Here’s my pick of the top five interesting issues in fuels this week with a little insight and analysis as well. Topics covered include air pollution, vehicle and oil demand as projected by Statoil, a comprehensive cradle-to-grave analysis on fuels-vehicles released by Argonne National Laboratory, an outlook on electric vehicle (EV) growth by IEA and car banning as climate/air pollution mitigation strategy.
Statoil’s 2016 Energy Perspectives highlights a number of emerging trends in the transport space:
The company used three scenarios the company used to analyze trends in the global energy space:
As the charts below show, there is substantial EV penetration for light-duty vehicles under all three scenarios by 2040, particularly under the renewal (nearly 60% of sales) and reform (nearly 90%) scenarios. Statoil expects electrification will take longer for heavy-duty vehicles.
Oil demand drops in the renewal scenario by 2030 and progresses further in 2040. Under the reform scenario, there is some decrease in oil demand by 2040. Demand for non-road transport such as marine, aviation and rail is expected to rise as global population grows and economic activity increases. In all three sub-sectors combined energy demand is expected to grow by nearly 60% from 2015 to 2040, according to Statoil.
I noted earlier this week that despite the actions taken by many governments to reduce stationary and mobile source air pollution – ozone and particulate matter (both PM10 and PM2.5) is expected to increase substantially in the coming years concurrent with increased economic activity and energy demand. This week, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) released a report assessing the potential economic impacts of spiraling air pollution through 2060, finding 1% loss of GDP or $2.6 trillion annually in losses. Read more about it here.
This study provides a comprehensive lifecycle analysis (LCA) of the cost and GHG emissions of a variety of vehicle-fuel pathways, the levelized cost of driving (LCD) and cost of avoided GHG emissions and estimates the technology readiness levels (TRLs) of key fuel and vehicle technologies along the pathways. Read more about it here.
Well-publicized but still worth mentioning is IEA’s Global EV Outlook 2016. A few key nuggets:
There are some great statistics in the back of the report covering number of electric cars by type and year, market share and charging stations.
Proving that Google Translator might not be accurate and perhaps checking facts pre-publication may be advisable, social media was set aflame this week on the news that Norway had planned to ban all petrol vehicles beginning in 2025. Not true, as it turned out. It seems the political parties in Norway have agreed to set targets for low- and zero-emissions vehicles to meet climate goals that will be presented next year in the country’s national transport plan.
Why bother mentioning this at all? Because, I think banning cars is going to increasingly be a primary strategy to combat air pollution (see first point) and climate change, perhaps starting in less populated or smaller countries or cities with the potential to spread from there. Such strategies are already being deployed in Paris, New Delhi, Oslo, Zurich, Curitiba and Bangalore.