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Well-to-wheels life-cycle analysis of alternative fuels and vehicle

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Article  in  Energy Policy · October 2012

DOI: 10.1016/j.enpol.2012.06.038

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 Energy Policy 49 (2012) 296–307

Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect

Energy Policy
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/enpol

Well-to-wheels life-cycle analysis of alternative fuels and vehicle

technologies in China
Wei Shen a, Weijian Han b, David Chock c,n, Qinhu Chai d, Aling Zhang d
a
Ford APA Research, Ford Motor Company, Unit 4901, Tower C, Beijing Yintai Center.No. 2 Jianguomenwai Street, Chaoyang District, Beijing 100022, China
b
Ford APA Research, Ford Motor Company, 430-A6, World Headquarters, One American Road, Dearborn, MI 48126-2798, USA
c
Independent Consultant and University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute, 4389 Compton Way, Bloomfield Hills, MI 48302, USA
d
Institute of Nuclear and New Energy Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China

H I G H L I G H T S

c Data and estimates unique to China are used in this analysis.

c Use of starch-based bio-ethanol will incur a substantial carbon disbenefit in China.
c Use of methanol derived from coal will incur even more carbon disbenefit.
c Plug-in-hybrid with cellulosic ethanol and clean electricity may be a viable option.

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: A well-to-wheels life cycle analysis on total energy consumptions and greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions
Received 21 July 2011 for alternative fuels and accompanying vehicle technologies has been carried out for the base year 2010
Accepted 13 June 2012 and projected to 2020 based on data gathered and estimates developed for China. The fuels considered
Available online 11 July 2012
include gasoline, diesel, natural gas, liquid fuels from coal conversion, methanol, bio-ethanol and
Keywords: biodiesel, electricity and hydrogen. Use of liquid fuels including methanol and Fischer–Tropsch derived
Well-to-wheels analysis from coal will significantly increase GHG emissions relative to use of conventional gasoline. Use of
Alternative fuels starch-based bio-ethanol will incur a substantial carbon disbenefit because of the present highly
Vehicle technologies inefficient agricultural practice and plant processing in China. Electrification of vehicles via hybrid
electric, plug-in hybrid electric (PHEV) and battery electric vehicle technologies offers a progressively
improved prospect for the reduction of energy consumption and GHG emission. However, the long-
term carbon emission reduction is assured only when the needed electricity is generated by zero- or
low-carbon sources, which means that carbon capture and storage is a necessity for fossil-based
feedstocks. A PHEV that runs on zero- or low-carbon electricity and cellulosic ethanol may be one of the
most attractive fuel-vehicle options in a carbon-constrained world.
& 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction (Mtce), or about 17 EJ, to 3480Mtce, or 102 EJ (National Bureau of

Since 1978, the start of the economic reform, the Chinese
economy has been undergoing an unprecedented long period of
sustained growth. The gross domestic product (GDP) has risen
from RMB 364.5 billion in 1978 (National Bureau of Statistics of
China (NBS), 2010) to RMB 47.2 trillion in 2011 (both in current
prices) (National Bureau of Statistics of China (NBS), 2012).
Accompanying this tremendous growth is the rapid increase in
energy demand. Between 1978 and 2011, China’s overall energy
consumption surged from around 571million tons coal equivalent
n
Corresponding author. Tel.: þ1 248 647 8842.
E-mail addresses: dpchock@gmail.com, dchock@umich.edu (D. Chock).
Statistics of China (NBS), 2012), exceeding the US energy con-
sumption in 2010 (British Petroleum (BP), 2011). According to
International Energy Agency (IEA) (2010), China overtook the
United States to become the world’s largest emitter of CO2 and
contributed more than 22% of the global total CO2 emissions from
fuel combustion in 2008. However, China’s CO2 emissions per
capita is still relatively low (only half of the average level of the
Kyoto Annex I parties) and the potential to grow remains high.
Fig. 1 shows the percent of global total emissions and per-capita
emissions of CO2 from fuel combustion from major emitting
countries in the world in 2008. The corresponding global CO2
emission was 29.4 Gt.
As the Chinese energy consumption grows, the issues of
energy security, air quality, and climate-change impacts all point

