How Many Tanker Trucks Arrive in the Yukon Each Day?

I've always been curious as to how many trucks are required to haul all of the gasoline, diesel and heating fuel to the Yukon? Well here are the numbers:

• 2007 annual fossil fuel usage in Yukon¹: 128,062,000L - yes, 128 million litres of fuel used in the Yukon.
• Assuming the average B-train has a payload of 50,000 L, then that is: 2561 B-trains loads a year, or
• almost 7 tanker trucks of fuel A DAY are consumed by the Yukon!!!!!

From a green house gas emissions perspective, if we assume the average B-train comes from Edmonton to Whitehorse and returns, this is a round-trip of almost exactly 4,ooo km. The average B-train has a fuel efficiency of 1.7 L/km², so each round trip consumes some 3,400 L of diesel. Sum all those trips, and we burned 8.7 million litres of diesel just to get our fossil fuels to us!

Convert that to green house gas emissions, and that's 23,000 tonnes of CO₂e annually. Another way to put this is trucking fuel to the Yukon accounts for 6% of the Yukon's total GHG emissions! This means when we are doing GHG inventories, we should be tacking on a GHG transporation surcharge of 6% on GHG emissions.