Dhe fuel nozzle is barely in the socket before the display on the fuel pump starts to flash. With every liter of diesel, around ten kilowatt hours end up in the tank. Otto fuels average around 8.5 kilowatt hours per liter. Until the desired filling level is reached, there is time for a few basic thoughts. In 2021, Germans used 16.3 million tons of petrol and 34.5 million tons of diesel. In addition, there are almost six million tons of aviation fuel, which is a low value in the long-term average due to the corona pandemic. According to calculations by the Federal Ministry of Economics, 580 terawatt hours of energy flowed into the transport sector last year, not including the fuel bunkered in Germany for international flights and ship transport. This amount of energy roughly corresponds to the electricity that is consumed in Germany every year.
New studies on ways to achieve climate-neutral transport reach the editors almost every day. Each of these papers has strengths and weaknesses, but they all have one basic assumption in common: the costs and availability of raw materials can already be calculated up to the year 2045 or 2050. In many studies, a proportion of traffic is also mentally shifted, as if in a free society people could be told whether they should choose a car, train or plane. Against this background, we have decided to describe the solutions for the individual modes of transport qualitatively and not quantitatively. Motorized individual transport, which causes around 60 percent of the energy consumption in transport in Germany, has the role of a main actor that has to tolerate other strong characters alongside it.