0301-4215/$ - see front matter & 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2012.06.038
 W. Shen et al. / Energy Policy 49 (2012) 296–307
Others
29.6%
India
4.9%
Russia
5.4%
EU27
13.1%
China
22.2%
United States
19.0%
Japan
3.9%
Canada
1.9%
Fig. 1. CO2 emissions from fuel combustion in 2008 (Global: 29.4 Gt). Left panel: percent contributions of major emitters. Right panel: per-capita emissions.
to the need for an urgent effort to address them. The impacts of
climate change are increasingly apparent and are particularly
threatening to the well-being of China’s future because of their
long-term persistence. They include coastal erosions and salinity
intrusion of groundwater due to sea-level rise, which will threa-
ten coastal cities like Shanghai; increased water supply variability
due to melting of glaciers and altered precipitation patterns (Cruz
et al., 2007); and the increased frequency of occurrence of severe
weather patterns including floods and droughts. The urgency
to address the issues above is obvious and the challenges are
enormous. A strategy involving all sectors of the society is
necessary to help tackle these challenges. Road transportation is
a significant consumer of energy and contributor of greenhouse-
gas (GHG) and air-pollutant emissions, and is growing rapidly in
China. From 2002 to 2009, China’s vehicle sales surged from
2 million/y to 13.6 million/y, and has since overtaken the United
States as the largest vehicle market in the world. In 2011, new
vehicle sales reached 18.4 million (National Bureau of Statistics of
China (NBS), 2012). Road transportation contributes 5.1% of
China’s total fossil CO2 emission (International Energy Agency
(IEA), 2010). Out of the 5.1%, 46% comes from light-duty vehicles.
Many issues need to be considered to minimize the energy and
fossil-carbon footprint of vehicle transportation. They include the
life-cycle analysis of fuels and of vehicles, both in terms of energy
consumption and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, cost implica-
tions, and material resource availability. In addition, the degree of
consumer acceptance and usage of the vehicle/fuel systems is just
as important. The purpose of this paper is to concentrate on the
energy and emission aspects of the well-to-wheels (WTW) life-
cycles of fuels in an attempt to answer the following two
questions. First, what are the potential fuel/vehicle-technology
pathways that will help sustain the viability of the transportation
system in China in the next 10 years? Second, what are the
implications of these pathways on energy resources, energy
consumption and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions? The present
study does not cover the life-cycle analysis of vehicle production
and subsequent recycling and disposal. In general, depending on
the fuel consumption of the vehicle, the life-cycle energy due to
fuel use during the useful life of a vehicle is roughly four to nine
times more than the life-cycle energy of the vehicle itself.
(Sullivan and Cobas-Flores, 2001). These ratios will vary depend-
ing on the WTW energy efficiency of the fuel/vehicle systems, the
overall energy efficiency of vehicle production and recycling, and
the travel distances accrued during the useful life of the vehicles.
We choose 2010 as the base year and 2020 as the target year
for our WTW analysis. Being not an Annex-I country, China is not
subject to the Kyoto Protocol commitment. At the United Nations
climate change summit in Copenhagen in 2009, China pledged a
40%–45% carbon intensity reduction by 2020 relative to the level
in 2005. Carbon intensity is the amount of carbon allowed to be
emitted (as CO2) for a given amount of economic output. The year
297
20
18
16
Germany 2.7%
14
Unit: kg/capita
12
UK 1.7%
France 1.3% 10
Italy 1.5% 8
Spain 1.1% 6
4
Others EUs
4.8% 2
0
2020 is also a target year in China’s long-term development plan,
whereby the GDP per capita would grow to four times while the
total energy consumption would grow by no more than two times
their respective levels in 2000. Accordingly, the year 2020 is a
meaningful target year for our WTW estimates.
2. Methodology
A WTW analysis is a life-cycle analysis of vehicle fuels, which
includes the energy and emission implications of the well-to-tank
(WTT) step and the tank-to-wheels (TTW) step. The WTT step
deals with feedstock resource availability and gathering as well as
the efficiency of fuel production and delivery processes, whereas
the TTW step deals with the efficiency of a representative vehicle
in utilizing the fuel for traveling purposes. We adopted the
Greenhouse gases, Regulated Emissions, and Energy use in Trans-
portation (GREET) Model (Wang, et al., 2005) as our template but
incorporated the data and information applicable to China.
In the WTT step, the energy expended (meaning not including
the energy of the produced fuel) and the accompanying emissions
of GHGs are estimated in the process of (1) feedstock extraction or
cultivation and harvesting, (2) transport of the feedstock to fuel-
production facilities, (3) subsequent conversion of the feedstock
to one unit-energy (in terms of lower heating values) of fuel, and
(4) delivery of one unit energy of the fuel to the storage device on
the vehicle. In these estimates, the energy expended and emis-
sions include not only the energy and emissions of fuels con-
sumed in the process, but also the energy expended and
emissions incurred in the production of these consumed fuels,
which may or may not be the same fuel being produced and
delivered. Therefore, an iterative calculation procedure is used as
necessary until the results do not vary by more than 1/1000 of the
estimates. The results yield the WTT information in terms of MJ of
energy expended and grams of GHG emitted per MJ of fuel
delivered to vehicle’s on-board storage. The energy expended
and emissions associated with the by-products not relevant to the
fuel during the fuel production process will be excluded in the
calculations. They are estimated to be the respective energy and
emissions due to the production of other main products for which
the amounts of these by-products can substitute or displace. In
the case where multiple fuels are produced concurrently in the
same process from the same feedstock, the energy and emissions
are assigned according to the energy fractions of the produced
fuels in the process. The TTW step determines the fuel energy
consumed and the associated emissions in order to propel the
vehicle to travel one unit distance.
Thus, the WTW total energy per kilometer traveled is the sum
of the TTW fuel energy consumed per km and the WTT energy
expended to produce the amount of fuel needed for the travel, the
latter being the product of the TTW fuel energy per km and the
298 W. Shen et al. / Energy Policy 49 (2012) 296–307
Table 1
Transportation mode share and distance of crude oil and petroleum products in 2010.
Ocean Tanker Waterway
Crude oil
Mode share (%)n 55 15
Distance (km) 11,000 1200
Diesel/gasoline
Mode share (%)n 25
Distance (km) 1200
n
This is the percent amount of crude/fuel from all sources that includes a given mode (but not exclusively and regardless of distance involved) in its transport from
source to destination. Since crude/fuel from one source may involve more than one mode for transport, the mode shares defined here are not to be summed across the
different modes.
energy expended per unit energy of the fuel. The WTW fossil
energy follows the same expression if the fuel itself is fossil. For a
nonfossil fuel, the WTW fossil energy per km traveled is simply
the product of the TTW fuel energy per km and the total fossil
energy consumed in the WTT step for one unit energy of the
nonfossil fuel. The WTW GHG emission per km traveled is
the sum of the TTW GHG emission per km and the product of
the TTW fuel energy consumed per km and the GHG emission of
the WTT step per unit energy of the fuel. If only CO2 emission is
considered, then the TTW GHG emission per km is the product
of the TTW energy consumed per km and the carbon content
(in terms of CO2) per unit energy of the fuel.
The GHG emission is expressed in terms of grams CO2-
equivalent (gCO2-eq.). The ‘‘equivalence’’ is based on the conven-
tional global warming potentials (GWPs) of respective individual
GHG for a time horizon of 100 years. Because radiative forcings
are time dependent, so are the GWPs. We use the GWP values
provided by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
(2007) for the two GHGs of relevance to our study: 25 for
