Biofuels and climate: a simple but troubling view

If biofuels benefit the climate, it's not when they're burned; those CO₂ emissions are the same as from the fossil fuels they replace. Any potential benefit is due to the CO₂ uptake when plants are grown. Society should maximize that uptake and, once carbon is absorbed, do everything possible to keep it from getting back into the air. This almost certainly means not burning biofuels. 

Automotive carbon-cutting bang-for-buck

Fuel efficiency is clearly the low-hanging fruit when it comes to reducing CO2 emissions from cars and trucks. But what if we need to reach higher on the technology tree to get on track to cutting carbon as much as eventually will be needed? 

Alternatively fueled vehicles (AFVs), meaning cars designed to run on something other than gasoline or diesel fuel made from petroleum, are commonly touted as "clean fuel vehicles," and green-leaning policymakers promote them as a key part of sustainable energy strategy. 

Although various AFVs have gone in and out (and in again) of favor over the years, some form of all-electric drive is often seen as a leading contender for the car of the future. In 1990, California issued a zero-emission-vehicle (ZEV) mandate to push battery electric vehicles (BEVs) and eventually hydrogen fuel cell vehicles (FCVs) into the market. Originally justified as the solution to smog-forming tailpipe pollution, ZEVs are now thought to be crucial for cutting carbon. Given the range limitations of BEVs, plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) that can both charge up with electricity and fill up on gasoline have been added to the portfolio as well. 

The Fuel Efficiency Horizon study, however, shows that the supply of low-hanging fruit is more ample than many people think. The adjoining chart compares the relative cost to the relative GHG reduction benefit for several competing technology options. 

The vertical axis gives the costs as a percentage increase over the price of a baseline vehicle, taken as a 2005 midsize car. The horizontal axis gives the percentage cut in GHG emissions relative to the baseline, counting emissions both downstream at the tailpipe and upstream at locations where fuels or electricity are produced. All of the options reflect projections of lower costs and improved performance attainable by 2035, drawing results from the MIT On the Road in 2035 report. The BEV, FCV and PHEV points assume modest reductions in upstream GHG emissions for electricity and hydrogen. No upstream GHG reduction or CO2 offset is assumed for the gasoline or diesel vehicles. 

The upshot? Efficiency improvement remains the least costly way to cut auto sector CO2 emissions for the foreseeable future. This fuel efficiency horizon involves only vehicles that still rely solely on gasoline or diesel, up to and including "grid-free" (non-plug-in) hybrid electric vehicles (shown as the "gasoline hybrid" point on the chart). These ongoing efficiency gains offer GHG reductions greater than those from the battery electric, hydrogen fuel cell and plug-in hybrid technologies at a lower cost (a cost that is far lower in comparison to BEVs). 

In short, an evolutionary technology pathway, highlighted as the shaded band in the lower portion of the chart, will enable quite a lot of progress over the next 25 years, and do so without the high costs, consumer acceptance concerns and fuel infrastructure barriers faced by the alternatives.  

Auto efficiency: how much is on the horizon?

Everyone appreciates how higher fuel efficiency is important for controlling oil use and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Although efficiency can be given a big boost by making a vehicle all-electric, plug-in cars have limitations as well as high costs. And so a key question is this: how much can we improve the fuel economy of "grid-free" automobiles that still use only gasoline?  

Most technologies can progress quite a lot given sufficient time, but policymakers concerned about climate want to cut GHG emissions substantially by mid-century. Because it takes roughly 15 years to replace the on-road stock of cars and light trucks, the relevant question becomes that of how much more efficient new vehicles could be by 2035. 

An answer is provided in a recent report, A Fuel Efficiency Horizon for U.S. Automobiles. This study examines how far auto efficiency can be taken if it is pursued with determination, using technology and design options that offer a "revolution by evolution." 

