From the University of Tennessee at Knoxville comes this surprising bit of research. Taken in entirety, and electric vehicle has a greater impact on pollution than a comparable gasoline vehicle. Full disclosure – I own an electric car myself. I’m actually on my third one, shown below, made in China:
UT researchers find China’s pollution related to E-cars may be more harmful than gasoline cars
Electric cars have been heralded as environmentally friendly, but findings from University of Tennessee, Knoxville, researchers show that electric cars in China have an overall impact on pollution that could be more harmful to health than gasoline vehicles.
Chris Cherry, assistant professor in civil and environmental engineering, and graduate student Shuguang Ji, analyzed the emissions and environmental health impacts of five vehicle technologies in 34 major Chinese cities, focusing on dangerous fine particles. What Cherry and his team found defies conventional logic: electric cars cause much more overall harmful particulate matter pollution than gasoline cars.
“An implicit assumption has been that air quality and health impacts are lower for electric vehicles than for conventional vehicles,” Cherry said. “Our findings challenge that by comparing what is emitted by vehicle use to what people are actually exposed to. Prior studies have only examined environmental impacts by comparing emission factors or greenhouse gas emissions.”
Particulate matter includes acids, organic chemicals, metals, and soil or dust particles. It is also generated through the combustion of fossil fuels.
For electric vehicles, combustion emissions occur where electricity is generated rather than where the vehicle is used. In China, 85 percent of electricity production is from fossil fuels, about 90 percent of that is from coal. The authors discovered that the power generated in China to operate electric vehicles emit fine particles at a much higher rate than gasoline vehicles. However, because the emissions related to the electric vehicles often come from power plants located away from population centers, people breathe in the emissions a lower rate than they do emissions from conventional vehicles.
Still, the rate isn’t low enough to level the playing field between the vehicles. In terms of air pollution impacts, electric cars are more harmful to public health per kilometer traveled in China than conventional vehicles.
“The study emphasizes that electric vehicles are attractive if they are powered by a clean energy source,” Cherry said.”In China and elsewhere, it is important to focus on deploying electric vehicles in cities with cleaner electricity generation and focusing on improving emissions controls in higher polluting power sectors.”
The researchers estimated health impacts in China using overall emission data and emission rates from literature for five vehicle types—gasoline and diesel cars, diesel buses, e-bikes and e-cars—and then calculated the proportion of emissions inhaled by the population.
E-cars’ impact was lower than diesel cars but equal to diesel buses. E-bikes yielded the lowest environmental health impacts per passenger per kilometer.
“Our calculations show that an increase in electric bike usage improves air quality and environmental health by displacing the use of other more polluting modes of transportation,” Cherry said. “E-bikes, which are battery-powered, continue to be an environmentally friendly and efficient mode of transportation.”
The findings also highlight the importance of considering exposures and the proximity of emissions to people when evaluating environmental health impacts for electric vehicles. They also illuminate the distributional impact of moving pollution out of cities. For electric vehicles, about half of the urban emissions are inhaled by rural populations, who generally have lower incomes.
The findings are published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology.
Cherry worked with Matthew Bechle and Julian Marshall from the University of Minnesota and Ye Wu from Tsinghua University in Beijing. The scientists conducted their study in China because of the popularity of e-bikes and e-cars and the country’s rapid growth. Electric vehicles in China outnumber conventional vehicles 2:1. E-bikes in China are the single largest adoption of alternative fuel vehicles in history, with over 100 million vehicles purchased in the past decade, more than all other countries combined.
This study is funded by the National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award. The prestigious CAREER award supports junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education, and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations. Cherry received his award in 2011.
Once upon a time in a land far far away the energy required to build a an automobile was about the same as the three next years consumption of fuel. The energy required for all the extra widgets and gadgets in the modern automobile and the huge weight disadvantage ensure it is dead before you use the same amount of energy required to make it. This also applies to electric vehicles, only more so, as the life time is projected toward the less so and the recycling toward the more so.
Electric vehicles and the PC gadgets and widgets are a green nightmare, I would ask the question, which county in which state will be the first to hold up their hands to bury these electric vehicles in their land fill. None I would imagine, will there be some government hand out to a green mob to try and recycle this stuff? It is tricky to handle and a bugger to try and recycle.
