Mazda Says Its Upcoming Gas-Powered Cars Will Emit Less CO2 Than Electric Cars

cartechboy writes: "One of the arguments for electric cars is that we are reducing greenhouse gases and emitting less CO2 than vehicles with an internal combustion engine. But Mazda says its next-generation SkyActiv engines will be so efficient, they'll emit less CO2 than an electric car. In fact, the automaker goes so far as to say these new engines will be cleaner to run than electric cars. Is it possible? Yes, but it's all about the details. It'll depend on the test cycles for each region. Vehicles are tested differently in Europe than in the U.S., and that variation could make all the difference when it comes to these types of claims. At the end of the day whether future Mazdas with gasoline-powered engines are cleaner than electric cars or not, every little bit in the effort to reduce our carbon emissions per mile is a step in the right direction, right?"

Comments

Do electric cars actually produce CO2?

[kruach aum]

Or do they mean in the "yeah but guess where that electricity comes from, a coal-burning plant" sense?

Re:Do electric cars actually produce CO2?

[Moheeheeko]

If that were the case I would point them to the refining process for gasoline.

Re:Do electric cars actually produce CO2?

[Todd Palin]

Interesting notion, but the devil is in the details. In the NE United States most of the electricity is from coal or gas fired plants, but in the NW United States most of the electricity is hydropower. You can argue that the carbon footprint of the NW electricity is very low, but if you consider the carbon cost of building the dams, the carbon goes up. You have to make assumptions about the expected life of a dam so you can pro-rate the carbon cost. The same issues surround calculating the carbon cost of nuclear generated electricity, but you also have to include carbon coats for transporting, storing, and guarding the nuclear waste for a long time, which involves another assumption. There are also a host of carbon issues relating to power transmission infrastructure. There is a lot of steel in those towers, but some of it is a century old. Do you count it in current carbon calculations?

The bottom line is, the assertion that the Mazda has a lower carbon footprint is more of a marketing claim than an engineering calculation. I suspect the assumptions involved have been made with the primary purpose of supporting the claim rather than meeting some test of reasonableness.

If you ask a question from a marketing context, you get a marketing answer.

Re:Do electric cars actually produce CO2?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

I don't think it's just refining, mere drilling and pumping requires progressively more energy as we've already consumed all the low-hanging fruit.

Re:Do electric cars actually produce CO2?

[knarfling]

Exactly!! The TFA (I know, I know. Why read the TFA.) calls it the wells-to-wheels carbon profile. And Mazda is comparing only to the "dirtiest" areas.

And those levels would likely be better than the wells-to-wheels carbon profile of an electric car running in a coal-heavy country--Poland, for example.

Not only that, but the engines themselves are not yet designed. They are "projected" be available by 2020.

I realize the air is a bit dirty, but still -- That is a long time to hold your breath.

Re:Do electric cars actually produce CO2?

[DittoBox]

Also consider how the materials for the batteries are sourced (emissions/energy cost to mine), where they're sourced (emissions/energy cost to ship), how they're put together (emissions from factory, energy cost), and where the entire vehicle is put together (emissions/energy cost to ship batteries to car factory). Is continuing to use older vehicles less and more impactful to the environment?

People who are totally against innovation in this sector tend to think all of these are worse than continuing to rely on dead dinosaur-based fuels. I think we need to push forward and research all options, including reducing individual demand for vehicular use through public transit, better civic planning, automated vehicles (which increase efficiency in the system greatly) among other options.

I'm a car guy and I desperately do not want to see organic fuels disappear because of over use or damage to the environment. I think converting to more efficient travel methods and shrinking work-to-home distances are ultimately the way to go. Having access to fossil fuels in the future will then be reserved mostly for folks who just want to have fun, like owning horses is today. I don't want to see track days go away, or being able to take apart and put back together an almost entirely mechanical engine. There's a certain mechanical hackery to it.

Cars as appliances need to move on from fossil fuels, cars as projects/things to hack shouldn't. If we continue to treat fossil-fuels as infinite and undamaging we're going to lose cars as toys and projects and things to hack. That's sad.

Re:Do electric cars actually produce CO2?

[Solandri]

Then you'd also have to include the energy costs for mining and transporting coal used to make electricity. That's why people don't include that part - it's kinda assumed to be similar for both processes and cancels out. (Though to be honest I don't think I've ever seen an energy cost-analysis of coal mining vs petroleum drilling and refining. Coal is substantially cheaper per Joule than gasoline so its mining costs may be a lot lower too.)

