When it comes to green vehicles, advanced technologies such as cars powered by electricity immediately come to mind. Nissan even created an ad for its all-electric Nissan Leaf featuring a polar bear threatened by global warming who hugs a Leaf owner, and Nissan calls the car “true innovation for the planet.”
Nissan goes overboard but has a point. According to GreenerCars.com, which analyzes both greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) and emissions directly damaging to human health that often cause smog, two of top three “greenest” cars of 2012 are all-electric. And recently, the Union of Concerned Scientists released a report finding that the Nissan Leaf emits fewer GHGs than an average new compact gasoline vehicle, even in regions that burn a lot of coal to generate electricity.
Yet when it comes to green vehicles in the next couple decades, we actually should be turning our attention to the seemingly dirty 20th-century technology — the conventional gasoline engine. Proposed fuel economy standards through 2025 should dramatically improve efficiency and reduce GHG emissions, while increasingly stringent air quality standards should continue to reduce smog-forming pollutants of these “advanced gasoline” vehicles. Emissions from advanced gasoline vehicles could fall more rapidly than those from electrics and sometimes be a better choice for the environment.
Improving gasoline vehicles is vital because they are likely to represent the vast majority of vehicles sold in the next couple of decades. The government only expects 3 percent of vehicles sold in model year 2025 to be electric, even with much stricter efficiency standards, while more than 80 percent would be powered by gasoline. Hybrids like the Toyota Prius would represent 15 percent of sales. This level of electric penetration is still much higher than sales in 2011, when the Leaf and plug-in hybrid Chevy Volt, which runs on electricity for about 40 miles and then engages a gasoline motor, accounted for less than 0.2 percent of sales (17,345 of 12.7 million sold).
The agonizingly slow penetration of electric cars basically comes down to battery costs. The U.S. Advanced Battery Consortium estimates that battery costs need to be approximately $150/kilowatt-hour (kwh) for successful long-term commercialization. But Bloomberg New Energy Finance reports vehicle battery costs of $689/kwh in the first quarter of 2012 — or about $16,500 for a Nissan Leaf — and there are reports showing price declines of 6-8 percent per year. At this rate, it would take another 20 to 25 years for battery technology to be price competitive.
It would be great if battery technologies were to improve more rapidly and be competitive in the 2020s, but in the meantime advanced gasoline vehicles will continue to get better. The Obama administration has finalized GHG and fuel economy standards for vehicles through 2016, and the administration’s proposals through 2025 should roughly double the efficiency of new vehicles compared with those sold in 2010. Those efficiency gains will lead to a roughly 40 percent drop in oil use and GHG emissions of new vehicles, once accounting for the rebound effect.
Similarly, California has proposed tightening standards concerning emissions directly harmful to human health. Its proposed Low Emission Vehicle (LEV) III standards would lead to at least 70 percent reductions in various emissions by 2022 compared with 2008 vehicles. These pollutants include nitrogen oxides (NOx) and particulate matter (PM). In addition to California, 13 other states, which along with California represent nearly half of the U.S. population, have decided to follow California’s lead and will adopt these standards when they are finalized. (Texas is not part of the group.) Automakers tend to dislike having to meet multiple standards, so California’s policies should encourage the federal government to tighten its own requirements, a process that has already begun.
Electric vehicles should improve as well because cleaner natural gas should tend to displace coal from the electric grid. Still, they are unlikely to match the expected improvements in gasoline vehicles unless the fuel economy standards are stymied or very unlikely events occur (e.g., natural gas totally eliminates coal-fired electricity, which accounted for 46 percent of electric power in 2010). By 2025, the average electric vehicle will probably still be a little greener than the average gasoline vehicle, but not by much. The hope is that electric cars could eventually emit no GHGs, but a lack of policy means we will need to wait an extremely long time to have such a future, if it ever occurs at all.
So this Earth Day, rather than just focusing on electric cars, consider the efficient gasoline vehicles helping clear our air — the Ford Focus, Chevy Cruze Eco or Honda Civic HF. With consumers buying them in large numbers, at least a polar bear could find an owner to hug.
James D. Coan is a research associate for the Energy Forum at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy. His research interests include renewable energy, U.S. strategic energy policy and international relations.