Battery Electric Long-Haul Trucking in the United States: A Comprehensive Costing and Emissions Analysis

This work presents a costing and emissions analysis of long-haul battery electric trucks (BETs) with overnight charging for the U.S. market. First, we compute the energy requirements of a long-haul truck for a 600-mile (966 km) real-world driving range and perform battery sizing. The battery sizes are used along with a fleet-replacement model and the U.S. payload distribution to compute payload losses for two different chemistries, Nickel-Manganese-Cobalt (NMC) and Lithium-Iron-Phosphate (LFP). Given present battery energy densities, BET fleets will require 1.06 and 1.27 times the trucks of a diesel fleet to provide the same cargo capacity. Next, we perform electricity pricing analysis for high-power applications. Our baseline scenario estimates a price of 0.32 USD/kWh, and it only decreases to 0.15 USD/kWh for the optimistic scenario. Currently, we compute the total cost of ownership for BETs to be more than twice (>2x) that of diesel trucks, however, the price premium is projected to decrease significantly to 1.2x in the long term. BETs could become economically competitive with diesel if the delivered cost of electricity for high-power applications drops below 0.1 USD/kWh, and if we realize projected improvements in battery energy density and cost. Our emissions analysis shows negligible present-day greenhouse gas (GHG) benefits from switching to BETs, primarily due to the carbon intensity of electricity generation. In the long term, we project BETs to have 40% less GHG emissions than diesel. Today, BETs are not well-suited for the long-haul trucking sector. However, our sensitivity analysis shows that operating with battery swapping and short-haul applications could potentially benefit from electrification, hence we encourage further investigation. Our analysis framework is provided as a Google Colab Notebook that can be modified to assist these needed future studies.