Featured DOE findings on TCO: ICE, HEV's, PHEV's, & BEV's

Mandates and subsidies distort the picture, for sure. If you say EV's are mandated, then the +price is diverted to other types of vehicles and other people's money. Most states including my own are moving to punish hybrids with extra taxes...good press here refreshing. I wish we could be less EV-mandate centric and more love also for hybrids and PHEV.

 

We can’t even raise the gas tax

 

The problem is that when giving incentives for PHEV that many people can take the incentives and then never plug it in.
Yes, I got the rebates for my PIP...but then I have driven it 65% in EV (thank you free charging at work) for more than half those miles. But to use PHEV incentives at this point, after the market has been established and plenty of BEV are available makes no sense, IMO.

Mike (main car is M3 now)

 

Obviously giving people money for buying a car with certain features is not the best way to do it. If you want to persuade people to drive in a way that is good for the ecology, pay them to do it. They should pay for every mile traveled with a register car pooler. They should reimburse people for eliminating a long commute by taking a local job. They could pay people to exchange a gas guzzler for an energy efficient model.

Taking it further, they should remove incentives for charging inefficient EVs from the grid in an area where the grid is dirty. Artechnica has an article ** about how much GHG is released to the atmosphere by burning or breaking down Natural gas. I think it's actually saying that coal may be cleaner for fueling a generator instead of burning NG because of the CO2 byproduct of combustion and escaping methane along the supply line.

And as for PHEVs that are never plugged in... well that can be handled by some big brotherish yearly reporting of how often the car was plugged in. We already have to report total miles driven in some cases. This would not be that much different. The car itself could keep a tally of the percentage of times it was recharged after use and report it out as part of the bi-yearly smog check process.

** “Blue” hydrogen is worse for the climate than coal, study says | Ars Technica

 

PHEV incentives not requiring them being charged in Europe has fueled a backlash against PHEVs. Bringing calls for PHEVs to be cut off from incentives because they aren't good enough at reducing GHG emissions.

There isn't any incentives for charging. There are incentives for installing charges. Tying incentives to what EV uses them would greatly increase the bureaucracy, thus cost, for incentives.

Considering the sales levels of inefficient PHEVs sold, tracking where they charge isn't going improve the impact incentives will have. Compared to the ICE version, inefficient PHEVs still emit less GHG even on a dirty grid.

That is not what the study said. The graph in the article is comparing GHG footprint for an unit of heat energy. For a given amount of heat energy NG* and coal have equal GHG footprint. NG plants are far more efficient than coal; the worse NG plant is about 28% more efficient than the best coal plant in the US. For that unit of heat energy, we get more kWh from NG, and the NG plant has lower levels of other pollutants.

*That is assuming 3.5% leakage. Worse case is 4.3%, and best is 1.54%.

 

I don't think you read the article you posted. It states blue hydrogen produces more ghg than simply burning the coal or natural gas used to produce it.

Japan's plan to get blue hydrogen from saudi natural gas or australian coal makes little sense.

Leaking from natural gas pipelines is a problem, and satelites can help detect it. Last year they detected a huge leak from the yamal pipeline which transports natural gas between siberia and europe. The US has weak regulations on natural gas leaks although some states have stronger ones. Any large leak in the US though costs the operator a lot of money and will get fixed quickly.

Even with leaks, natural gas electricity and heating is less ghg gas intense than coal. Coal also has much greater harmful air, water, and land pollution.

 

I encourage everyone to read that article. The key takeaway was that using NG (Natural Gas) to provide the heat and pressure needed for the process that breaks down the NG to make hydrogen is a double whammy if they don't do something to capture and sequester the CO2 from the process. On top of that there is a lot of methane leakage along the supply line.

This suggests that using NG to generate a huge part of the grid on natural gas which in turn charges BEVs is not as clean as it looks.

I like the assertion "Even with leaks, natural gas electricity and heating is less ghg gas intense than coal. Coal also has much greater harmful air, water, and land pollution." That's like saying that "yeah, she's ugly and leaks a lot of fluids, but you should see my brother's car!"

 

Using this as an excuse to not move to BEVs is misguided thinking IMO.
It is going to take a lot of capital to build out the EV factories, battery factories and EV charging stations. Waiting to do this until the grid is cleaner just delays all efforts. We can work on both at the same time.

However, if you buy another ICE today it will never get any cleaner in its lifetime, while an EV will / can get cleaner (in terms of CO2 emissions) as the grid improves over the life of the EV. You can directly affect this by installing solar to offset your battery charging.

Mike

 

But if you buy neither, you avoid a) discarding a potentially usable vehicle that may or may not be recycled and b) the construction of a new vehicle (with all the natural resources and energy that entails) that is only marginally better than what you drive today.

It's a great idea to subsidize the home solar wherever that works. That's the part that should have incentives.

 

The study is actually saying the opposite. That blue hydrogen with carbon capture only reduces 3% of the grey hydrogen's GHG emissions. For a given amount heat generated, NG and coal have less GHG emissions than any hydrogen derived from NG.

The study used a worse case leakage rate for NG. The actual rate can be far less.

