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Electric Cars Emit 50 Percent Less Greenhouse Gas Than Diesel, Study Finds (theguardian.com)
entirely_fluffy shares a report from The Guardian: Electric cars emit significantly less greenhouse gases over their lifetimes than diesel engines even when they are powered by the most carbon intensive energy, a new report has found. In Poland, which uses high volumes of coal, electric vehicles produced a quarter less emissions than diesels when put through a full lifecycle modeling study by Belgium's VUB University. CO2 reductions on Europe's cleanest grid in Sweden were a remarkable 85%, falling to around one half for countries such as the UK. The new study uses an EU estimate of Poland's emissions -- at 650gCO2/kWh -- which is significantly lower than calculations by the European commission's Joint Research Centre science wing last year. The VUB study says that while the supply of critical metals -- lithium, cobalt, nickel and graphite -- and rare earths would have to be closely monitored and diversified, it should not constrain the clean transport transition. As battery technology improves and more renewables enter the electricity grid, emissions from battery production itself could be cut by 65%, the study found.
There is a horizontal red line in the graph for gasoline ICE reference.
178 gCO2eq/km is equivalent to 30.65 mpg (US gallons) according to this conversion site
Actually, it's not a comparison of purely coal generated electricity. They use the combined CO2 emissions for all the power generation methods in each EU nation. There's a lot of nuclear, wind and solar used in Western Europe.
If you look at the figures for some the the eastern European nations, the EV is about the same as the reference ICE figures.
Indeed. Particularly has Diesel is a hydrocarbon, and so half of its bonds are to hydrogen, not carbon-carbon. Coal power stations are pretty efficient, but so are modern ICEs. Plus there are transmission and battery losses for EV.
As a chemist, I can tell you the first half of your comment makes no sense at all. Methane is an hydrocarbon, none of its bonds are carbon-carbon (since it only has one carbon atom) and it still produces CO2. In fact, you'd have to go to a pretty unsaturated hydrocarbon to have half and half (e.g. benzene which no one wants in a fuel because it's carcinogenic). So what's your point with that?
I probably shouldn't have kept reading, but I did. The rest makes pretty little sense either. ICEs are anything but efficient. The Carnot cycle limits their efficiency and even a quick look at Wikipedia will show that engines suck. They mention most engines have an average of "18%-20% efficiency" with Formula 1 engines having up to 47% efficiency. Of course, GM isn't going to sell you a cheap car with a F1 engine... In contrast, electric engines have a much higher efficiency, around 90%. Sure, there are some battery losses, but you're going against an engine that wastes 80% of the energy of the fuel, how hard do you have to make it? As for transmission losses does your ICE car roll without one of those?
So the question is... do you actually believe the stuff you say?
He pulled his figures from his backend. The efficiency of an internal combustion engine isn't the whole story. There are also very significant losses in the transmission needed in order to use said ICE. This has been analyzed over and over again and the EV almost always comes out on top, especially as coal makes up a smaller and smaller percentage of power generation. Hybrid vehicles improve the efficiency but as far as I know nobody makes a hybrid diesel-electric passenger vehicle.
The differences between diesel and electric vehicles are far more than 10%, especially when this moves to large vehicles such as in this CARB study comparing battery electric trucks compared to conventional diesel vehicles.
He gets especially erratic when he talks about NO and being greenhouse negative. NO is NOT something you want in the atmosphere, and it in no way would be greenhouse negative since the goal of modern diesel vehicles is to limit NOx and soot due to the negative effects of both in terms of human health.
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