Aye lad, there's the rub.*
From IEEE Spectrum, November 29:
If grain must be dragged to market on an oxcart, how far can it go before the oxen eat up all the cargo? This, in brief, is the problem faced by any transportation system in which the vehicle must carry its own fuel. The key value is the density of energy, expressed with respect to either mass or volume.
The era of large steam-powered ocean liners began during the latter half of the 19th century, when wood was still the world’s dominant fuel. But no liners fired their boilers with wood: There would have been too little space left for passengers and cargo. Soft wood, such as spruce or pine, packs less than 10 megajoules per liter, whereas bituminous coal has 2.5 times as much energy by volume and at least twice as much by mass. By comparison, gasoline has 34 MJ/L and diesel about 38 MJ/L.
But in a world that aspires to leave behind all fuels (except hydrogen or maybe ammonia) and to electrify everything, the preferred measure of stored energy density is watt-hours per liter. By this metric, air-dried wood contains about 3,500 Wh/L, good steam coal around 6,500, gasoline 9,600, aviation kerosene 10,300, and natural gas (methane) merely 9.7—less than 1/1,000 the density of kerosene.
How do batteries compare with the fuels they are to displace? The first practical battery, Gaston Planté’s lead-acid cell introduced in 1859, has gradually improved from less than 60 Wh/L to about 90 Wh/L. The nickel-cadmium battery, invented by Waldemar Jungner in 1899, now frequently stores more than 150 Wh/L, and today’s best mass-manufactured performers are lithium-ion batteries, the first commercial versions of which came out in 1991. The best energy density now commercially available in very large quantities for lithium-ion batteries is at 750 Wh/L, which is widely seen in electric cars.....
In 2013, "Here is THE Problem Facing Alternative Energy":
An article on Professor Smil from the journal Science, 2018:
Meet The Guy Who Taught Bill Gates About Energy
....The fourth transition is unlike the first three, however. Historically, Smil notes, humans have typically traded relatively weak, unwieldy energy sources for those that pack a more concentrated punch. The wood he cut to heat his boyhood home, for example, took a lot of land area to grow, and a single log produced relatively little energy when burned. Wood and other biomass fuels have relatively low "power density," Smil says. In contrast, the coal and oil that heated his later dwellings have higher power densities, because they produce more energy per gram and are extracted from relatively compact deposits. But now, the world is seeking to climb back down the power density ladder, from highly concentrated fossil fuels to more dispersed renewable sources, such as biofuel crops, solar parks, and wind farms. (Smil notes that nuclear power, which he deems a "successful failure" after its rushed, and now stalled, deployment, is the exception walking down the density ladder: It is dense in power, yet often deemed too costly or risky in its current form.)....Same energy density problem here in 2019:
Shipping: "Electric Container Ships Are Stuck on the Horizon"—Vaclav Smil
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