methane1 (CH4) and 298 for nitrous oxide (N2O). Even though
we are following the conventional use of gCO2-eq. to represent
GHG emissions, two caveats need to be kept in mind: first, the
effective atmospheric lifetime of fossil CO2 extends to hundreds
to thousands of years (Archer et al., 2009; US National Academy of
Sciences (US NAS), 2010), much longer than the 100 years implied
in the GWP time horizon and the life times of CH4 ( 12 years)
and N2O (114 years) such that the GWPs for these gases would be
grossly exaggerated insofar as the long-term climate impact is
concerned. (Note, however, that CH4 will eventually be oxidized
to form CO2.) Second, the gCO2-equivalent emission cannot be
directly translated into CO2-equivalent concentration, the latter
being based on the instantaneous radiative forcings of the GHGs,
not one based on the 100-year time horizon or the lifetimes of the
GHGs. Fortunately, the GHG emissions presented here are domi-
nated by CO2 emissions except for the fuels where N2O from
fertilization or CH4 from gas fields and coal mines are involved.
The number of fuel-vehicle technology combinations for WTW
analysis can be enormous. A large number of such pathways have
indeed been considered here. But only the results of more probable
pathways in terms of feedstock resource availability, achievable
vehicle technologies, likely infrastructure availability, and poten-
tially affordable vehicle ownership, will be presented here.
Because it is impossible to collect all the needed information
or data even for the present, and there are also uncertainties in
the projections of fuel pathways and vehicle technologies into the
future, we provide a range of uncertainty in the estimates. These
1 2
More recently, by incorporating gas-aerosol interactions, Shindell et al.
(2009) has indicated that the methane GWP ought to be revised upward to about
33. This revision is not considered here.
Railway Oil pipeline Truck
35 80
950 500
53 16 100
950 300 80
estimates reflect the efficiency diversity in the fuel and auto
industries and the uncertainty in our information.
3. The fuel pathways
3.1. Petroleum
Petroleum products will likely remain the predominant fuels
for the transportation sector for many decades to come. By the
end of 2010, China’s proven oil reserve was 2.0 billion tons (or
14.8 billion barrels), which constituted only 1.1% of world’s
proven reserve (British Petroleum (BP), 2011). As of 2010, China
imported a little more than two thirds of its petroleum for
domestic consumption and the percent of import will most
definitely grow with time. For domestic production, the present
study has acquired a large amount of data describing energy use
of 52 kinds of process technologies used in excavation and
pretreatment processes of petroleum from 14 major oil fields in
China (China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), 2007;
Administration of Shengli Oilfield (ASO), 2008). The production
of these oil fields accounts for 66% of total crude oil output in
China in 2010 (Xiao and Zhao, 2011). Presently, the energy
efficiency in domestic excavations tends to be somewhat low
compared to international standards. Even as efficiency continues
to improve, it is partly offset by the post-prime status of most oil
fields in China.2 The representative excavation energy efficiency
of imported crude oil is provided by the British Petroleum (BP).
About 90% of imported crude was shipped from overseas,
primarily from the Middle East and Africa. The weighted average
shipping distance is 11,000 km. The balance of imported crude
was delivered through pipelines from the former-Soviet-Union
countries. The overall crude oil transport distances and mode
shares are shown in Table 1 (China Communication and
Transportation Association (CCTA), 2011). The specific energy
consumptions incurred by the respective pathways are generally
high (see Table 2.) compared to the best available corresponding
practices. However, they are expected to quickly approach those
practices in the not-too-distant future. The energy conversion
efficiency in the refining processes depends on the distribution of
the final products or the distillates but typically averages around
90% overall.
Presently, more than 60% of the gasoline in China has a
Research Octane Number (RON) of 93. We expect the RON93
gasoline to represent 80% of the gasoline consumed by 2020.
Accordingly, RON93 gasoline will be the reference fuel in our
comparative study. The oxygen content of the gasoline comes
from the addition of up to 3% (by weight) of methyl tert-butyl
The data from the national petroleum companies of China are considered
strictly proprietary. Please contact the authors directly for additional information
related to energy consumption for crude excavation.
 W. Shen et al. / Energy Policy 49 (2012) 296–307
Table 2
Energy intensity for different transportation and distribution modes of energy feedstock and fuel.
Fuel type Ocean Tanker Waterway
Fuel oil Fuel oil
Energy intensity (kJ/t km)n 36 257
n
The numbers listed include the energy consumed for the return trip of the empty vessel after delivery.
Table 3
Mean production efficiency of synthetic fuels from NG and coal.
(%) Methanol (%) DME (%)
NG-based
2010 57 56
2020 63 62
Coal-based
2010 38 37
2020 50 49
n
At 25 1C and 1000 mb.
ether (MTBE) produced mostly directly by the refineries using
petroleum and natural gas as feedstocks. The sulfur content of the
RON93 gasoline is required to be no more than 150 ppm by
weight presently. This number is expected to go down signifi-
cantly by 2014 to meet the low-sulfur fuel requirements for air
pollution control.
According to the data collected in 2008 (Zhang et al., 2010), the
sulfur content of diesel in China differed greatly from region to
region. About 72% of diesel sampled in Northern China had a sulfur
content of 500 ppm–2000 ppm. For major cities like Beijing, Shang-
hai and Guangzhou, the diesel sulfur content has been no more than
50 ppm since 2010 in order to meet the EU-IV vehicle emission
standard while the overall national sulfur content for diesel should
be no more than 350 ppm by July 1, 2011 in order to meet the EU-III
emission standard.
The delivery of gasoline and diesel in China is primarily
accomplished by rail and by ship along the coast and major
rivers. Road delivery is used as supplements and for short-range
distribution purposes. Pipeline delivery of gasoline and diesel
remains rather limited presently. The Chinese government is
promoting pipeline delivery from major refinery areas to major
urban areas. We assume that realistically, the share of pipeline
delivery may reach 30% by 2020, with an average delivery
distance of roughly 800 km.
3.2. Natural gas
China is not rich in natural gas (NG) reserve. The proven
conventional gas reserve is only 2.8 trillion cubic meters, or 1.5%
of global total reserve in 2010 (British Petroleum (BP), 2011), and
is concentrated in the central western regions of the country.
Roughly 70% of the domestic production comes from oil fields,
while most of the rest comes from natural gas fields. Due to an
anticipated substantial increase in demand, many liquefied-
natural-gas (LNG) terminals along the coast are being constructed
to meet an import capacity estimated to be as high as 170–300
billion m3 per year by 2020 (National Energy Administration
(NEA), 2012). The technically recoverable resources of unconven-
tional gas like shale gas are initially assessed to be 36.1 trillion
cubic meters by the US Energy Information Administration (EIA)
(2011). Much uncertainty remains regarding the accessibility of
these resources.
The energy efficiency in the extraction and processing of
domestic NG is roughly similar to the current European estimate
(China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), 2007; CONCAWE,
299
Railway Oil pipeline NG pipeline Truck
Diesel Electricity Oil & Elec. NG & Elec. Diesel
203 78 241 1,435 1,480
FTD (%) DCL Off-site hydrogen (%)n On-site hydrogenn
53 62 55%
60 70 65%
36 50% 52
48 58% 60
2008). The NG escape rate during production is estimated to be
around 0.4%, comparable to the CONCAWE estimate (Institute of
Nuclear and New Energy Technology (INET), 2003; CONCAWE,
2008) for Europe. The energy expended for the production and
transport of the imported LNG is based on estimates provided by
BP for the Middle East and Australia, the main sources of the
import.
Pipelines are the dominant transport mechanism for com-
pressed natural gas (CNG). The China National Petroleum Corpor-
