In today’s world there has been a lot of discussion about climate changes, in particular, global warming which is caused by emission of carbon dioxide. As we all know global warming is not a joke. It is a serious problem that cannot be overlooked. EU wants to make some changes towards a brighter tomorrow. The European Union has decided to stop sales of combustion engines by 2035 in order to prevent emission of greenhouse gasses and to achieve a “carbon neutrality by 2050”. The plan is to replace internal combustion cars with electric ones. But is this move so convenient? Is this a better option for our population?
First of all let us look at the emission of a typical passenger vehicle. On the average a car emits about 4.6 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year. We assume that the gasoline car burns 3.8l per 35.4km and drives yearly about 18000km. In comparison to electric vehicles that seems quite a lot. But we need to take to account that manufacturing a battery such as for example in Tesla Model 3 that holds an 80kWh lithium-ion battery emits from 3 up to 16 tons of CO2. Every kWh of manufactured batteries produces around 150 to 200 kilograms of CO2. That is a figure based on world’s predominantly fossil fuel energy mix. It doesn’t seem like a big change. If we take into consideration that we will need to produce millions of batteries like that. It seems like the numbers would be kind of similar even though the electric cars do not leave a carbon footprint on the road.
What is more average life span of those batteries is not so long. It is ranging from 5 or 6 years to as low as 2 years or even in some cases you have to replace the battery after 1 year of usage. Moreover costs of those batteries and replacement are very high. It can cost between 3,000$ to 18,000$ plus the costs of the work that needs to be done to replace it. It is a big sum of money that not everybody has. On the other hand, when you have a regular combustion vehicle it is less likely that you would have to pay that much for maintenance. Regular cars are way cheaper to preserve. Luckily there is an alternative, EU also agreed to consider the use of synthetic fuels and plug-in hybrids. Still there will be a lot of costs to adjust to the changes but this might be a cheaper option.
Another topic that must be discussed is how this will influence the oil companies. This situation can cause a lot of problems in oil and fuel industries. One of the options is that companies will move from making traditional fossil fuels to synthetic fuels (also referred to as e-fuels). This is the best solution for this industry. This would make internal combustion engines still accessible for people. But for now, e-fuels do not seem like genuine solution. There is still a lot of research to be done concerning this type of fuel. Furthermore there is a need to build many charging points. It is assumed that there must be charging point every 60 kilometres down main roads of Europe.
All this demands lots of effort, work and money. But is it really worth it? Combustion engines has 10-15% of total CO2 emissions in Europe. If we make all this changes those numbers will not radically drop. If we really want to decrease the amount of CO2 emissions we should focus more on more approachable things that would make a better visible differences.
Sources:
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20220629-eu-approves-end-of-combustion-engine-sales-by-2035
https://www.greenly.earth/blog-en/carbon-footprint-battery
https://www.osti.gov/pages/biblio/1607021
https://meche.mit.edu/news-media/how-much-co2-emitted-manufacturing-batteries