Transport

Transport is a feature of product (or the product itself) Transport is a part of logistics. Modes of transport (and type of energy consumed):

• w:Ship (high sulphur / low sulphur diesel), (ocean or inland) Identified by w:IMO number or ship name. Various ship-tracking services exist that get their data feed from w:Automatic identification systems
  • w:RORO (diesel) (Roll On Roll Off, loads full trucs)
  • w:Container ship (diesel) ship
  • other other merchant ships (diesel)
• w:Train (electricity or diesel)
• Lorry (diesel or biofuel)
• Truck (diesel or biofuel)
• Van (diesel or biofuel)
• Car (fuel, diesel, biofuel, natural gas, solar or electricity)
• Airplane (kerosine, biokerosine mix)
• Animal (produce)
• Human (produce, animal)
• Sail (wind)

Ecologicality of modes of transport

See w:Energy efficiency in transport for extensive info on this issue

Sea vessels are basically very ecological even if the transported distance goes into the thousands or tens of thousands of km.

Rail traffic is practically free, at least for heavy cargo, to operate once the huge investment of building a rail network is done.

Trucks consume a lot of fuel, especially for heavy things. Studies have found that the larger the truck is, relatively it consumes more energy.

Airplane is the most unecological way to transport things as the CO2 footprint is very high for aircargo.

Work that needs to be done re Consumium

What we need to find to figure out the transportation costs are:

• Usage of fuel/kg/km transported for all transport types
• Database of distances between places. I'm sure the logistics companies have this information, but are they going to give it to us if we ask is a different question. So if you know of any open content sources to get road/railroad/ship/airtravel distances between places it would be most welcome. We could approach this by finding these distances coutry-by-country and then linking countries together using UN/LOCODE bordercrossing points as nodes to tie the countries networks together.