Low emission scenarios with shared and electric cars: Analyzing life cycle emissions, biofuel use, battery utilization, and fleet development

Abstract

Passenger cars contribute considerably to total emissions of greenhouse gasses. In this article, we develop scenarios for the Swedish passenger car fleet in 2030, achieving a 70% reduction of greenhouse gas emissions as compared to 2010. The number of shared and electric cars, how they are combined, and levels of biofuel use differ between the scenarios. Transport volumes, car access, battery use, indirect emissions, and fleet development are evaluated and compared. Conclusions based on the scenarios include:

• Target-fulfillment requires a reduction in kilometers traveled by passenger cars. The reductions are 21%–47% per capita in six scenarios.

• Major changes to both removal rate and new car sales are needed, highlighting a policy challenge for the coming decade.

• Total battery capacity in the vehicle fleet increase from 1 GWh 2018 to 73–168 GWh in the six scenarios. This implies a need for careful consideration regarding resource scarcity and production capacity. A new metric, vehicle kilometers/(kWh*year), is developed and tested to explore efficiency in battery use.

• Reducing direct emissions through a high production of electric cars causes tensions in relation to the European Emissions Trading System due to the indirect emissions that arise. It is therefore important to consider indirect emissions in policymaking.

Keywords:

• Backcasting
• passenger car fleet
• electrification
• sharing
• life cycle

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Disclosure statement

None.

Notes

1 With PHEV UF 40%, and with 0.7 and 0.2 billion VKT travelled by PHEVs and BEVs (see Trafikanalys 2019), emissions from electric power for EV propulsion in 2018 is 0.01 million metric tons of CO2. A negligible amount as compared to the total emissions.

Additional information

Funding

The authors acknowledge support by the Mistra SAMS research program funded by the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Environmental Research (Mistra) (Grant Number DIA 2014/25).