Re:Do electric cars actually produce CO2?

[lexman098]

Well, to go even further let's not forget that buying an electric car fuels more research and development for electric vehicles and machinery in general which could one day supplant the use of gas powered machinery to mine materials and construct dams etc. Electric cars (bought now) might turn out to have a negative carbon footprint if you look enough years into the future (which we can't).

Re:Do electric cars actually produce CO2?

[Lumpy]

Not for me, I get my power from Nuke plants. it's the most environmentally friendly power source out there. IF the government was not filled with retards and allowed the spent fuel to be used in breeder reactors.

Nuke is better than anything else, it's the morons in DC that make it less than perfect.

Re:Do electric cars actually produce CO2?

[dbIII]

That's hard to do since it's going to depend on the mine and how far it has to be transported. Some power stations are sited next to open cut mines with high quality coal, others have to get it from underground some distance away. Since coal is very soft it's cheap to mine - but it may be expensive to dig down to where the coal is. It may be deep or it may be under some hard rock which then means requiring a completely different set of equipment in addition to the coal mining equipment. Energy costs tend to be abstracted away to the current coal price since that makes more difficult to mine coal financially viable.

Re:Do electric cars actually produce CO2?

[beltsbear]

We are more ABLE to drill and pump but it certainly does not make less CO2 or take less energy. Fracking takes far more resources then just drilling and most of the big easy wells are gone. We now drill in deep water which takes phenomenally more power and work then ground based operations.

Re:Do electric cars actually produce CO2?

[Ol Olsoc]

If that were the case I would point them to the refining process for gasoline.

No citizen, all things Gasoline are perfect.

And ummm, Mazda assumes that the only reason to use an electric car is CO2 reduction?

I want to go electric so that we can quit sending our money to people that hate us, and to use the remaining oil as lubrication, not burn it up.

Re:Do electric cars actually produce CO2?

[Hal_Porter]

If you really needed the shale oil and you didn't have fossil fuels to do the extraction you could run the extraction process using a nuclear plant.

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/...

The last of these ideas would locate a nuclear plant near a deposit of oil shale -- a type of deposit, technically known as kerogen, that has not been used to date as a source of petroleum. Heated steam from a nuclear plant, in enclosed pipes, heats the shale; the resulting oil can be pumped out by conventional means.

At first glance, that might sound like a "dirty" solution, enabling the use of more carbon-emitting fuel. But Forsberg suggests that it's quite the opposite: "When you heat it up, it decomposes into a very nice light crude oil, and natural gas, and char," he explains. The char -- the tarlike residue that needs to be refined out from heavy crude oils -- stays underground, he says.

Today, the heating of the rock is usually accomplished by burning fossil fuels, making the process less efficient. That's where the excess heat from a nuclear plant comes in: By coupling the plant's steam output with a shale-oil well, the oil can be recovered without generating extra emissions. The process also does not need regular heat input: The nuclear plant can operate at a steady rate, providing electricity to the grid when needed, and heating oil shale at times of low electricity demand. This enables the nuclear plant to replace the burning of fossil fuels in producing electricity, further reducing the release of greenhouse gas.

The world's largest oil-shale deposits are concentrated in the western United States. "We lucked out," Forsberg says. "This has the lowest carbon footprint of any source of liquid fossil fuel."

The resource that could be unlocked is enormous, he says: "Some of these deposits would yield a million barrels per acre. There's no place else on Earth like it."

Actually you could view the current extraction process as being a sort of pump priming - right now fossil fuels are used to run things. Counter intuitively it becomes more economic when fossil fuel prices are high. Now if fossil fuel prices fell you could imagine using a nuclear plant to supply the heat. Or, if fossil fuels became unavailable - e.g. due to a major war in the Middle East - you could use nuclear too. Once people have started to make money out of extracting shale oil the odds are they will use that money to stay in business.

It seems like if you could use the waste heat from a reactor to extract oil you can get even better energy efficiency than merely using the heat to generate steam to generate electricity. Also thorium means that we're not in any danger of running out of fuel for nuclear reactors.

Re:Do electric cars actually produce CO2?

[Hal_Porter]

You have to admire Jane Fonda. On pretty much any issue if you look at her opinion it tells you what to do. Admittedly you should do the exact opposite of what she says, but someone that is always 100% wrong is just as useful as someone that is always 100% right.

