Althaus, Hans-Jörg

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EDITORIALModern individual mobilityHans-Jörg AlthausReceived: 30 November 2011 /Accepted: 30 November 2011 /Published online: 16 December 2011# The Author(s) 2011. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.comThe transport sector is responsible for almost 60% of the oilconsumption or almost 30% of the total energy consumptionin OECD countries1 (IEA 2011). The dominant share of thisenergy consumption is caused by individual passengertransport by roads and air transport. Even though techno-logical progress has constantly improved the fuel efficiencyof vehicles combustion engines, the energy consumption ofindividual road transports is constantly increasing, mainlydue to increasing population and increasing distances trav-elled daily. This leads to an increase in CO2 emissions fromroad transport in the EU by 20% between 1990 and 2000 (deHaan et al. 2007). Thus, individual mobility is one of themost relevant and fastest growing contributors to climatechange. Also, human-toxic emissions from this sector arenot negligible despite increasingly rigorous emission stand-ards. The daily limit values for PM10 and for NO2 in 2009still exceeded at more than 30% of the traffic sites acrossEurope (EU-27)2 and (Kunzli et al. 2000) attributed about3% of total mortality in Austria, France and Switzerland toair pollution of motorized road traffic. And also externalcosts from road passenger transport in the USA due to airpollution are estimated higher than those due to climatechange (Delucchi and McCubbin 2011).From a global perspective, the transport sector is not only avery relevant but also a rapidly growing energy consumer: itsshare on worldwide primary energy consumption is expectedto rise from 21.8% in 2000 to about 34% in 2050 (de Haan etal. 2007). Knowing that vehicle density per capita increaseswith increasing GDP (almost linear rise from 0 vehicles percapita at GDP 0 to 0.3 vehicles per capita at GDP $10,000)and considering that annual economic growth in emergingnations like India (population 1.2 billion, GDP per capitaabout $3,500, average annual growth ca. 7%)3 and China(population 1.3 billion, GDP per capita $7600, average annualgrowth rate ca. 10%)4 is considerable, a steep increase invehicle numbers and kilometers driven is to be expected. By2050 one expects 5 billion cars (2010: 1 billion) driving 50trillion km per year, emitting 6 billion tons of CO2 (i.e. about20% of overall annual emission in 2010).From this context, it is obvious that individual mobility isone of the most relevant issues in the discussions on climatechange and urban pollution. Some years ago, biofuels werehoped to be the magic bullet to solve all problems. LCA,however, showed that even though many biofuels might haveclimate change mitigation potential, overall environmentaleffects of biofuel based mobility are often worse than for fossilfueled transports. And, just recently, the Scientific Committeeof the European Environment Agency acknowledged a “seri-ous error” in the greenhouse gas accounting methodologyused for European Union regulations and policy targets.53 https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/in.html, accessed 01.11.20114 https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ch.html, accessed 01.11.20115 http://www.eea.europa.eu/about-us/governance/scientific-committee/sc-opinions/opinions-on-scientific-issues/sc-opinion-on-greenhouse-gas,accessed 15.11.20111 http://www.iea.org/subjectqueries/keyresult.asp?KEYWORD_ID04121, accessed 01.11.20112 http://www.eea.europa.eu/pressroom/newsreleases/european-transport-sector-must-be, accessed 15.11.2011H.-J. Althaus (*)Empa, Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science andTechnology, Technology and Society Laboratory,Überlandstrasse 129,8600 Dübendorf, Switzerlande-mail: hans-joerg.althaus@empa.chInt J Life Cycle Assess (2012) 17:267–269DOI 10.1007/s11367-011-0365-8Thus, even the climate change mitigation effect of biofuels isonly true, if “land and plants are managed to take up additionalCO2 beyond what they would absorb without conversion intobioenergy”.5 Another drawback of biofuels was found to befood competition.But a new panacea is already at hand: electric mobility,based on batteries or on hydrogen. Obviously, critics arepointing their fingers at electricity generation which globallyis based to two-thirds on coal, natural gas and oil (IEA 2011).Fossil electricity is produced at an energy efficiency of about40% (Graus et al. 2007), and a modern battery electric vehiclereaches plug to wheel energy efficiency of more than 75%.The resulting energy efficiency is thus just above 30%—avalue only slightly higher than that of the most efficientcommercially available diesel cars (e.g. Golf VI 1.6 TDiBM: 29% in the New European Drive Cycle (NEDC)). Thisrough estimate suggests that the potential of electric vehiclesto mitigate environmental burdens cannot be huge as long asthe electricity to drive these vehicles is not generated in a moreenvironmentally friendly way than today’s average genera-tion. But the environmental burdens directly related to theenergy consumption and its generation can be lower for elec-tric vehicles if environmentally friendly electricity generationis considered for charging.The critics go on and warn against overcompensation ofpotential benefits from a more environmental friendly usephase of electric vehicles by the production and disposal ofbatteries, electronic components, motors or fuel cells withtheir rare elements and exotic materials.Several carbon-footprint, Well-to-Wheel or LCA studieswere made to prove this fear right or wrong, and divergingresults were produced. Only few very basic points seem tobe generally accepted today:& Vehicle mass—be it for electric or thermal vehicles—needs to be minimized. This minimizes environmentalburdens of the vehicle’s production, and also, and moreimportantly, it minimizes the energy consumption in theuse phase of the vehicle.