Electric Vehicles vs E-fuelled ICE Vehicles: Comparison of potentials for life cycle CO₂ emission reduction
2022-01-0903
03/29/2022
- Content
- The need to control global warming by regulating automotive emission levels has led to a lot of changes in the policies of different countries globally, specifically the United States (US) and the European Union (EU). More recently, both the governments have been strongly pushing the integration of Electric Vehicles (EVs) in the market to replace the conventional Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) vehicles for CO₂ emission reduction, with the enforcement of 50% EV sales by 2030 in the US and complete 100% by 2035 in the EU for passenger cars. However, these policies are misleading by considering EVs as zero emission vehicles, as there is no such technology yet available that has zero emissions during its lifecycle. During the manufacturing phase, any vehicle produced gives out emissions, with EVs emitting even higher than the conventional ICE vehicles with their battery manufacturing. Further, during the use phase, there might be no Tank-to-Wheel emissions from the EVs due to zero tailpipe emissions, but they do have very high Well-to-Tank emissions from the electricity generation needed to recharge the batteries. On the other hand, hybridisation is also a promising way for CO₂ emission reduction. Using synthetic e-fuels, hybrids can have emission reductions much higher than using conventional fuels. Hence, in this study, we have evaluated the life cycle CO₂ emission reduction potential with electric and e-fuelled hybrid passenger cars as two different cases, varying their sales from 0 to 100%. The evaluation is done with 0D numerical simulations performed on GT suite, for 30 different drive cycles consisting of 10 urban, 10 sub-urban and 10 highway cases with GPS based vehicle speed information, for US as well as EU separately. Results shows e-fuelled hybrid vehicles with greater emission reduction potential than EVs, even by using future electricity generation emission predictions.
- Citation
- Garcia, A., Monsalve-Serrano, J., Villalta, D., and Tripathi, S., "Electric Vehicles vs E-fuelled ICE Vehicles: Comparison of potentials for life cycle CO₂ emission reduction," SAE Technical Paper 2022-01-0903, 2022, .