It suggests nothing of the kind. Again, you are misunderstanding what the study reports. It was looking at hydrogen production and GHG emissions. For comparisons to other fuels, the study looked at the amount of each fuel needed for a chosen set of heat energy. The study only cared about the costs to make hydrogen, not how it would be used after.

Heat energy does not equal electricity generated. The efficiency of converting that heat energy to electrical energy varies. NG plants are more efficient than coal ones. So same amount of GHG emissions for same amount of heat energy means less GHG emissions per unit of electrical energy when using NG instead of coal.

Furthermore, upstream GHG emissions for NG electricity have included the leakage for some time. The leaks having GHG impact isn't new knowledge.

It is also like saying a hybrid car pollutes less than a traditional model.

 

When you buy an EV you are not discarding your old ICE car. It goes into the used car market. Most people actually buy used cars, not new ones. Hopefully it replaces a very old low mpg car. It is a known fact that very old cars are the worst smog polluters. CA studies show this. Also true in general based on gradually increasing emissions improvements over the years.

Recent studies, also noted in the just released Tesla impact report, show that the extra CO2 produced in making an EV is recovered in just over 5K miles of driving, then the EV advantage just improves after that.

Buying an EV today, from anyone, helps fund the factories and infrastructure needed. Buying an ICE does not. Buying neither is OK too, but if you are still driving an ICE you are still part of the high CO2 problem.

Mike

 

I would add that Tesla Battery Day showed a clear path to significant reduction in battery carbon emissions. The dry electrode technique bought with Maxwell is especially promising.

Bob Wilson

 

Yes with solar you are 100% sure it will displace fossil fuel usage. Whereas with an EV, the amount of CO2 reduced depends on a number of factors. Also I think the return in terms of $/tonne of CO2 is much lower for solar than for an EV.

 

What study is that and has Tesla provided detail on what their CO2 production emissions are in US & China ? I wold imagine Tesla would have a good idea of what their production emissions were.

 

The key takeaway is blue hydrogen in cars or to replace natural gas in pipelines with blue hydrogen does not do much as much of the ghg of the methane feedstock is in production and distribution of the gas. CO2 sequestration does little to mitigate it in the process. Its right there in the article, even sequestered from manufacturing the blue hydrogen from natural gas, it has similar warming footprint.

That would be a big leap of faith and nowhere in the article. There is no new research on natural gas's impacts in this study. There are many other studies of plug-ins (BEVs and PHEVs) that use worse ghg assumptions of the grid than 100% natural gas at these levels.

That was not at all what I was saying, and clearly not what the article said. It definitely countered your misleading statement that somehow ng electricity is as bad as coal electricity.

The study that most people look at, and it is partial in what these researchers did comes from one spearheaded by the University of Texas in the Permian basin in 2013. Here natural gas is produced directly or as a coproduct of oil production, the natural pipelines are quite old. They used expensive equipment to detect leaks, and when they did the gas production and pipeline people fixed them. They found methane leaks at about twice the rate the epa had been predicting. A new federal law mandating fixing these leaks was put in place in 2016. Unfortunately, even though it was supported by big oil, it was removed due to lobbying by small and midrange producers who argued it was too expensive and would cost consumers too much in 2020.

I am hoping this is put back into place. Most natural gas pipelines were built before then 1990s. University of texas along with some big oil companies, and environmental groups now has project astra that promises to cut leak detection costs by 90%.
New UT Collaboration to Revolutionize the Way Methane Leaks Are Found | Energy Institute | The University of Texas at Austin

I am not sure what this has to do with tco of bevs or phevs ;-)

 

Click the link and then download the pdf and go to page 11

2020 Impact Report | Tesla

Mike

 

Thanks. The report is OK but fairly light on detail but I'm not sure whether this is normal for auto manufacturers. They do provide CO2 splits in their appendix for US and China, however no detail on how its calculated, such as how many km is assumed for the EV vehicle life.

Also they should provide 'like for like' comparisons .. i.e best EV against best ICE .. which would be Toyota hybrids. Instead they pick the Model 3 and compare against average ICE across all manufacturers which would include trucks I assume.

Also they seem to assume the average ICE travels 200,000 miles .. seem high to me and chosen to favour EV's which have lower fuel life-cycle emissions.

There is not much detail on how they calculate the numbers.

Also very little detail on what battery recycling they actually do ... I think its early days for them on that front.

 

Hybrids simply aren't big seller in the US. If they did, the average ICE car value would be better. The Model 3 matched the 2020 annual Prius family sales here for 2 quarters in 2020.

Midsize premium sedans is a like to like comparison. While some Tesla owners came from a Prius, others have come from the likes of Audi and Mercedes; my friend had a BMW before the Tesla. Hybrids in that class tend to be power hybrids, which look poor in fuel economy compared to the Prius. The report also used Consumer Reports for the ICE figures, who gets some of the poorest results from the Prius.

 

There is a huge amount of detail in the report.
Check out the appendixes.

Vehicle useful life sources and methodology are at the top of page 92.

 

Link: How Many Miles Does a Car Last?

Car and Driver says 200K miles

Not too many Tesla's at the EOL yet. But I heard that so far they mostly recycle all the in house prototypes and batteries that failed testing.
The big battery recycler is going to be this:

JB Straubel's Redwood Materials raises $700 million to accelerate EV battery recycling business - Electrek

Mike