& If electricity generation is not environmental friendly,electric cars are not better (they can even be moreburdensome) than clean and efficient diesel or naturalgas fueled cars.& Advantages of electric vehicles over vehicles withthermal engines are higher (or disadvantages lower)in places like inner cities, where local air pollutionand engine noise are more relevant. (Engine noise ofpassenger cars is relevant at speeds below 40–50 km/h,while tire and aerodynamic noise is dominant at higherspeed.)This obviously is a rather weak consensus. And just be-cause the issue is not complicated enough, there are not onlythermal versus electric vehicles but there are also hybrids of allkinds: serial, parallel and mixed hybrids, plug-in-hybrids,hybrids with various thermal drivetrains (from internal com-bustion of diesel, petrol or gas to fuel cells).The good news in this is that there is plenty of room forhighly relevant LCA work in modern individual mobility.Case studies on various technological options can be made,vehicle concepts can be compared or simulations of poten-tial developments of environmental impacts of individualmobility as a whole can be performed and analyzed. Butalso interesting methodological issues can be identified bylooking at potential reasons for the variation of the results inthe existing studies:& Vehicle and component production: Primary industrydata for most production processes of important compo-nents of (electric) vehicles like batteries, motors, elec-tronic components etc. are rarely or not at all publiclyavailable. Thus, these processes must either be theoret-ically modeled bottom-up, using methods or tools forprocess designing (e.g. Notter et al. 2010), or they areestimated top-down from sector or company genericindicators, often applying economic allocation (e.g.Zackrisson et al. 2010). What is the influence on theresults? How can the quality of the data be assessed?How can data quality be improved?& Fuel/energy consumption in vehicle’s use phase: Consump-tion can be determined for standard drive cycles (e.g.NEDC) or for real world operation in average or specific(e.g. urban driving) situations. How should consumptionvalues be determined? What is the influence on compara-tive results if vehicles of different technologies are com-pared applying different methods of determination of theconsumption?& Data and modeling of vehicle’s end-of-life: Since recy-cling is very widespread with vehicles, allocation pro-cedures for reuse and recycling might have an importantimpact on the results of transport or mobility studies.How large is the difference? Can the choice of allocationprocedures influence comparative results for differenttechnologies?& Influence of background data: Most studies use genericdata for the basic material and fuel production and forenergy generation. Results can significantly differ fordifferent sources, be it due to different system bound-aries or cut-off criteria applied or due to different tech-nologies. Are there systematic differences from theapplication of different background databases? Howdoes the choice of a background database influencecomparative results for different technologies?& Impacts assessed: The choice of impact assessmentmethods can determine the ranking of technologies incomparisons. Most studies look at potential climatechange impacts. Acidification, eutrophication and268 Int J Life Cycle Assess (2012) 17:267–269photochemical oxidation are also often reported. Manystudies also use one or another end-point indicator likeeco-indicator 99, ReCiPe or ecological scarcity points.What assessment methods are relevant for what technol-ogies or technology comparisons?This list of topics is far from being comprehensive.We would like to invite practitioners and method devel-opers to submit articles within the area of individualmobility in LCA, contributing to more adequate modelsand/or improved LCI data. We thus hope to achieve animproved understanding of environmental aspects andpotential mitigation strategies in this highly relevantsector.Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the CreativeCommons Attribution Noncommercial License which permits any non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, providedthe original author(s) and source are credited.Referencesde Haan P, Peters A, Scholz RW (2007) Reducing energy consumptionin road transport through hybrid vehicles: investigation of re-bound effects, and possible effects of tax rebates. J Clean Prod15(11–12):1076–1084Delucchi M, McCubbin D (2011) External costs of transport in the U.S. In: Palma AD, Lindsey R, Quinet E, Vickerman R (eds) Ahandbook of transport economics. Edward Elgar, CheltenhamGrausWHJ,VoogtM,Worrell E (2007) International comparison of energyefficiency of fossil power generation. Energ Policy 35(7):3936–3951IEA (2011) Key world energy statisticsKunzli N, Kaiser R, Medina S, Studnicka M, Chanel O, Filliger P,Herry M, Horak F, Puybonnieux-Texier V, Quenel P, Schneider J,Seethaler R, Vergnaud JC, Sommer H (2000) Public-health im-pact of outdoor and traffic-related air pollution: a European as-sessment. Lancet 356(9232):795–801Notter DA, Gauch M, Widmer R, Wager P, Stamp A, Zah R, Althaus H-J(2010) Contribution of li-ion batteries to the environmental impactof electric vehicles. Environ Sci Technol 44(17):6550–6556Zackrisson M, Avellán L, Orlenius J (2010) Life cycle assessment oflithium-ion batteries for plug-in hybrid electric vehicles—criticalissues. J Clean Prod 18(15):1519–1529Int J Life Cycle Assess (2012) 17:267–269 269

Modern individual mobility

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