Sixties and seventies cars crush and melt make new ones and repeat. Early on back when some wanted to make vehicles with a long life span, twenty to thirty years, this was frowned upon at the time as was the reuse of milk bottles and indeed coke bottles, which were good for fifty to one hundred cycles, no no no we can not have that it is not hygenic, make new ones every time.
Once upon a time again I owned a 1960 vehicle, in a comfortable fashion it seated five people, it was so quite at any speed that conversation was like sitting in your lounge room. It had 4wheel radial tuned suspension with 4wheel fully floating disc brakes, at 60 MPH it got as a minimum 50 MPG. My question, what in the hell has gone wrong in the last fifty years that automobiles have gone backwards. The small car I have now is not a patch on what I drove in the sixties in comfort or MPG or handling or safety.!!!
I seem to remember some years ago – when California started its ‘anti-energy’ crusade, that there was this joke going round:
What is a ‘zero emissions’ vehicle in California..?
An electric car for which the electricity is generated in Nevada…
John Wright says:
February 13, 2012 at 10:02 am
Sorry — not true. We use internal combustion engines today because they have proven to be more efficient than steam. The “cyclonepower” referenced above is a steam piston heat engine, which is less efficient than using steam to drive a turbine. Steam turbines probably generate 90% of the world’s electricity, but they have disappeared from any role in marine propulsion (except for nuclear), which they used to dominate. They were replaced by diesel-electric. Why? efficiency and economy.
William Lear (inventory of the car radio, the 8-track tape, and the Lear Jet) had a fling with steam car development after getting a $200 bill for automatic transmission service. He gave up in the face of the insurmountable efficiency gap between steam and internal combustion.
Yes, external combustion heat engines have the advantage of fuel adaptability, but it’s still combustion and they will burn more fuel (and produce more CO2 if you care) than the same useful energy output from an internal combustion engine.
It’s surprising that some readers are willing to pass a judgment on Anthony’s experiments with electric cars without having read or looking up now what he wrote about them previously (as suggested by the tone of the comments).
Donald L. Klipstein says:
February 13, 2012 at 9:52 am
tell ya what why don’t you come here and cart the groceries for my family of four for 2 weeks 25 miles one way to the top of the small (700′ above the valley floor) hill where I live? Then we will see how efficient a bike is. Oh by the way there is anywhere from 1-3 inches of snow on the ground right now.
Kadaka,
There are two issues with your comment/question. 1) Assuming the solar rooftop installation is less than 100 percent home energy need capacity level then charging the car from the roof system would take from the solar portion of the incomplete home charging unit. 2) Affordable solar is a very new concept in light of the current, ongoing plunge in panel prices globally and plug-in cars are also new. It would make for a better demonstration project for the other 99 percent of us with no overpriced roof mount solar system to see the benefits of DIY solar charging system at current costs and without 300 percent markups by installers mining tax credits. This should be a lot more obvious in a few years when there are many more plug-in vehicles and people connecting the dots.
Jeff Alberts,
Yes you are correct in most cases, however the detectors or induction loop sensors generally fail to detect small vehicles, especially bicycles. The sensors need a sufficient mass of metal to interact with the sensors magentic field triggering the light. Many bikes today have little to no metal, while even motorcycles may not have enough to set off the sensor.
D. J. Hawkins says:
When I studied chemical engineering in the late 70′s, the usual figure was that approximately 25-30% of the fuel value of a barrel of oil was consumed in its refining. That’s ballpark, and a lot depends on the source of the crude and your product breakdown. And refineries have boosted efficiencies by 30-40% since then. The rest is left as an exercise for the student ;-).
——————–
Mr Hawkins, since the energy contained in a gallon of gasoline is 33.41 KWh your figures would put the refining energy into the 6KWh/gal neighborhood that the ‘greens’ are harping about, but I need to know if the refineries are literally using 6kWh/gallon of electricity from the electrical grid or are they just using the equivalent of 6KWh/gallon from burning their own fuel? Please advise.
The law of diminishing returns and reality!
All (most) of the easy gains in fuel economy have already been made back in the 1970’s when there was a big push to cut fuel costs.
It takes about 12-15 hp to move a typically sized passenger car at 60 mph steady road speed. Modern engines burn about .5 lbs of gasoline to produce one horsepower for one hour. Highly optimized engines such as light aircraft engines at light throttle cruise can get down to specific fuel consumptions of about .34 lbs of gasoline per horse power hour.
