be aware of liquefied natural gas, we already have some ships that are on this-- powered by this fuel, but this is still a fossil fuel. So if we're trying to get to net zero, this is not a viable long term option for de-carbonising shipping. So just an example of the largest electric ferry, which is was built in August or launched in August 2019, 200 passengers, 31 cars and five trucks. In one charge, this can go 25 miles so this is a great low carbon alternative that's already available. But obviously 25 miles isn't isn't a huge distance. So we need to be developing this technology more If we're going to be travelling more by this very low carbon mode. Just a very brief note on ports and port infrastructure, when the ship docks, it's continues to use energy once it's in port for lots of things that are on board, and at the moment they tend to use their diesel engines for that. If we could electrify our ports, this would also reduce the CO2 emissions from those from those ships, and the electricity or the carbon emissions associated with that depends very much on the electricity grid, and I think you've already heard about the electricity in the CO2 intensity and the renewables on the grid will make a difference to that.

Moving briefly onto rail. So again, the passenger numbers are up there, and we have a lot more domestic rail than international, and this is an increasing trend. In terms of our current UK trains, they're electric or diesel and the diagram-- the carbon intensity again of rail is much lower than other modes of transport, and I think you've had that shown to you. About 42% of our network is electrified. And then if we look at our average rail carbon intensity, so it's about 37 grams of carbon dioxide per passenger for our rail in the U. K. And I just want to draw attention to a comparison with Eurostar, which is just 6. And the reason for that is because the electricity that's used in continental Europe has a very large proportion of nuclear power and some more renewables, which means the carbon intensity is really low. So it's a very low carbon mode and overall alternative. So our trains, the O2 electric train depends on the grid again on its energy efficiency, and our diesel train depends on the fuel and the engine efficiency. There are some options for reducing emissions from trains. We could have more electric trains that would definitely help. We can have a hybrid or by-mode trains there so they can switch from the electric lines to the diesel lines. But there's a bit of a penalty there, so the diesel engines then won't be quite as efficient as they are currently if they have to have both those technology. Some people ask well will HS2 help emissions, help reduce emissions? This might be a question that comes up. This is a really complicated question, so I would probably save this for the discussions. But things that come to my mind are what are you accessing better? Are you accessing high speed rail on the continent and therefore giving yourself options to not fly? Or are you accessing the airports and actually flying more or travelling more? So we really need to think about some of those things.

I think last slide, alternative technologies. So again, there are lots of developments going on here about travelling virtually. So whether it's just having a conversation, it might actually be using some sort of augmented reality where there's part of the real world and part of the fake world, and you're actually having an experience rather than just a conversation. I think that this is commonly used with business travel. The question, I suppose, is whether we would use it to actually substitute for seeing friends and family or having holidays. And I think that that's something for the tables to debate. And is the Internet high carbon? Well, again, it depends on the grid. Electricity and carbon intensity, so if that is improving, then we're improving the virtual communication and the carbon intensity of that. So that's all I'm going to say. Thank you very much.