ation’s data indicate that the energy expended per unit energy of
NG transported via pipeline per unit distance is about 20% higher
than international levels (Xie et al., 2006). By 2020, this energy
will likely be reduced further to 1/2 or even 1/3 of the present
level. Two categories of transport distance are assumed in this
paper: 300 km for pipeline transport from gas fields to nearby
cities (representing cases in some gas-rich regions like Sichuan
and Xinjiang) and 4000 km for transport from various domestic
and foreign production sites including those from Western China
and the former Soviet Union. Electricity is used to pump and
compress NG to vehicle storage device at 20 MPa–25 MPa
(200 bar–250 bar) with a power consumption of 1 kW h per
5 Nm3 (containing roughly 225 MJ of fuel energy) of delivery.
Natural gas can be used to produce different mixtures of
syngas (a mixture of carbon monoxide (CO) and hydrogen (H2)),
by steam-methane reforming or auto-thermal reforming. The
different syngas mixtures can then be catalyzed to produce
different vehicle fuels including methanol, dimethyl ether
(DME), Fischer–Tropsch diesel (FTD), and hydrogen. The efficiency
of the presently prevailing NG-based methanol production in
China is low (roughly 950Nm3–1300 Nm3 of NG consumed per
ton of methanol produced). But we expect that by 2012–2020, the
efficiency may approach the state-of-the-art levels of 750Nm3–
850 Nm3 of NG consumed per ton of methanol produced. The
dehydration of methanol is used to produce DME. The efficiency is
somewhat less than that of NG-methanol pathway and the
estimate is based on a large-size DME plant, which is not
presently available in China. There are no NG-to-FTD plants in
China presently. In fact, China’s key pathway for FTD is coal-to-
liquid (CTL) conversion, not gas-to-liquid (GTL). We assume a GTL
efficiency of 53% and 60%, 75%, for 2010 and 2020, respectively,
(see Table 3).
Steam methane reforming is a major pathway for hydrogen
production using NG. The hydrogen plants in China tend to be
small presently, with a typical production rate of 700 t/y, and the
energy conversion efficiency tends to be low (47%–65%). We
300 W. Shen et al. / Energy Policy 49 (2012) 296–307
expect that the efficiency should increase to 70%75% for a
moderate size centralized plant of say, 50,000 t/y after 2015.
The small distributed plants for on-site delivery is expected to
have an improved energy efficiency of up to 65% by 2020.
Liquefaction of hydrogen is energy intensive, with an energy
efficiency of 67%–75%. This can be compared with about 90% for
gaseous compression of up to 70 MPa. Because of the ease of
delivery, methanol from NG or coal is also being considered as
feedstock for on-site hydrogen production.
For compressed gaseous hydrogen, because of the high cost of
other delivery systems, only pipeline delivery is considered here,
where the hydrogen production facilities are within say, 50 km
from major end users. For liquid hydrogen, road delivery with an
average distance of 100 km is assumed.
3.3. Coal
China has the world’s third largest proven reserve of coal, at
114.5 billion tons, or 13.3% of global total as of the end of 2010
(British Petroleum (BP), 2011). In terms of heat content, coal
represents some 90% of fossil fuel reserves in China (Liu, 2002).
Coal also provides about 70% of energy consumed in China
presently, but at the current consumption rate, China’s coal
reserve would last only 32 years (British Petroleum (BP), 2011;
National Energy Administration (NEA), 2011). About 95% of the
coal comes from subsurface mining, with the balance from sur-
face mining. According to the Chinese Coal Research Institute
(Chinese Coal Research Institute (CCRI), 2006), by 2015, the
average electricity and coal consumed to excavate 1 t of coal are
estimated to be 36 kW h and 25 kg, respectively. Furthermore, for
each ton of coal excavated, there is an accompanying emission of
roughly 7 m3–8 m3 of methane, 6 m3 of CO2, and trace amounts of
SO2 and oxides of nitrogen. About one half of all the coal produced
in 2010 (National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC),
2012) is subsequently cleaned and sorted, further consuming, on
a per-ton of output basis, 3 kW h of electricity, 100 kg of water
and 0.04 t-coal-equivalent of original coal. There are  15% coal
gangues that will be eliminated during the washing process
(Chinese Coal Research Institute (CCRI), 2006). Overall, the energy
efficiency in the coal excavation processes including cleaning and
washing averages about 97%.
Rail, road and waterways (coastal and river) are the transport
mechanisms for coal. Based on various data sources, we estimate
that the portions of coal shipped by rail, road and waterways are
50%, 30% and 20%, respectively. The transport distances for the three
routes are guesstimated to be 595 km, 500 km, and 1500 km,
respectively (China Communication and Transportation Association
(CCTA), 2011).
Coal can be converted to different types of fuels, first via coal
gasification to form syngas, which is then catalyzed to form
different products. One such product is methanol, with a present
energy conversion efficiency of 32%–40% for large-size plants
(200,000 t or more per year) and o30% for small plants
(10,000 t–50,000 t capacity). By 2020, the coal-to-methanol
energy conversion efficiency is expected to improve to around
50%. The conversion efficiency for DME from coal (via methanol)
is no better than 40% presently and probably close to 50% by 2020
(see Table 3).
There are two pathways in coal-to-liquid conversion: direct
and indirect liquefaction. The former, called direct coal liquefac-
tion or DCL, dissolves coal in a solvent at high temperatures and
pressure followed by hydrogenation. There is a 1 Mt demonstra-
tion plant using this approach in Inner Mongolia. The latter is the
conventional CTL route catalyzing syngas to form desired pro-
ducts including FTD. There are six FTD plants in China with
capacities ranging from 10 kt/y to 180 kt/y. The conversion
efficiencies for the direct and indirect approaches are about 50%
and 36%, respectively. We assume that by 2020, these efficiencies
would improve to  58% and  48%, respectively.
Coal gasification in the presence of steam has been used to
produce hydrogen. The efficiency of gaseous hydrogen production
is presently around 52%, and around 60% by 2020, with an
uncertainty of 75%–10%.
The delivery of products from coal is the same as that from
natural gas. The mean production efficiency of various synthetic
fuels from NG and coal is summarized in Table 3.
3.4. Biomass
Using biomass to produce fuels is still a rather limited activity
in China and may not have a major energy impact in the next
decade. But the biomass pathways, especially for producing bio-
ethanol and biodiesel, are rapidly gaining strategic importance.
Reports on the growth in energy demand in agriculture have
not been consistent. We find it to be on the order of 5% per year
over the last 15 years or so. On the per-unit-yield basis, the
energy use may be decreasing. A major concern is the rapid
growth in the use of chemicals for agriculture. According to the
National Bureau of Statistics report (National Bureau of Statistics
of China (NBS), 2010) the use of fertilizers grew by  300% in 30
years prior to 2009, reaching 341 kg/ha by 2009. However, the
effectiveness of the fertilizers has been quite limited. The use of
pesticides has also increased markedly, reaching 10.8 kg/ha by
2009, twice that of 20 years earlier (National Bureau of Statistics
of China (NBS), 2010).
Globally, more than 80% of ammonia is produced using NG.
But in China, the fraction is more like 22%, with the balance of
ammonia being produced mostly with coal as the feedstock. The
NG-based ammonia is produced by large-sized plants, many of
which with improved technology that has an energy consumption
of around 30 GJ/t of ammonia produced, a rate comparable to the
state-of-the-art standard. Overall, the NG consumption remains
somewhat high, at around 950 Nm3 (compared to 750 Nm3) per
ton of ammonia produced. The picture with coal-based ammonia
is bleak presently. The energy consumption is as high as 55 GJ/t–
63 GJ/t of ammonia produced. But the prospect for improvement
is good. The ammonia consumption in the production of urea in
China remains lagging behind the state-of-the-art by 5–10 years.
The phosphorus and potassium fertilizers are mostly imported.
The energy consumption rates in their production are based on
the US data. The transport of fertilizers in China is mostly carried