Re:Do electric cars actually produce CO2?

[Solandri]

Yes, I've heard the 6 kWh figure too. Assuming it's true, I suspect it's the cost to refine a volume of crude oil which yields a gallon of gasoline. So the 6 kWh would actually need to be amortized over the other petroleum products too, not just the gasoline. The EIA says a barrel (42 gallons) of crude oil yields about 19 gallons of gasoline. So if I'm right, only 2.7 kWh is attributable to the gasoline. (This isn't strictly correct because I believe 42 gallons of crude oil yields more than 42 gallons of product - such are the pitfalls of working in volume instead of mass.)

The 300 Wh is also the electrical energy stored in the battery (the Tesla S has an 85 kWh battery rated at 300 miles, so that works out to 283 Wh/mile). If you're going to factor in production costs of gasoline, you also need to factor in production costs of electricity. Charging the battery is about 75% efficient. Transmission to the home is about 98% efficient. And coal plants are about 45% efficient. So to produce the 300 Wh/mile the EV uses, the power company actually has to burn 300/(.75*.98*.45) = 907 Wh/mile. Factor in coal mining and transport costs and you're probably up around 1 kW/mile.

So the energy cost to refine gasoline is probably more likely enough to drive the EV only 2-3 miles.

Re:Do electric cars actually produce CO2?

[Jesrad]

Breeding means generating more nuclear fuel from stuff that is not fissile material in the first place. For example, in a classic nuclear fuel rod only a few percents of the uranium is of the 235 isotope variety, which is fissile (= radioactive, potentially dangerous and useable as nuclear fuel), the rest is the 238 isotope and is not fissile... but is intead "fertile", because once it gobbles up a passing neutron (= beta radiation), it quickly transmutes into the 239 isotope of plutonium - and this kind of plutonium, in turn, is fissile.

And, fortunately, you can have it so that while the 235 uranium "burns" it produces the right neutrons for the 238 to turn into 239, or "breed" into plutonium. Or breed the fertile 232 thorium into fissile 233 uranium, too. That's the principle of a breeder reactor. And you may use your fresh new fuel to breed yet some more fuel, too, so that potentially, all the uranium and all the thorium in the world may be converted into nuclear fuel - that's called "supergeneration", because then you are not even limited by the tiny amount of starting fissile material anymore.

For every amount of starting fuel you can have various ratios of breeding happening. In fast breeder reactors you can have three or four times more breeding than consuming, so that every unit of fuel spent generates, on the side, three or four units of additional fuel from fertile material. In molten salt thorium reactors this ratio is projected to be 1-on-1 to limit the risks of nuclear proliferation (= using the breeding process to make a lot more fissile material, in order to make weapons).

Re:Do electric cars actually produce CO2?

[thegarbz]

To give an example from the refinery I work at we process we process a barrel of oil using about 8kWh of electrical power (yes I said 9 above in another post but, rounding error). The barrel yield for how we're set up is about 15 gallons of gasoline per barrel and 19 gallons of diesel (yes that's more than 1 barrel in total, but that's how upgrading refineries work, we get more out in volume than we put in).

Total energy cost is higher as we also use a considerable quantity of natural gas to fire heaters, but it's still *much* less than the quoted figure the way I look at it. I'm interested to know where the 6kWh figure came from.

Re:Do electric cars actually produce CO2?

[jklovanc]

The figure came from articles like this. The issue is that the 6KWhr/gallon is energy loss and not energy use. Some of that loss is in heat and other waste. If you look at just electricity consumption it is closer to 89Whrs/gallon.

Re:Do electric cars actually produce CO2?

[rtb61]

Well no, technically by far the best generator of electricity is sewerage digester methane plants. The sewerage must be broken and this produces a lot of methane (basically natural gas) in the process, this can break down naturally but in the interim it is a very bad green house gas. So by capturing that methane and burning it, it reduces the green house impact of it. Now if your digester is an anaerobic base you can pump the carbon dioxide back into the system, the heat will benefit growth and a proportion of the carbon dioxide will be captured. So you have eliminated a problem and as a bonus generated energy. All that is need now is very large scale sewerage digester, optimum bioengineering organisms to ensure maximum production of methane and all methane produced is captured and destroyed to produce energy. The waste produced should be high pressure steam sterilised (waste heat from plant) and sold as fertiliser. Waste water should be run through aerobic beds and any residual production of methane should be captured and used with residual water used in controlled irrigation, say an orchard with below ground piping. See, much, much better than nuclear. It is always better to think outside of the box and try to solve more than one problem at a time, especially you should avoid solutions than create other problems.

