Why Europe Is Ignoring the Only Heavy-Transport Solution That Actually Works
In Austria, we have a saying for a particular kind of slow-motion incompetence. When someone misses every opportunity placed politely in front of them—misses it not once, but repeatedly, with monk-like discipline—we say that he sleeps in the pendulum clock. The image is charming: a person wedged inside a mechanism explicitly designed to announce the passage of time, yet somehow managing not to notice it. It is gentle mockery, the sort reserved for someone who could have caught on, had he been merely drowsy rather than profoundly absent.
The tragedy, of course, is that this phrase is often far too generous. What we are witnessing today is not a half-asleep daze but an industrial-scale coma. A cultivated, institutionalised, and aggressively defended lack of initiative. Individuals, companies, entire sectors are reclining comfortably while the clock swings back and forth above their heads, ticking loudly, patiently, without mercy. The consequences are not subtle. They are simply inconvenient to acknowledge.
This is precisely the position in which natural gas—specifically its two vehicular incarnations, CNG and LNG—now finds itself.
This post first appeared in 2019, back when I still entertained hope that rational arguments might sway public sentiment. I’ve since remastered it—sharpened the edges, clarified the threat, and realigned it with the Grimwright ethos: use what works, discard the rest, and always—always—question the narrative. The date remains unchanged as a historical marker. The content does not.
At first glance, this should be a very different story.
The European Union has draped itself in the banners of emissions reduction. Climate targets are invoked with liturgical regularity. Press releases bloom like algae. One could be forgiven for assuming that policies are being guided by a sober assessment of physics, economics, and industrial reality. One would be mistaken. What we are seeing is theatre, not engineering. Optics, not outcomes. Technologies and fuel concepts are being elevated not because they work, but because they photograph well and flatter the moral vanity of policymakers desperate to harvest the votes of wide-eyed adolescents trained to mistake aspiration for feasibility.
Reality, with its vulgar insistence on trade-offs, costs, and timelines, is quietly escorted out of the room.
If the economic well-being of European citizens were even a minor variable in these deliberations, methane-based fuels would not be a footnote. They would be the centrepiece. They would be treated as the obvious, unavoidable, embarrassingly sensible bridge between what we burn today and what we might plausibly burn tomorrow.
Want low emissions in heavy transport? Methane does that.
Want near-zero emissions without detonating your industrial base? Methane again.
Want to do it now, at scale, without bankrupting logistics firms or hollowing out welfare states? You are still talking about methane.
This is not ideology. It is arithmetic.
Methane-based fuels can operate at every level of the value chain. From production to distribution to end use, the infrastructure exists, the expertise exists, and the learning curve has already been climbed. Crucially, this can all be done without rendering European industry uncompetitive—a detail of some importance, though apparently not to those whose salaries are paid regardless of outcomes.
CNG and LNG are not experimental toys. They are mature technologies with decades of operational history behind them. Not pilot projects. Not “living labs.” Actual, boring, industrial deployment. And not in niche conditions, but across continents, climates, and regulatory regimes.
If this sounds implausible, that is only because myth has replaced memory.
LNG-powered buses have been operating in Dallas for over forty years. Bio-LNG has quietly fuelled refuse trucks in Philadelphia for similar stretches of time—garbage collection being, last time anyone checked, a daily and non-negotiable service. The global shipping industry has relied on LNG as fuel for LNG carriers for well over half a century, compiling a safety record so dull it rarely makes headlines. There have been more coal dust explosions at sea than serious LNG incidents, which is to say: vastly more.
Small-scale LNG predates large-scale LNG. Large-scale LNG itself is no spring chicken, clocking well north of sixty years. LNG has served as a peak-shaving fuel for close to a century. In China, LNG trucking adoption is not a theoretical discussion but a logistical fact. Even in Europe—supposedly paralysed by regulatory sclerosis—you can traverse the continent on LNG and refuel with minimal inconvenience.
These are not future promises. They are present conditions.
And unlike the fashionable alternatives, methane-based fuels pass the brutally simple tests that actually matter: cost, reliability, and operability. Against diesel, they hold their own without requiring creative accounting or subsidies large enough to make a finance minister sweat.
More importantly, methane is not merely “cleaner.” With modest additional technology, it becomes functionally emissions-free. Bio-methane pushes this even further. The holy grail—zero emissions in heavy transport—is not a fantasy here. It is an engineering problem already solved well enough to deploy.
Picture it: a forty-ton truck producing effectively zero emissions. Not a conceptual sketch, not a prototype wheeled onto a stage under dramatic lighting, but a vehicle doing what trucks do—hauling weight over distance, day after day. The same applies to the largest diesel engines you can imagine: construction machinery, road trains, ship engines. Methane-based fuels run them without sacrificing range, reliability, or ease of use.
With bio-methane, this is not aspirational. It is achievable.
Even rocketry has noticed. SpaceX and Blue Origin are moving toward LNG-based propulsion. When the people whose business model involves strapping controlled explosions to payloads decide that methane is the sensible option, one might pause before dismissing it as quaint or transitional.
A match made in heaven, one would think.
So who could possibly oppose this?