out by rail and has a delivery distance of some 1400 km (China
Communication and Transportation Association (CCTA), 2011).
China has adopted a policy of not allowing fuel to compete
with food. Thus any new biofuel crop will have to be cultivated
from waste land, marginal or abandoned cropland, etc. This would
minimize the impact of indirect land-use change but would still
incur carbon debt due to the release of carbon from the soil and
native habitat of the land as a result of land conversion. The soil
carbon content is roughly estimated to be about 73 tCO2/ha by
CONCAWE (2008). Even though this is comparable to the value of
69 tCO2/ha estimated by others (Fargione, et al., 2008) for corn
ethanol with the crop cultivated on formerly abandoned cropland,
the value has large uncertainties because of the large variety of
soil types and native habitats. We shall not take carbon debt into
consideration in our WTW analysis. Note that carbon debt would
delay the time when a net CO2 emission reduction starts to occur
as biofuels continue to replace fossil fuels. But this time may
never come if an inefficient agricultural practice persists since it
can make biofuels more disadvantageous than gasoline in energy
consumption and GHG emissions. By assuming a more optimal
agricultural practice say, by 2020, use of biofuels can become
 W. Shen et al. / Energy Policy 49 (2012) 296–307
advantageous in CO2 emission reduction. The impact of carbon
debt on carbon break-even times as advanced bio-ethanol from
various biomass feedstocks replaces conventional gasoline is
discussed in Shen (2007).
Nitrous oxide emissions mostly occur during the nitrification
and denitrification processes of micro-organisms. There are also
direct and indirect effects on N2O emissions due to agricultural
practice including the use of nitrogen fertilizers. We used the
agricultural data in China and applied the procedure described in
the Good Practice Report (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC), 2000) to estimate the N2O emissions.
Through tax relief and government subsidy, bio-ethanol has
been promoted for blending with gasoline in the form of E10 (10%
ethanol by volume) in some ten provinces of China. Corn and
wheat have been the early enablers of bio-ethanol production in
China. However, to avert excessive investments and to reinforce the
call for no food sacrifice for fuel, the subsidy was terminated after
2008, and with some exceptions, new corn-to-ethanol projects have
also been temporarily suspended. Separately, a cassava-to-ethanol
plant was put into formal operation in 2008.
The yields of corn and wheat in China are presently around 6 and
5 fresh tons per hectare, respectively. The transport of feedstock to
plants is assumed to be by road for a distance of 200 km (Li, 2005).
With some exceptions, wet milling has been used for corn/wheat-
to-ethanol conversion. This approach is more costly and consumes
more water, but produces a wider range of byproducts compared to
dry milling. For wet milling, the energy and water expended per ton
of ethanol produced presently in China are 22 GJ–37 GJ and 9 t–20 t,
respectively. The numbers would be more like 12 GJ and 3 t,
respectively, for the more advanced international level. Also, the
energy efficiency of the wet-milling production of ethanol using coal
as fuel in China is 40%–55%. This is significantly lower than the
energy efficiency of at least 60% for more advanced wet milling
processes using natural gas as fuel. In the US, dry milling has been
the preferred approach, with an energy conversion efficiency of at
least 70% (see Table 4). According to the surveys in 9 provinces, the
delivery distances from plants to blending centers average about
500 km, with a distribution percent of 60:30:10 by rail, road and
waterways, respectively.
Cassava is a resilient woody shrub grown in the tropics and
subtropics. It has a high photosynthetic efficiency (1.9%–2.5% for
young plants. See Veltkamp, 1985) and its root system stores a
high content of starch and sugar. However, the yield improve-
ment of cassava in China (primarily the Guangxi province) has
been slow, from  16 t/ha in 2005 to 18 t/ha by 2009. We use a
yield level of 18 t/ha for the 2010 baseline and assume a yield
reaching 39 t/ha by 2020, which is within the experimentally
achieved yield of 35 t/ha–75 t/ha. The feedstock-to-plant trans-
port is mostly by rail with an assumed distance of 200 km. The
ethanol produced is primarily consumed within the province
(Guangxi) where it is presently produced, so the delivery distance
is assumed to be 500 km, mostly by rail and road transport.
Sweet sorghum is a very resilient plant that can grow in a wide
range of soil moisture, acidity and temperature. The sugar content of
the stalk serves as the feedstock for ethanol production. However,
Table 4
Comparison of energy efficiency between Chinese and U.S. ethanol plants.
Technology China ethanol plants U.S ethanol plants
Wet milling Wet milling Dry milling
Processing fuel type Coal NG NG
Efficiency (%) 40–55 62 72
301
the stalk yield depends on the levels of soil moisture, fertilization,
and soil salinity. Furthermore, the sugar content of the stalks can
quickly decline as the water content of the harvested stalks starts to
deplete. Thus, we assume the feedstock to be transported by road at
a distance of only 25 km. After extracting the juice from the stalks,
the sugar fermentation process is the same as that for corn ethanol.
Decomposing the ligno-cellulose from energy-crop plants like
corn stover, switchgrass, miscanthus, and fast-growing trees like
poplar, willow, etc., and waste wood, paper pulp, and so on for
ethanol production can significantly increase the feedstock availabil-
ity, reduce competition with food crop, and reduce the fossil energy
expended for biofuel production. Ligno-cellulosic ethanol production
involves three basic steps: (1) pretreatment to improve the accessi-
bility of plant fiber to enzyme breakdown; (2) enzymatic hydrolysis
to breakdown the plant fiber into simple sugars; and (3) fermentation
of the sugars to form ethanol. The second step is the most difficult to
accomplish and is the concentration of ongoing research efforts. It is
expected that cellulosic ethanol would not be available in any
meaningful quantity until, say, 2020. Through gasification, waste
wood, stalks, etc., can also be converted to syngas, which can then be
separated or catalyzed to yield hydrogen or various liquid fuels.
The main source of biodiesel in China is waste oil. Its transport
distance to biodiesel plants is assumed to be within 100 km. Bio-
based oils like industrial or municipal waste oils, vegetable oils
including jatropha oil, soybean oil, etc., which are fatty acids,
when reacting with methanol, will form biodiesel, which is a
mixture of long-chain esters like fatty acid methyl esters (FAME).
A main byproduct of the transesterification process is glycerin.
Because the fraction of glycerin production can vary significantly,
and there are no reliable data in China, we use the estimates from
GREET (Wang, et al., 2005), with 4% as the upper bound and 0% as
the lower bound. Producing 1 t of biodiesel from waste cooking
oil requires an initial generation of 10 t of steam to first separate
out impurities from the waste oil itself. The steam is presently
generated from coal-fired boilers, leading to substantial energy
consumption and GHG emission.
Soybean is a major import of China, but it may become a
needed commodity for biodiesel production someday. It is con-
sidered here as a potential feedstock for China for comparative
purposes. Since the yields (lower in China), fertilizer uses (three
times higher in China for nitrogen and phosphorus), and transport
distances (roughly 10,000 km from the US) are quite different
between the domestic and imported (mostly from US) soybeans,
they are treated separately. Within China, the transport distance
of the feedstock to plants is assumed to be 200 km. The fuel
delivery distance to refineries or blending facilities is assumed to
be within 500 km, with a similar means of transportation as bio-
ethanol. The blended diesel in the form of B5 (5% bio-diesel by
volume), B20 or B50 is then distributed to users with an average
delivery distance of 50 km.
To prevent waste oil from being illegally mixed with food, the
Chinese government recently provided a new tax-exemption
policy for biodiesel production based on waste oil. There are
presently 30 þ biodiesel plants in China, with a 1.5-million-ton