Quite a lot of progress -- as much as a tripling of new fleet average fuel economy -- can be made through ongoing refinements to vehicles that still rely on internal combustion engines as their sole and prime mover. Costs are involved, but much less than the costs of electric and other alternatively fueled vehicles (AFVs), which face infrastructure barriers and other market challenges.  

Addressing biofuel GHG emissions in the context of a fossil-based carbon cap

What follows is the abstract of an in-depth discussion paper that reflects an early stage of my re-evaluation of lifecycle analysis methods for fuels policy. 

Renewable fuels have been promoted as a climate solution as well as for their energy security and domestic economic benefits. Analysts often assume that, other than process emissions, biofuels emit no net CO2 because their biogenic carbon was recently absorbed from the atmosphere. This "renewability shortcut" has shaped both public perception and public policy to date. Cap-and-trade policies follow GHG inventory conventions that use the shortcut and so fail to properly account for biofuel emissions. They also miss portions of the upstream GHG emissions from fossil-based transportation fuels, although most such emissions are trade related.

Lifecycle analysis (LCA), which attempts to account for all of the GHG impacts associated with fuel production, has been proposed as a means of regulating fuels for climate policy. LCA is used to qualify certain fuels for the U.S. federal renewable fuel standard (RFS) and also forms the basis of a low-carbon fuel standard (LCFS). However, as LCA system boundaries have expanded to address market effects such as induced land-use change, its application in policy has become controversial.

This paper examines these issues, quantifies GHG emissions missed by cap-and-trade policies as commonly proposed, and identifies ways to address biofuel emissions in the context of a carbon cap that covers major emitting sectors. Resource economics suggests that policy should be defined by annual basis accounting of carbon stocks and flows and other GHG fluxes rather than by LCA. This perspective suggests the use of a three-part approach: (1) correct specification of the transportation sector point of regulation with careful carbon accounting at the point of finished fuel distribution; (2) voluntary fuel and feedstock GHG accounting standards to track CO2 uptake and uncapped GHG emissions throughout the fuel supply chain; and (3) a land protection fund for purchasing international forest carbon offsets to mitigate leakage.

While an RFS can remain in place to drive volumes of specified fuels into the market, this approach avoids the need for either LCA requirements in the RFS or the added regulatory layer of an LCFS. Integrated into a cap-and-trade framework, this market-based approach would provide biofuel and feedstock production with a carbon price incentive tied to the cap, creating a more complete carbon management framework for the transportation fuels sector.

Citation and link: 

DeCicco, J.M. 2009. Addressing Biofuel GHG Emissions in the Context of a Fossil-Based Carbon Cap. Discussion Paper prepared for the Environmental Defense Fund. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, School of  Natural Resources and Environment, October. http://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/76029

Lutz loved cars but never got it on green

The environmental world came to know General Motors vice chairman Bob Lutz as the cigar­chomping, jet-flying skeptic of global warming as well as the visionary product boss who introduced the Chevy Volt and became an unlikely affirmer of GM’s effort to go green.

General Motors' Bob Lutz and his Aero L-39 Albatros
(via Jalopnik)

That “Maximum Bob,” who represents what Autoextremist.com calls the end of an era, would be a bundle of contradictions should come as no surprise.

The best of design is often about creatively blending opposing concepts into a harmonious whole. Lutz is right-on about the importance of outstanding, customer-focused car design, but off base in thinking that green directions kill the emotional factor.

Lutz bemoaned what he sees as a depressing new period of government oversight driven by pressures for higher fuel economy and lower CO₂ emissions. In an Associated Press interview, Lutz said that the new era “doesn’t really play to my greatest skills, which were perhaps more in the intuitive, emotional area with sort of a sense for what the market would want.”

No, it’s not Lutz’s talent that is out of step; it’s his worldview.

Lutz epitomizes the “Old Detroit” in terms of ecological attitudes, a cohort of corporate leaders who rose to the top eerily disconnected from the parallel rise of environmental values in American culture. 

