Illinois trucking companies push back against Biden’s EPA standards

The owner of an Illinois-based trucking company says the latest EPA emissions standards for trucks are implausible.

The new rules state that 30% of heavy-duty vocational trucks would need to be zero-emission by 2032.

The EPA calculated that new electrified trucks would save operators a total of $3.5 billion in fuel and other costs from 2027 to 2032, paying for themselves in two to four years, but industry officials lambasted the new standards as unreachable with current electric vehicle technology, including Mike Kucharski, co-owner of JKC Trucking in Chicago.

“We would need a miracle, better technology,” said Kucharski. “We are going to need a super battery that would charge up pretty quickly, 20 to 30 minutes, that would last a while.”

Kucharski notes that the way to kill a battery is extreme heat or extreme cold, so he wonders how the battery is going to perform in the extreme cold of Montana or extreme heat of Las Vegas.

Kucharski said another challenge with electric semi-trucks is that they only have a range of 300 miles.

“We are going from the Midwest to the west coast, California and back, that is about 2,000 miles,” said Kucharski. “Three-hundred miles. That won’t get us out of the state of Illinois before we would have to shut down, recharge for 12 hours, and then do another charge in 300 miles.”

A study by the Clean Freight Coalition concluded that fully electrifying the U.S. trucking fleet would require a nearly $1 trillion infrastructure investment.

The Illinois Corn Growers Association joined the American Petroleum Institute and other groups in filing a lawsuit in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals challenging the EPA’s heavy-duty vehicle emissions standards for model years 2027-2032.

The groups said EPA exceeded its congressional authority with the regulation with targets that rely too heavily on electrification and do not fully appreciate the role low carbon fuels like ethanol play in the transportation sector.