Re:Do electric cars actually produce CO2?

[Half-pint HAL]

Hydro destroys river ecosystems. For an extreme example of the effects of damming on waterways, look at France. It's a mass of hydroelectric plants and drinking water reservoirs, and its major rivers have almost all been canalised, with a network of locks and sluices to reduce winter flow to ensure that the water level is high enough for navigation during the summer months. Fish stocks in the French rivers are dangerously low, with the Atlantic Salmon now all but unknown to French anglers.

All human activity has an impact, and there is no such thing as "clean" electricity.

Re:Do electric cars actually produce CO2?

[BasilBrush]

Well she was right about Vietnam. That was a mistake.

Re:Do electric cars actually produce CO2?

[DriveDog]

Yep. And we're finding out that the methane leaked during fracking is a pretty serious problem, since methane is a much worse greenhouse gas than CO2.

Re:Do electric cars actually produce CO2?

[runningduck]

To your point it take between 4 ~ 7.5Kwh of electricity for refine 1 gallon of gas. Electric cars can travle about 4 miles per Kwh. That mean that an electric car can travel between 16 ~ 30 miles on the same electricity that it takes to refine 1 gallon of gas. In effect gas cars generate the same amount of CO2 from electricity production per mile as an electic car, but add to the mix all the CO2 generated from drilling, extracting, shipping, refining [the chemical side of the process] and distributing fuel.

The most honest well-to-wheel analysis I have seen suggest that an electric car charged with the dirtiest type of coal plant is roughly on par with a gas car which get 50 miles per gallon. The US has a roughly 50% mix of coal generated electricity across the nation. If Mazda is claimng that a 30% improvement in their car is cleaner than current electric cars they must be trying to prove their point with a theoretical edge case.

Re: Do electric cars actually produce CO2?

[runningduck]

Agreed. And as the mix of electricity generation continues to get cleaner, every existing electric car currently on the road gets cleaner as well. In the case of Mazda, if we are to believe that their new engines will have a serious impact on emissions we will have to wait 1) until they release a car with the new technology, 2) an average of 5 years for people to trade in their old cars and purchase new cars, and 3) for enough people to actually purchase the new cars with Mazda's new technology. Even if Mazda delivers on their promise and doubles their market share they will at best have a marginal impact on overall automobile related pollution especially when compared to electric cards.

I'll get off my soap box now.

Ummm....

[drooling-dog]

It's not like CO2 is some unwanted and avoidable by-product of burning hydrocarbons in oxygen. It's the main product of combustion, along with water. So the only real way to reduce CO2 emissions per mile is get more miles per gallon of fuel. Is that what they're promising?

Re:Ummm....

[twotacocombo]

So the only real way to reduce CO2 emissions per mile is get more miles per gallon of fuel.

No. My ~40mpg motorcycle pollutes far more than my ~27mpg car. It's all about how well the engine burns the fuel and handles the emissions before they leave the pipe, not necessarily just the volume of it.

Re:Ummm....

[robot256]

This MYTH has been debunked:

"A study by M.A. Weiss et al., published in a 2000 report from the MIT Energy Laboratory, On the Road in 2020: A Lifecycle Analysis of New Automotive Technologies, calculated that fully 75 percent of a vehicle’s lifetime carbon emissions come from the fuel it burns, and another 19 percent was due to the extraction and refining of that fuel. The raw materials making up the vehicle added another 4 percent, and just 2 percent of lifetime carbon was due to manufacturing and assembly. In other words, you'll save a lot more energy if you junk your old car and buy a much more efficient new one."

And as everyone in this thread knows, energy == emissions for all practical purposes...

Re:Ummm....

[Rising Ape]

CO2 emissions are directly proportional to fuel consumption (for a particular fuel). It's the other emissions - CO, hydrocarbons, nitrogen oxides etc. that can vary dramatically.

Re:Ummm....

[Immerman]

CO2 emissions != pollution. CO2 is the final byproduct of hydrocarbon combustion - it is exactly proportional to the amount of fuel consumed, minus the amount of fuel burned incompletely to produce noxious pollutants like carbon monoxide, nitrious oxide, and other various byproducts of varying degrees of nastiness.

