https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-03-21/evs-are-much-lower-emitting-than-combustion-cars
My BloombergNEF colleague Corey Cantor just published a detailed report on the lifecycle emissions of electric vehicles, looking at everything from average battery pack sizes by region, battery manufacturing emissions, current and projected electricity-generation emissions, day- and night-time charging trends, and more.
Corey comes to the same conclusion that virtually all other independent studies have: EVs have lower lifecycle emissions than their internal combustion counterparts.
Even in places like China, where coal still plays a large role in power generation, EVs have lower emissions overall. The reduction is around 27% there, compared to 71% lower in a market like the UK, where coal has been mostly pushed out of the generation mix. In a market like the US, an EV becomes a cleaner option after about 25,000 miles of driving, which is about 2.2 years for the average US vehicle.
The power sector is changing rapidly, with more clean generation capacity being added to the grid. This means that by 2030, the breakeven point will have moved up significantly in all regions. An EV made in the US in 2030 will be lower-emitting after a year of driving, while in China, it will be after just over four years, based on current trends. Battery recycling eventually will push EV emissions down even further, as will localizing battery production closer to demand centers.
One final caveat to all vehicle lifecycle emissions work is that most studies (including BNEF’s) don’t include emissions from refining and distributing gasoline and diesel.
These fuels don’t just appear at the pump, and anybody who has driven by an oil refinery can see the vast scale of our current energy infrastructure. This is a tricky area to pin down, but global refinery emissions are somewhere around 1.4 gigatons of CO2 annually. That’s a few percent of global CO2 emissions.