capacity but only about 100 thousand tons of real output in 2010.
Most of the products are used as additives for plastics production
instead of as vehicle fuel. Hainan province, the second biggest
island in South China, began a B5 demonstration program in 2009,
with a 20 kt biodiesel plant of China National Off-shore Oil
Corporation (CNOOC) as its fuel supplier.
For 2010, we consider only four feedstocks for biodiesel: waste oil,
domestic and imported soybeans, and jatropha. There are other
potential biomass feedstocks as well, like Chinese pistache, swida,
sorbifolia, etc. But they would not be considered until 2020. There are
other pathways using fat or oil for fuel production. One such pathway
is the hydrotreating or hydrodeoxygenation of fat or oil to form
302 W. Shen et al. / Energy Policy 49 (2012) 296–307
renewable diesel, which is essentially identical to diesel (Knothe,
2010). We shall not consider this pathway presently.
3.5. Electricity and hydrogen
Electricity is a carbon-free energy carrier, not an energy feedstock.
But it does have several renewable and fossil-free resources, namely,
biomass, hydro, solar, wind, geothermal and nuclear. As of 2010,
more than 49% of coal in China is used to generate about 77% of
electricity, and less than 5% of which is presently based on clean-coal
technology (such as ultra-supercritical pulverized coal combustion
and integrated gasification combined cycle or IGCC). Hydro-electri-
city contributes a little more than 16% of China’s electricity. Nuclear
contributes 1.8% while natural gas also contributes 1.8%. Fuel-oil
power is greatly reduced in the last ten years, from 3.5% in 2000 to
less than 1% in 2010 (China Electricity Council (CEC), 2012). Accord-
ing to the projection of China’s National Energy Administration, the
energy-source distributions of China’s electricity by 2020 would be
roughly 68% coal, 3% natural gas, 21% renewable (16.5% hydro, 3%
wind and 1.5% others), and 8% nuclear (China Electricity Council
(CEC), 2010), (see summary in Table 5). The energy consumption per
unit energy of electricity generated in combustion-based power
generation is expected to improve from 333 gce/kW h (or 36.9%
efficiency; gce is grams-coal-equivalent, or 29.3 kJ) in 2010 to
320 gce/kW h (38.4% efficiency) in 2020. The grid transmission loss
is expected to decline from 6.5% in 2010 to 6% in 2020.
Clean hydrogen can be produced through electrolysis of water
using nuclear energy or electricity generated from renewable feed-
stocks. The prospect with nuclear energy is particularly attractive
because the future-generation high-temperature nuclear reactors
can enhance the electrolysis efficiency. Thermo-chemical water
cracking processes are also enabled with the high temperatures
(800 1C–1000 1C) provided by the nuclear reactors. These processes
have an overall efficiency of 42%–48% and may be realized by 2020
in China provided that the existing nuclear pathway stays on course.
3.6. Carbon capture and storage
Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is an important alternative to
reduce CO2 emissions into the atmosphere. This method is especially
effective when the CO2 concentration for capture is already high, as in
cases involving gasification of feedstocks with high carbon content,
like coal, natural gas and biomass, and in oxyfuel coal power plants. In
these cases, the capture efficiency is in the range of 80%–95%. The
energy penalty can vary from 10% to 40% for electricity generation,
and from 4% to 22% per unit energy of hydrogen production
(Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 2005). As the
carbon capture technology continues to improve, we estimate that by
2020, the electrical energy consumed per ton of carbon captured may
vary between 300 kW h and 1000 kW h.
The captured CO2 is generally transported via pipelines to
existing or spent oil fields for enhanced oil recovery, or to sites
accessible to permanent subsurface CO2 storage like the saline
aquifers 1 to 2 km underground. The permanence nature of the
storage is a subject of intense research and field studies.
Table 5
The Chinese electricity supply mix in 2010 and 2020 (projection).
Coal (%) NG (%) Residual oil (%)
2010 76.8 1.7 1.7
2020 projection 68.0 3.0 0 8.0
4. The vehicle pathways
To determine the TTW energy consumed and the GHG emitted
per unit distance traveled, we use a passenger vehicle in the
1280 kg–1430 kg weight class as our representative vehicle,
which, if operating with a MY2010 port-injection spark-ignition
(PISI) 1.8 L engine coupled with a 5-speed standard automatic
transmission and using China’s octane 93 conventional gasoline
and meeting the Euro-III emission standard, would have had a
fuel consumption rate of 8.1 L/100 km (corresponding to 2.63 MJ/
km in energy consumption and 190 g/km in CO2 emission) under
the New European Drive Cycle (NEDC). Although some taxi fleet
surveys showed that fuel consumptions in real-world driving in
cities in China may be 15%–35% higher than those based on the
NEDC test cycle, the fuel consumptions (and the corresponding
GHG emissions) based on the NEDC will be used in this report to
facilitate possible comparisons with the WTW results in other EU
or North American reports. However, when assessing the total
emissions from the road transportation sector, the gap between
the real world and the NEDC results should be taken into
consideration in China due to the prevailing use of vehicles in
the urban congestive environment which may persist for many
years to come.
Note that the use of a representative vehicle is needed in order to
meaningfully compare the fuel consumption of the presently pre-
vailing conventional gasoline vehicle with results of comparably-
sized vehicles designed for other fuel-vehicle technology combina-
tions. This vehicle needs not represent the actual average light-duty
vehicles used in China today. Furthermore, the results of our analysis
may not be applicable to non-light-duty vehicles, including heavy-
duty vehicles, motorcycles, and farm-use vehicles.
The vehicle powertrain technologies considered include the
internal combustion engines with port-injection spark ignition
(PISI), and direct injection for both spark ignition (DISI, for
gasoline, alcohols, CNG and hydrogen) and compression ignition
(DICI, for diesel fuels). These engines can be coupled with a
battery-driven electric motor to jointly or independently propel
the vehicles. The resulting hybrid-electric vehicle (HEV) technol-
ogies improve the fuel-consumption efficiency significantly by
taking advantage of the high efficiency of the electric powertrain,
and the control to shut off the engine at idle and to capture and
re-use the energy from braking to recharge the battery. We
assume the fuel efficiency improvement of HEV relative to the
conventional gasoline PISI vehicle to be 30%–40%. And 15%–25%
efficiency improvement is assumed when the HEV technology is
applied to a DICI vehicle (Kenney, 2009). The HEV technology can
be further modified by using a larger set of battery that can also
be charged from an external power source. Vehicles using the
resulting plug-in hybrid (PHEV) technology can travel typically
tens of kilometers in purely electric mode. Depending on the
percent usage of the battery-driven electric motor (the charge-
depleting or CD mode), the efficiency of the PHEV can vary as
well. In this study, we assume that on average, the CD mode will
be in operation 80% of the travel distance when the vehicle is
driven in urban traffic. The average urban travel distance of the
vehicle per day in China is assumed to be around 50 km (roughly
13,000 km per year). The vehicle is also assumed to travel an
Nuclear (%) Biomass (%) Hydro (%) Wind and
others (%)
1.8 0.6 16.2 1.2
1.0 16.5 3.5
 W. Shen et al. / Energy Policy 49 (2012) 296–307
Table 6
Estimated mean energy consumptions of selected vehicle technologies for representative vehicles in the 1280–1430 kg weight class following the NEDC cycle in 2010 and
2020 (MJ/km).
PISI gasoline DISI gasoline DISI NG
2010 2.63 2.24 2.17
2020 2.27 1.95 1.89
n
Assuming 60% charge-depleting mode and 40% charge-sustaining mode.
MJ/km
10
Well-to-Wheel Total Energy Use
Fig. 2. WTW total energy consumed per vehicle distance traveled for selected pathways in 2010.
additional 5000 km per year of long distance trips, where the CD
mode is assumed to be in operation about 20% of the travel
distance. Thus the CD mode is assumed to be on for 60% of the
total yearly travel distance. The advances in the lithium-ion
battery technology have greatly improved the prospect of elec-