Quite a few people, as it turns out. And not by accident.
What we are dealing with is an unholy alliance. On one side, die-hard diesel interests keen to prolong their monopoly for as long as possible. On the other, a political class intoxicated by the aesthetics of “zero emissions” and utterly indifferent to whether the underlying technologies can function outside a brochure.
The trick is elegant in its cynicism. Battery-electric and hydrogen trucks are loudly promoted precisely because they are not ready. Their immaturity becomes their shield. Because they cannot replace diesel, diesel remains indispensable. LNG, inconveniently, can replace diesel—right now—which makes it dangerous.
Electric trucks are expensive, heavy, and operationally compromised. Hydrogen trucks are rarer than polite debates on social media. Both are paraded endlessly as the future, a future that never quite arrives.
Electric vehicle fires already terrify municipal authorities. Scale that up fortyfold and imagine explaining to an insurer why your fleet now doubles as a mobile lithium bonfire. Range is another small inconvenience. Batteries weigh a great deal, eating into payload. Charging takes time. A lot of it. Trucking does not happen in polite urban loops; it happens over thousands of kilometres, on schedules that do not tolerate multi-hour pauses every few hundred kilometres.
An LNG truck can do close to a thousand miles on a single fill. Refuelling takes roughly as long as diesel. The comparison is not subtle.
Hydrogen, meanwhile, exists largely as a press release. If you ever see a hydrogen truck in the wild, take a photograph. You may not get another chance. The corrosive nature of hydrogen, its storage challenges, and the safety implications are politely ignored in favour of glossy renderings. These vehicles are not solutions. They are props.
For freight operators, neither electric nor hydrogen trucks offer a realistic, immediate choice. They cannot be deployed at scale. They cannot be trusted with core operations. They cannot be justified without subsidies that would make public accountants reach for medication.
So surely the conclusion is obvious. The question is not whether LNG replaces diesel, but how fast.
Wrong again.
Because this is not a game governed by what exists, but by what people prefer to believe might exist one day.
Battery and hydrogen trucks are treated as the Emerald City on the hill: distant, radiant, and eternally just out of reach. Everything else is dismissed as insufficiently pure. Anything that works now is deemed morally suspect for not aligning with the fantasy.
The vehicles that do exist in these sectors function primarily as technology demonstrators. They pose for cameras. They attend auto shows. They do not haul freight as part of a normal truck pool. Even if they did, their range, cost, and availability problems would disqualify them from serious commercial use.
The head understands this. The spreadsheets certainly do. Which brings us back, inexorably, to natural gas.
And yet—still no movement.
Why? Because many managers would rather do nothing than do something that feels “halfway.” They wait for perfection. Or rather, they wait for someone else to take the risk first. They wait for purchase prices to fall. They wait for political cover. They wait while diesel limps along, increasingly regulated, increasingly expensive, increasingly untenable.
The real issue is accountability. A fleet manager who adopts LNG is making a decision. He owns it. If something goes wrong, his name is attached. Sticking with diesel—even when it is clearly doomed—feels safer. Everyone else is doing it. Politicians endorse alternatives that do not yet work. Consultants write reports. Blame becomes diffuse.
When things collapse, as they inevitably will, responsibility can be deflected upward and outward. It wasn’t me. It was the experts. The studies. The regulations.
Rational decision-making has never been the dominant force here. Risk avoidance is.
So diesel remains, not because it is good, but because it is familiar.
To be clear: this is not an argument against diesel per se. Properly regulated, it has served its purpose well. And it is entirely understandable why logistics managers hesitate to gamble their businesses on immature technologies. No one wants to be the case study that went wrong.
But this makes complacency within the natural gas industry inexcusable.
Those operating in LNG as a fuel cannot afford to sleep any longer. They must drive the market, not wait for it. They must engage policymakers, customers, and the public without flinching. They must argue not only that LNG is better, but that waiting for alternatives that do not exist is actively harmful.
They must state plainly that there is no realistic substitute available on the required timeline. That delay guarantees failure on emissions targets. That fantasy is not free.
Instead, too many LNG players appear to believe that reality will eventually assert itself without their involvement. It will not.
People are being encouraged to pin their hopes on laboratory creatures that may never mature. When they do not, the cost will not be abstract. It will show up in energy prices, transport costs, and the price of everything that moves—which is to say, everything.
Will people notice? Eventually. But people are busy. As long as life remains tolerable, they outsource thinking to activists and policymakers. The silent majority stays silent. Complaints only become pressure when discomfort becomes acute.
Germany is a case in point. A flagship of renewable ambition, now saddled with some of the highest electricity prices on the planet. Heating is switched off. In extreme cases, people freeze. All of this despite subsidies of a magnitude that would cripple less wealthy states.
Transport will follow. Electric and hydrogen trucks will require vast subsidies. Budgets will strain. Prices will rise. And then, belatedly, the questions will begin.
By then, the long straw will be gone.
Time is short. Voter patience shorter still. When it becomes obvious that workable solutions were ignored in favour of theatrical impossibilities, the backlash will not be gentle.
The pendulum is swinging. Loudly. Anyone still sleeping in the clock should not be surprised by what happens when it stops.
