Electric, e-Fuels or Hydrogen mobility – Different publications, different results?

Intro

Many recent publications and studies were focusing on the comparison of different fossil and alternative fuels. Some of them created a loud medial noise favoring the one or the other alternative fuel for the future. In our world of social media there is a lot of cherry picking for big headlines e.g., “Production of xyz is not sustainable” or “xyz vehicles are much worse than abc vehicles”. Behind these big headlines, there are many assumptions, calculations and of course interests, that lead to the results. Due to my work in the field of future mobility, I wanted to catch up on the ones, which created from my point of view the most media attention here in Germany. This article reflects just my own personal understanding and opinion on this topic.

In my article, I have selected four studies, which fulfill the following requirements from my point of view:

• One of the three alternative fuels is analyzed: Electricity for Battery Electric Vehicles, Hydrogen for Fuel Cell vehicles or e-Fuels for internal combustion vehicles
• The publication is comparing alternative fuels and respective vehicles to each other and/or to fossil fueled internal combustion engines using gasoline or diesel
• The life cycle of the fuel was analyzed from well-to-wheel, from fuel extraction to driving the vehicle
• The publication received attention in news and social media

This list of publications is not complete and I am happy to hear about further ones from you in the feedback part at the bottom!

Publications

 #1 How clean are electric cars?

Result: Pro Battery Electric Vehicles

Organization: European Federation for Transport and Environment

Link: https://www.transportenvironment.org/what-we-do/electric-cars/how-clean-are-electric-cars

Summary:  Electric vehicles emit less CO2 over the life cycle compared to gasoline and diesel fired internal combustion vehicle no matter in which country the battery will be produced and where the vehicle will be driven. A cleaner energy mix of the country where production and operation of the vehicle takes place, results in a higher CO2 advantage for the battery electric vehicle. On average electric cars emit in Europe around 3 times less CO2 than combustion engine cars using gasoline or diesel. In the calculation, all battery production related CO2 emissions are included.

Source: https://www.transportenvironment.org/sites/te/files/worst.png

Source: https://www.transportenvironment.org/sites/te/files/best.png

#2 Volkswagen Sustainability report 2019

 Result: Pro Battery Electric Vehicles

Organization: Volkswagen AG

Link: https://www.volkswagenag.com/presence/nachhaltigkeit/documents/sustainability-report/2019/Nonfinancial_Report_2019_e.pdf (page 63)

Summary: Volkswagen has done an evaluation assuming a vehicle life cycle of 200,000 km and calculated the respective primary energy requirement for production and usage phase in kilowatt-hour per kilometer. The result can be found in the picture below. According to that a battery electric vehicle needs 40% less primary energy compared to hydrogen vehicle, 50 % less compared to a gasoline vehicle and 70% less compared to an e-fuels powered vehicle.

Source: https://www.volkswagenag.com/presence/nachhaltigkeit/documents/sustainability-report/2019/Nonfinancial_Report_2019_e.pdf

#3 Electric mobility and climate protection: the big miscalculation (Elektromobilit?t und Klimaschutz: Die gro?e Fehlkalkulation)

Result: Contra Battery Electric Vehicles

Organization: Kiel Institute for Economy

Link: https://www.ifw-kiel.de/fileadmin/Dateiverwaltung/IfW-Publications/-ifw/Kiel_Policy_Brief/KPB_143.pdf

Summary: This institute states that previous publications missed out the fact, that charging electric vehicles require additional electricity. Their assumption is that coal power plants with a very low efficiency will cover all additional energy demand for electric vehicles in Germany. This calculation results in CO2 emissions for electric vehicles being 73% higher than emissions of comparable diesel vehicles over the lifetime.

#4 The concept of performance in the climate policy debate on road traffic (Der Effizienzbegriff in der klimapolitischen Debatte zum Stra?enverkehr)

Result: Electric and e-Fuels vehicles can have the same efficiency over life cycle

Organization: Frontier Economics consultancy provider

Contracting authority: German Mineral Oil Industry Association and the Federal Association of Medium-Sized Mineral Oil Companies

Link: https://www.mwv.de/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/201026-Frontier-UNITI_MWV_Effizienz-Antriebssysteme_.pdf

Summary: The aim of this study was to compare Power-to-Liquid technologies (e-fuels production from electricity) and the direct usage of electricity in battery electric vehicles. First main assumption: Battery electric vehicles can only be charged locally, in this case in Germany, while Power-to-Liquid plants can be installed anywhere in the world. The second main assumption: Renewable installations as solar panels can be operated with a much higher utilization rate in countries with high irradiation intensity such as Morocco. When Power-to-Liquid plants would be built next to renewable installations in these favorable regions the overall energy loss (yellow in the next picture) would be much smaller. The overall efficiency is according to this publication for vehicles using Power-to-Liquid (e-Fuels) at 10%-13% and for Battery Electric vehicles at 13%-16%.