trification in motor vehicles. The potential growth of electrifica-
tion is further assured by the availability of sufficiently abundant
lithium resources (Mohr et al., 2012). Although HEVs, PHEVs, and
battery electric vehicles (BEVs) produced by some international
OEMs incorporate regenerative braking to improve fuel consump-
tion efficiency, the initial demonstration PHEVs and BEVs from
China’s domestic OEMs did not incorporate this technology. We
also consider hydrogen fuel cell (HFC) technology as a potential
future powertrain. The HFCV is effectively an electric vehicle but
with the electricity being generated onboard by the reaction
between the hydrogen fuel and oxygen from air in a stack of
proton-exchange membrane fuel cells. A summary of the esti-
mated mean energy consumptions for selected vehicle technolo-
gies are given in Table 6.
5. Results
We have conducted a WTW analysis on more than 140
combinations of alternative fuel and matching powertrain sys-
tems. Presently, the main alternative fuels being used or poten-
tially to be used in China include CNG, methanol, ethanol,
biodiesel, electricity and gaseous hydrogen. Accordingly, for
2010, we show in Figs. 2 and 3 the WTW energy consumptions
and GHG emissions, respectively, of twenty two fuel-powertrain
systems for a vehicle to travel a distance of 1 km based on the
303
DISI E85 DICI diesel HEV gasoline HEV diesel PHEVn gasoline BEV HFC
2.15 2.10 1.74 1.70 1.05 0.55 1.25
1.87 1.82 1.51 1.45 0.95 0.53 0.95
Feedstock Fuel Vehicle
technology landscape of present-day China. In the figures, the
dark blue bars at the bottom represent the stage for feedstock
excavation or cultivation and harvesting, and the transport of the
feedstocks to fuel conversion facilities. The medium blue bars
represent the stage for fuel conversion and delivery. Both stages
together constitute the WTT step. The light blue bars on top of the
medium blue bars represent the fuel-usage or the TTW step. In
the case of biofuels, the carbon stored in the biomass is treated as
CO2 credit and subtracted from the GHG emissions of the first
(feedstock) WTT stage. If the difference is negative, as in the case
of E85 in Fig. 3, it is represented by a white bar and subtracted
from the top of the stacked bar height so that the bottom
boundary of the white bar now represents the total GHG
emissions.
The height of each stacked bar in Figs. 2 and 3 (with the noted
adjustments for E85) reflects the result for the 2010 mainstream
technology roadmap in China. However, as China is developing
rapidly, it is inevitable that a large variety of new and relatively
backward technologies in resource extraction, fuel production
and vehicle powertrain do and will coexist for some time to come.
The cumulative upper and lower bounds (represented by short
horizontal lines) in each pathway in the figures represent the
likely range of the impacts of these technologies, the lower bound
representing more advanced technologies and the upper bound
the more backward technologies.
The WTW energy consumption and GHG emission for the
2010 conventional PISI:gasoline pathway are 3.34 MJ/km and
249 gCO2-eq/km, respectively. With this conventional pathway
as the baseline, we see that converting PISI to DISI would reduce
both the energy consumption and the GHG emission by 15%. Use
of DICI:Diesel would improve the efficiency further. Due to their
304
gram CO2eq./km
800
700
Well-to-Wheel GHGs emission
600
500
400
300
200
100
-100
Fig. 3. WTW GHG emissions per vehicle distance traveled for selected pathways in 2010.
tendency for high particulate emissions, sales of DICI:Diesel light-
duty vehicles have been banned in many cities in China. Reducing
the particulate emissions would erode the efficiency somewhat
and increase the cost of the powertrain. In that case, an attractive
alternative would be HEV:gasoline, which improves the energy
efficiency (2.2 MJ/km) and lowers the GHG emission (167 gCO2-
eq/km) further than the DICI:Diesel option. The energy consump-
tion (and GHG emission) of CNG vehicles (CNGVs, represented by
DISI:CNG) depends on the pipeline distance of CNG transport
from the NG source. When the transport distance is say, 300 km
as in the case of Sichuan Province, the CNGV WTW energy
consumption can be reduced by 5% relative to the baseline. When
the CNG transport distance is some 4000 km, exemplified by the
distance between the Xinjiang gas fields and Shanghai, the CNGV
WTW energy consumption is comparable to that of the baseline.
But since the carbon content per unit energy of NG is relatively
low, the WTW GHG emission would still be reduced by 19% and
14% relative to the baseline for the pipeline transport distance of
300 km and 4000 km, respectively.
From the WTW perspective, methanol from either natural gas
or coal is not a viable alternative fuel. Compared to the baseline
PISI:gasoline vehicle, the flexible-fuel vehicle running on M85
with NG-derived methanol would increase the GHG emission by
20%. If the methanol is coal based, the GHG emission would
increase by 2.5 times. And under extreme conditions, the increase
may be as high as 3.5 times. The main reason is the very low
energy efficiency in converting coal to methanol (30%–45%) in
China. The efficiency for converting natural gas to methanol is
also no more than 60% presently, significantly lower than the
efficiency of gasoline refinery. The direct coal liquefaction (DCL)
pathway consumes less WTW energy than the M85 pathway
partly because the diesel production process is more efficient
(50%–55%), and the DICI engine is also more efficient than the PISI
engine used for M85. However, the WTW GHG emission remains
very high; in fact, it is 80% higher than the baseline emission.
Being less efficient than the DCL pathway, the FTD pathway is
essentially as high as the coal-based M85 pathway in terms of
energy consumption and GHG emission.
The waste-oil based B20 pathway increases the GHG emission
by 20% compared to the conventional diesel pathway. This is due
W. Shen et al. / Energy Policy 49 (2012) 296–307
Feedstock Fuel Vehicle Credit
977
to the use of coal-fired boilers for steam generation in the process.
If the waste oil were replaced by the jatropha oil as feedstock, the
WTW GHG emission would decrease by 9% compared to the
conventional diesel pathway due to the renewable-carbon credit
of jatropha.
Blending gasoline with 10% by volume of ethanol to form E10
does not have any energy and GHG-emission benefit. And use of
E85, which contains 85% ethanol by volume in the gasoline blend,
actually increases the GHG emission by 15%–20% relative to the
baseline emission, regardless of whether the ethanol comes from
corn or cassava. An excessive use of chemical fertilizers greatly
offsets the GHG benefit of carbon uptake by the biomass. This is
on top of the very low efficiency in fertilizer production process
compared to international standards, and the use of coal as 60% of
the raw material for the fertilizers and as process fuels in ethanol
production.
Compared to the PISI baseline, the full hybrid electric vehicle
technology (HEV) can improve fuel consumption and reduce GHG
emission by 33% per km traveled. The battery electric vehicle
technology (BEV) using electricity from the national grid would
reduce energy consumption by 49% and GHG emission by 34%.
The gasoline-based PHEV running on the electric or CD mode 60%
of the time would reduce energy consumption by 42% and GHG
emission by 33%. Even though coal presently provides 77% of the
electricity in the national grid, this impressive achievement is
possible because of the high efficiency of the electric drivetrain
and the incorporation of energy-saving steps like regenerative
braking. For the vehicle size considered here, the CD mode would
consume a little more than 15 kW h of energy per 100 km of
NEDC travel distance, a mere 21% of the energy needed for the
PISI technology. These technologies should become available in
China in the early 2010s. However, regenerative braking has not
yet been incorporated in the electric vehicle prototypes of some
domestic OEMs to date in China. And the electric drivetrain
remains suboptimal. The actual energy consumed in the charge-
depleting mode for the electric vehicles in China to date may be
as high as 20 kW h per 100 km. With the electricity from low-
efficiency coal-fired power plants (employing old generators
that yield less than 200 MW of power), the GHG emission may
even increase by 11%–18% compared to the baseline emission.
 W. Shen et al. / Energy Policy 49 (2012) 296–307 305