In the first case that means at 60 mph a typical car would consume 6-7.5 lbs of gasoline per hour. Given gasoline weighs about 6.5 lbs/gallon that gives a theoretical top fuel mileage of 52-65 mpg at steady state highway cruise. These just happen to also be the very best fuel mileages claimed in real world cars today. A 1970’s vintage Morris cooper could get just short of 50 mpg if driven for maximum economy.
Throw in the fact that in the real world the roads are not perfectly flat, you sometimes have a head wind, you occasionally have to slow down and speed up due to traffic, and even on occasion, shift down to climb a hill or accelerate to pass. Not to mention that human drivers have difficulty holding an absolutely uniform speed, have to stop for traffic lights (where you get 0 mpg) etc. means we are doing pretty good to get up to 40 mpg on a practically sized sedan or small utility vehicle.
Unless folks are willing to drive a car with the aerodynamics of a tear drop, ride on rock hard tires to lower rolling resistance, and have a commuter car that will only carry 1-2 passengers, all the technology in the world will not get you real world fuel consumption much higher than 40-50 mpg.
Even if you use a highly optimized engine like a modern light aircraft engine running at ideal lean mixtures at steady state rpm (no acceleration, deceleration) and can achieve .4 lbs of fuel per horsepower hour you still can only get to peak theoretical fuel consumptions near 80 mpg at highway cruise speeds of 60 mpg with current body styles and vehicle weights.
The dominant forms of drag at highway speeds are mostly aerodynamic and some rolling resistance. Tire manufactures have already milked about as much out of low rolling resistance tires as they are likely to get in a wheel tire combination that also gives reasonable traction and ride characteristics. Except for a few most people do not want to ride to work in a car that looks like a torpedo on wheels for significant reduction in aerodynamic drag. They also want comfortable seating, a nice stereo, seating for 4 adults and even a bit of cargo area so they can haul the family to soccer practice or pickup a load of groceries on the way home from work.
Larry
Smokey,
Nice try right back at ya. Here is “Gangsta Illinois” we do not have 8′ dedicated bike lanes. The only “dedicated” bike lanes I am aware of are in Chicago, and they are about 2′ wide and part of the parking lane so you have to watch out for jerks who fling open their car doors without looking. In the burbs where I ride it’s mostly a 2-3′ shoulder of which 12″ is rumble strips. I’m not asking for 8′ thats ridiculous.
Also, your road building info is a bit off, at least for the Midwest, maybe California is different. We are not talking Interstates here ( bikes aren’t alowed ) and even then they were only paid for by approximately 70-75 fuel taxes. The rest are from general funds, bonds, property and other non-user taxes.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t appreciate jerk bicyclists just as I don’t appreciate jerk Taxis, Buses, cars, etc. I also drive my car more than probably most here ( 40k miles/year ), so I pay a hell of a lot of gas taxes, especially here in Chicago area.
DocRock,
Thanks for the correction. From what I’ve read about Critical Mass bicycle congestion in cities worldwide I assumed Chicago was similar to the Peoples’ Soviet Socialist Republic of California. Glad to hear your road engineers have more sense [they could hardly have less than here].
There’s also another factor in regards to the apparent lack of high mpg cars. Basically nobody wants them. The priority that people place on mileage just is not the primary concern of people when they buy cars at least now with fuel at its present price point. People want utility and comfort. Stripped down sub-compacts just don’t cut it when it come to car sales. I say, power to the people. Buy what you want.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/do-regular-cars-use-more-electricity-than-electric-cars/2011/10/17/gIQAiF67rL_blog.html
According to this Argonne study — and this analysis by the Department of Energy’s Jacob Ward—[he’s a govt. warmist] it takes about 6 kwh of energy to refine a gallon of gasoline, not 6 kwh of electricity, as I [author] originally stated. Now, some of the energy inputs that a refinery uses (such as natural gas) could be used to generate electricity instead if we shifted away from regular cars to electric cars. But even in that case you wouldn’t get a full 6 kwh of electricity — probably less than half that.
This idea never made sense to me that a petroleum refinery, which has energy at it’s disposal, would need to use lots of electicity in the refining process. However, the myth that refineries use 6KWh of electricity/gal of gas refined is spread throughout the internet and probably with us to stay.