Source: https://www.mwv.de/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/201026-Frontier-UNITI_MWV_Effizienz-Antriebssysteme_.pdf (Picture 5)

Translation: Energy losses in all value chain parts // Yellow: Less electricity generation in Germany compared to better regions for this kind of generation somewhere else in the world; Light and dark blue: Loss in e-Fuels generation; Pink and dark red: Loss for transport; Lila: Loss for storage; Green: Loss for fueling; Grey: Loss for Mobility; Turquoise: Total e-Fuels efficiency; Light red: Total electric mobility efficiency

My Take Away

Publication #1 focuses on the life cycle of vehicles and respective CO2 emissions. It offers not just a great overview of the results; it also offers a powerful tool we can use to see the difference on CO2 impact between different countries for production and usage phase. In every possible scenario electric vehicles are better regarding CO2 than gasoline or diesel. This is a great basis but unfortunately do not answer the question which alternative fuel is the best.

Publication #2 shows that car manufacturers are not just understanding the advantage of alternative fuels but also promoting them in own publications. Volkswagen just recently reinforced the focus on battery electric vehicles for the future in the statement: “E-fuels are cost-intensive, not very climate-efficient and only have a low level of efficiency.” (Compared to battery electric vehicles) https://www.sueddeutsche.de/wirtschaft/autokonzerne-deutschland-kraftstoff-1.5088399?reduced=true

Publication #3 looks from another perspective by analyzing the impact of additional electricity demand by electric vehicles. The assumptions made are questionable. According to the publication any additional electricity will be produced in coal power plants, the power plants with the worst CO2 ratio. This lead to some back fire by other institutes and organizations. The German Fraunhofer Institute summarized 12 different points of criticism under the following link. Using the same calculation logic but more realistic values the Fraunhofer come to the conclusion that instead of an 72% increase, it should be a decrease in CO2 between 20% to 46%. https://www.isi.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/isi/dokumente/cce/2020/Stellungnahme_IfW-Langfassung.pdf

Publication #4 shows a very interesting point of view. It analyzes the impact of e-Fuels production in regions with ideal condition for renewable energy: North Africa for solar panels and Patagonia for windmills. If all production of e-Fuels would be sourced out to these regions, then e-Fuels and Battery Electric Vehicles would be even. It does not answer how the financing of such renewable generation capacities would work. Furthermore it’s questionable if exchanging the dependency on Oil to dependency on e-fuels from north Africa and Patagonia is a desirable system. This reminds me of the DESERTEC plan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desertec). The idea was to build solar farms in the Sahara desert and supply Europe through a high-voltage direct current transmission network. Despite this interesting idea, the implementation was not even started. The technical, political and financing challenges were too high and the different companies and countries could not agree on an aligned way forward.

Summary and Outlook

As there is no centrally agreed data set, input values or model it’s hard to say which calculations is better than the other. The results show that if the life cycle of the vehicle is in the center of investigation, battery electric vehicles win the first prize regarding sustainability.

Production of hydrogen and e-Fuels is very energy intensive and can only compete with battery electric vehicles under special circumstances. Nevertheless, there will be applications where alternatives to batteries will be necessary e.g., airplanes or heavy-duty transport. Therefore, this industry will also be growing in the future and production capacities will increase.

In a world with a high amount of alternative fuels, mobility and energy generation are growing together. This inter-dependency is increasing the complexity in a well-to-wheel calculation. There will be an additional electricity demand and we need a better understanding of the amount and the respective generation. These thoughts bring up numerous new question:

• How much less electricity is required when refineries, gas stations and further coherent consumers are not there anymore?
• How will the efficiency of hydrogen and e-fuels generation develop in future?
• How will the renewable generation situation look like 2050 in Europe? (Germany has in 2020 already a 50% renewable share in electricity generation and is planning to have 80% by 2050)
• How will recycling improve the CO2 backpack of electric vehicles? (A closed recycling cycle for batteries in western countries reduces the environmental impact and CO2 backpack of electric vehicles as mining of required resources just need to happen once and then they stay in a local loop)

Give me Feedback!

What kind of unanswered questions do you have on your mind?

What do you think about the four publications above?

Which "noisy" publication do you miss here?

What is “your” fuel of the future and why?

My Bio

Working for almost ten years in the energy and electric mobility industry with a focus on business development, product management and innovative solutions.