So yes, your 40 mpg motorcycle (horrible mileage by the way, a crotch-rocket by any chance? Geo Metros do better than that) may well produce more pollution than even a 15 mpg car. BUT it also emits less CO2. And so it has less effect on global warming, even while it has a potentially greater effect on poisoning the neighborhood with chemicals created by incomplete combustion.

Re:Ummm....

[nolife]

Mythbusters had an episode on this, with all kinds of charts and graphs comparing CO2 and pollution for different cars and bikes in different situations.

Here are some of the results
http://rideapart.com/2011/10/b...

Re:Ummm....

[jklovanc]

The one thing that might have been missed is that the numbers are probably based on IC engine vehicles. The numbers may be very different for EVs as the construction of a battery/electric drive train is very different than an IC drive train. For example, t takes a lot more energy to build a ton of batteries than it takes to build a gas tank.

My electric is hydro/nuclear

[fustakrakich]

So where is the CO2 coming from? And the coal plants are still running whether I use an electric car or not, so the net total is still higher with gasoline.

Re:My electric is hydro/nuclear

[tri44id]

In Texas, where we have to take the wind turbines offline at night, but the wind is still blowing, and we have a "deregulated" electricity market, TXU energy will give you electricity for free. http://blog.txu.com/free-energy-charges-at-night Mazda is going to have to buy a lifetime worth of carbon credits, and give me free gas as well, to beat that.

Re:My electric is hydro/nuclear

[fustakrakich]

I don't use livestock to power my car. It is a horseless carriage...

Re:My electric is hydro/nuclear

[jklovanc]

It might not be such a great deal;

The attention grabbing headline is “TXU offers free nighttime electricity”. But the fine print will reveal that they are doing this by increasing daytime rates to 50% higher than rates offered by many of their competitors.

Much of the "free" night time energy is being paid for by higher daytime charges.

Re:Mazda is not open

[twotacocombo]

Mazda abuses copyright to stop 3rd parties from publishing manuals. Can't get a Haynes or Chilton manual for any Mazda newer than about 1995.

http://www.haynes.com/products... 2 seconds on Google.. come on, man.

Hydroelectricity!

[Valtor]

Here in Québec, with lots of hydroelectricity, I doubt very much that this gasoline engine will emit less CO2 per mile than an all electric vehicle.

Pick and Choose

[Oysterville]

When companies pick and choose their statistics so blatantly and make a claim like this, it really makes me trust the company that much less.

Simple way to test...

[SJ]

Get two hermetically sealed rooms. One with this new Mazda, and one with an all-electric car. Both cars are on roller ramps. Just to be fair, the Mazda can have it's air-intake piped in from outside.

Then grab the CEO of Mazda and give him this choice of 'driving' 20 miles in either the Mazda or the electric car.

Simple... Effective.

Re:That's a whopper. think for 60 seconds.

[thegarbz]

You're ignoring how most refineries are set up. You're absolutely right, we don't pay retail rates for electricity. In fact we generate our own using on site combined cycle power plants usually with heat recovery steam raising plant attached to the exhaust. We generate our own electricity for a fraction of the cost of retail electricity, we even generate excess and then export it to the surrounding suburbs offsetting their normal energy source which is brown coal.

The end result has the refinery I work at actually getting carbon credits for our energy consumption as we're not only not generating a lot of CO2 due to energy use, but we're also offsetting the carbon footprint of the surrounding town.

Oh by the way you're only telling half the story. It costs us closer to 2kW to create a gallon of gasoline, but it would be more fair to ask what it costs to process a barrel of oil (about 9kW), since that same energy that goes into creating your 2kW of gasoline also creates Jet fuel, diesel, LPG, bunker, as well as various polymers used in chemical plants.

You are dramatically overstating the carbon footprint of refining in the case of the refinery where I work, and we're often criticized for our lack of efficiency so I'm going to assume that there are even better examples out there.

Re:Mazda is not open

[thoth]

Dude, your original claim is complete bullshit (can't get ANY manual), so come on, man up, and admit you were either willfully ignorant or stupid.

Re:Mazda is not open

[BitZtream]

...

I didn't see a chiltons but I stopped looking when a simple google search showed a haynes manual for my wifes 2013 cx-5 as the first result so I'm going to call BS on your statement.