Is It Really the End of Internal Combustion Engines and Petroleum in Transport?

Bottom Line: Petroleum-based fuels and the internal combustion engine will continue to dominate transport for decades to come. The numbers are simply overwhelming. While battery electric car fleets continue to grow globally, a number of factors potentially make their environmental benefits much lower than advertised.

Using petroleum-based fuels, the internal combustion engine (ICE) meets about half the world’s transportation needs. This demand for more oil and ICEs is constantly growing. Battery capacity will have to increase by several hundred-fold even for light-duty vehicles to be run on electricity alone.

Yet the greenhouse gas impact of battery electric cars could be worse than that of conventional vehicles if electricity generation and the energy used for battery production are not sufficiently decarbonized. This is especially true for the emerging giants China and India, both of which are overwhelmingly coal-based systems. The human toxicity impacts associated with the mining of metals needed for batteries are very serious and will have to be addressed.

In other words, in a variety of ways, the environmental impact of cars that run on electricity could be worse than using oil.

Large previous investments in charging infrastructure and electricity generation will be needed for widespread forced adoption of battery electric cars to occur. Additional short-term costs will be associated with various subsidies required to promote such a change; in the longer term, the loss of revenue from fuel taxes will contribute significantly to public finances in most countries.

ICEs will continue to power transport, particularly commercial transport, to a large extent for decades to come. And rather quietly, ICEs will continue to improve, particularly from an environmental and efficiency perspective.

There will be a role for low-carbon and other alternative fuels where they make sense. Such alternatives start from a low base and face constraints on rapid and unlimited growth, so they are unlikely to constitute much more than 10% of the total transport energy demand by 2040. For example, as the energy system is decarbonized and battery technology improves, there will be an increasing role for battery electric cars and hydrogen, which could even combine to replace liquid hydrocarbons in transport as the required infrastructure evolves.

Read the full study here.