I see you found your answer. Yes, the primary utility requirement for atmospheric distillation of oil to gasoline is heat. Usually provided by burning part of the feedstock. There is some electricity used to run compressors, pumps, instrumentation and what not.
As for the comparison of kWh used in electric vehicles vs the stored energy of fossil fuels, don’t forget that basically 50% of all the electricity that is generated is lost in distribution due to I^2R losses in transmission.
Except that in some cases electrical power is more useful than the heating value of their primary commodity. If they can buy a million BTU of electrical energy for less than they can sell an equivalent energy quantity of petroleum in the form of gasoline or diesel or natural gas. It might be smarter to buy electrical power at a low cost per BTU and sell their petroleum chemicals for a higher cost per BTU as a refined product rather than burning it for energy.
Pumps and other devices need electrical power anyway and the power company can probably generate it a lot cheaper than they can produce it locally (including physical equipment costs).
Larry
Got so fed up with high gas prices, that I bought an e-bike last Sept. Had to put a for sale sign on it, because the battary did not give me enough juice to get me to town and back-it also took 8 hrs. to recharge it-my employer would not let me recharge the battary at work out of concern on running up his electic bill. E-bikes are good for running around town with short distances, but if a person has to travel more than 5 miles one-way, forget it-the battaries get less than half of what the advertisers claim. I found my gas moped to be a good choice as it will get me over 110 miles on a gallon of gas-it can get me four times farther on a gallon of gas than a car. But not many are willing to part with their cars-especially during th harsh winter months.
If it wasn’t for people trying to force other people to “do it my way,” then it would be an efficiency or practicality issue.
But people do want to force other people, so it’s a political issue, and it will be decided politically, and the outcome will be inefficient and corrupt and wasteful.
And, of course, people will fight about it forever, rather than doing anything useful.
The exotic metals used in the batteries and motors and the threat of fire still keeps me from taking electric vehicles seriously. At ftp://ftp.nhtsa.dot.gov/NASS/Videos there’s a video of the Chevy Volt battery fire test. Test was run on Nov 11, the fire started on Nov 24. Firemen begin to fight the fire with the hose on full – with no effect. After a few minutes they gave up, obviously concluding that all they were accomplishing was making a lot of steam.
If you “do the math” of losses at each conversion step, it’s pretty clear that e-cars make more (and are not as efficient as ICE cars) ‘well to wheels’. “Why” is simple: more conversions.
Crude, refine, transport, burn, motion
Coal, transport and process, burn, electricity, transformer, transmission losses, transformers, charger losses, battery charging losses, battery parasitic standby losses (can be 1%/day in NiCd), battery DIScharge losses, power controller losses, motor losses, motion…
The “pro-Electric” folks like to just look at the “battery to motion” vs “gasoline to motion” and ignore the rest of the cycle…
With that said, I’d like to have an E-Car. Why? Lower COSTS, even if higher energy consumption total. (Coal is just Soooo cheap…) Also stops using imported oil and uses domestic coal instead. Oh, and my ‘driving profile’ makes a 100 mile range fine for 90%+ of all I do and we could use the old Diesel for long trips…
But to say they are going to reduce pollution (or worse, reduce CO2) is just silly and ignores the math of reality…
Oh, and I’d like one because they are so quiet too…
@E.M.Smith So what are your calculations as to the losses / relative efficiency of BEV vs ICE?
And why are you bringing up NiCd batteries? Is some manufacturer considering them for EVs?
E.M.S.;
You should be so lucky:
http://www.teslamotors.com/modelx
D.Marchall;
BEV is about 3X as efficient getting its stored power turned into forward motion; all the rest is details.
typo:
DMarshall.
As always, the real objective is to give money to select groups who have friends in high places.
China (and India) are making serious investments in thorium molten-salt nuclear reactors. The US gov is too vested in the extremely dangerous and military-purposed LWR technology and fabricated “oil dependency”. As long as Haliburton, Raytheon and other petro/warfare industries continue to own the gov, thorium technology won’t be given consideration in the US. The US built the first experimental molten-salt reactor in the 60’s but the LWR won out because it’s easier to make nukes with it. We can thank the Fukushima’s of today and tomorrow for that fateful decision.
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/02/china-thorium-power/