A new report released May 3 found that while electric vehicles have no direct tailpipe carbon emissions, the CO2 production associated with the vehicle, battery, and electricity production would only result in a 30 percent decrease in greenhouse gas emissions compared to a standard diesel truck.
The American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI) report analyzed the environmental impacts of zero-emission trucks using federal and industry-sourced data to compare the full life-cycle CO2 emission for a range of truck types, from baseline diesel trucks to battery electric trucks and hydrogen fuel cell trucks.
“The U.S. trucking industry is strongly committed to carbon-reduction efforts, and electric motors and drive trains offer many additional performance and maintenance benefits,” said Hugh Ekberg, president and CEO of CRST The Transportation Solution, Inc. “But ATRI’s research highlights that several of the leading zero-emission approaches being advocated today still need additional research to fully understand how the different technologies can be best developed and utilized to maximize carbon reduction.”
The lower than expected environmental benefits of electric trucks are due to lithium-ion battery production, which, the study said, generates more than six times the carbon of diesel truck production. The research utilized outputs from the Argonne National Laboratory’s GREET Model. The researchers concluded that hydrogen fuel cell trucks are ultimately the most environmentally friendly by incorporating CO2 emissions generated from the U.S. electrical grid, which primarily relies on fossil fuels.
ATRI noted, however, that hydrogen fuel cell technology is not presently feasible for long-haul operations.
The report said identifying additional strategies can reduce CO2 truck emissions for all three energy sources, such as using renewable diesel (which would reduce emissions by only 32.7 percent of standard diesel) and sourcing hydrogen from solar-powered electricity (reducing emissions to 8.8 percent of the baseline diesel CO2).