For whatever reasons, most U.S. auto executives saw green only as inherently “anti-car” rather than as a chance to redefine the car for a future world that is very different than that of their formative years.

Bill Ford was criticized for trying, even though he had a good sense of what was ahead a few years before it arrived to catch his peers off guard.

The Old Detroit zeitgeist remained in deep denial across the turn of the century, even as Honda and Toyota brought practical hybrids to market, soon followed by 9/11, mounting fears of the end of oil, melting glaciers in Lutz’s Swiss homeland, and then escalating — and last summer spiking — gasoline prices. 

All of those factors and then some will meld into the still unfolding but emotive formulas that define what sells in the years ahead. Lutz himself seemed to get this when, remarking on the growing success of hybrids during the 2005 Detroit auto show, he said: “We forgot about the emotional impact and the fact that a lot of people out there want to make an environmental statement.” In short, customer-oriented intuition will be needed more than ever. 

Thus, it’s not Lutz’s core skill that is passé; rather, it’s his mindset about what is already starting to be valued by a new generation of car buyers. Being in sync with changing market sensibilities is utterly crucial for a financial recovery that can only be product-driven. 

Coloring passion green: the Chevrolet Volt
(General Motors)

The Chevy Volt also reflects the notion that meeting the environmental challenge mainly entails costly technology. 

Lutz is being succeeded by Thomas Stephens, GM’s head of global powertrain engineering. The Wall Street Journal writes that Stephens is “well-versed in what goes on under the hood, which is precisely where GM and other U.S. automakers have to play catch-up with some foreign rivals.” 

While what’s under the hood has a role to play — as it had for the muscle-car era — success won’t only or even mainly be found in technology. The PR blitz that GM has built around the Chevy Volt may be a hint of realization that serious sales hooks can be colored green. However, it’s not yet clear that they’re connecting all the dots, which critics point out may take a retooling of corporate culture much deeper than one futuristic product can provide. 

Lutz himself undertook at least the start of such retooling as he enlivened GM’s mainstream product strategy. 

So, as Bob Lutz fires up his after­burners to paint one last exhaust plume across the evening sky, perhaps a new car guy (or girl) is being cultivated inside GM. That person might be tattooed and body-pierced but will surely be well wired to the world around us. And if he or she has a Lutzian passion for product, the company will have hope for a new era. 

Editor's note: This piece first ran under the heading "Lutz loved cars, but never quite got passion for green" on page A12 of The Detroit Free Press, Monday, March 2, 2009. Although its original link went dead, the piece may yet lurk in the Freep's archives. 

Postmobility

Personal mobility is defined by the automobile as we had come to know it by the end of the 20th century.  But at the beginning of the 21st century, don't we have better things to do than to drive ourselves around?  "Post-mobility" is the notion of taking the automobile and most of what it means for personal mobility and redefining it for a world where a car itself is still a necessity but its value is ever more based on the power of its virtual connectedness than on the power of its physical motion.

The post-industrial era wasn't the end of industry.  Indeed, industry as it came to mark its opening era was simply taken for granted. And postmodernism (whatever it means) wasn't the end of modernism except for the prideful literati compelled to rail against it. And so post-mobility will not be the end of personal automobility, especially individual car ownership. But many of the automobile's other, now over 100-year-old, defining traits will give way to new definitions of the personal mobility appliance.

The ability to move from place to place is basic to animals.  Whether in search of food (or to avoid becoming food), in search of a mate, or to be part of the herd in the case of social species, all animals and even some other life forms make movement a key task of existence. Most creatures rely on their own motive power.  As for so many other things, we humans of course find ways to make life easier, and a quest for easier means of mobility is as ancient as civilization and before. Indeed, the wheel is one of the archetypes of all human invention, ranking up there with fire, clothing and weapons as creative solutions to the challenges of everyday life from time immemorial.

Editor's note: A few years after this short post (on the now defunct AutoProject website), I started a Postmobility blog, which further describes the term on its About page. (November 26, 2012)