MJ/km
Feedstock Fuel Vehicle
5

Well-to-Wheel Total Energy Use

4

Fig. 4. WTW total energy use of selected pathway in 2020.

gram CO2eq./km
Feedstock Fuel Vehicle Credit
250

200
Well-to-Wheel GHGs emission

150

100

50

-50

-100

Fig. 5. WTW GHG emissions of selected pathway in 2020.

These results are represented by the upper horizontal lines of the
corresponding technologies in the figures. Some prototype hydro-
gen fuel cell (HFC) vehicles are already available presently. Using
hydrogen from steam methane reforming at dispensing locations
has 33% less WTW GHG emission than the baseline, whereas
using hydrogen from electrolysis of water increases the emission
to twice the baseline level.
Figs. 4 and 5 show the estimated WTW energy consumptions
and GHG emissions per vehicle-km traveled, respectively, of
twenty three fuel and vehicle technology pathways that may
potentially be of interest by 2020. Upon the reduction of vehicle
weight, tire rolling resistance, aerodynamic drag, and the intro-
duction of dual-clutch transmission, etc., both the PISI and DISI
gasoline vehicles of 2020 should reduce the fuel consumption by
10% to 15% over their respective 2010 counterparts, achieving no
more than 7 L and 6 L of gasoline consumption per 100 km
traveled following the NEDC compared to 8.1 L and 6.9 L per
100 km for their respective 2010 vehicles. Even though it is not
obvious from the intended actions of the auto manufacturers in
China, it is likely that the DISI:gasoline vehicle will become
predominant by 2020. We shall consider it to be the baseline
vehicle for 2020.
By 2020, there should be efficiency improvements in the fuel
sector as well. If we assume that there are technological break-
throughs for the possible large-scale ligno-cellulosic production
of ethanol, then the WTW energy consumption of the DISI:E85
pathway will increase by 65% relative to the 2020 DISI:gasoline
pathway. However, since the process fuel used in the cellulosic
ethanol production is now mostly biomass-based rather than
fossil-based, the WTW GHG emission will be 45% lower than the
emission of the DISI:gasoline pathway. If in addition, the HEV
technology replaces the traditional powertrain, the resulting GHG
306 W. Shen et al. / Energy Policy 49 (2012) 296–307
emission will be lowered further, to 60% below that of the
DISI:gasoline pathway.
As electricity will be generated more cleanly and efficiently by
2020 (The coal-based portion is expected to drop below 70% of
the total power grid (China Electricity Council (CEC), 2010)), the
advantages in GHG emission of the BEV and PHEV technologies
become more obvious, with a reduction of 31% and 26%, respec-
tively, relative to the DISI:gasoline pathway. If carbon capture and
storage (CCS) were progressively implemented in fossil-based
power generation in the next 10 years, especially when it is
coupled with the IGCC technology, then the GHG emission
reductions of BEV and PHEV would be further enhanced to 82%
and 57%, respectively, relative to the DISI:gasoline pathway. By
further replacing the gasoline with cellulosic-based E85, the PHEV
GHG emission will be reduced by 72%, compared to the emissions
of the DISI:gasoline pathway.
Among the HFC pathways, use of hydrogen generated from
nuclear-powered water cracking yields the most GHG emission
reduction—89% relative to the emission of the DISI:gasoline
pathway. Use of hydrogen from centralized steam methane
reforming reduces the GHG emission by 42% relative to the DISI
baseline. The GHG emissions are slightly higher than the DISI:
gasoline pathway if hydrogen generated from coal gasification (a
production process used in some facilities presently) without CCS
serves as the fuel for the HFC vehicles. Coupling coal gasification
with CCS is a necessity for a significant GHG emission reduction.
6. Conclusions
In developing a sustainable transportation system, many factors
need to be considered. These include the relative roles of public and
private transportation, the types of fuels available long term in the
country, the well-to-wheels energy consumptions, GHG and pollu-
tant emissions of the fuel/vehicle usage, the energy and emission
implications of the vehicle life cycle, the availability of the fuel
infrastructure, the safety, affordability and consumer acceptance of
the fuels and vehicles, etc. The present WTW scenario analysis based
on the relevant data and information gathered from various sources
within China has provided findings that address one of these factors.
We summarize the key findings below, together with relevant but
brief comments when deemed valid and helpful regarding some of
the other factors described above.
Use of liquid fuels (including methanol, FTD from CTL, and fuels
from DCL) derived from coal will significantly enhance GHG
emissions relative to use of conventional gasoline, unless the fuel
production process is coupled with CCS, which would incur energy
penalty for the process. The conventional wisdom about the carbon
advantage of biofuels does not apply to China presently. In fact, the
carbon disbenefit of starch-based bio-ethanol is quite substantial
due to the present highly inefficient agricultural practice and plant
processing for fuels and fertilizers. The prospect is considerably
brighter when the production of ligno-cellulosic ethanol becomes
commercially viable. In this connection, judicious selection of non-
food biomass from perennials with high photosynthetic efficiency
as feedstock would be most helpful. Electrification of vehicles
via HEV, PHEV and BEV technologies offers a great prospect for
progressively reduced energy consumption and GHG emissions.
However, the latter is assured only when the electricity used by
PHEVs and BEVs is generated by zero- or low-carbon sources,
which means that CCS is a necessity if either coal or NG is used as
feedstock. Similarly, CCS will also become necessary if fossil fuels
are used as feedstocks for hydrogen. Because of the relatively short
driving range per charge and the relatively high cost of the
vehicles, BEVs may be conditioned primarily for specific applica-
tions like urban driving. For HFCVs, there are major challenges
including the high cost of building the hydrogen delivery infra-
structure, potentially limited resources of platinum and the likely
high cost of the vehicles. When affordability and driving range
become major controlling factors in private transportation, a PHEV
run on zero- or low-carbon electricity and say, E85 using cellulosic
ethanol may be one of the most attractive options in a carbon-
constrained world.
The sustainability pathways involving the electrification of
vehicles appear to be more viable than others especially because
they can start from the lower-cost and more affordable option of
HEVs and step up to the costlier options of PHEVs and BEVs. An
immediate challenge in the step up is the consumer acceptance of
the costlier options even as the long-term trend of gasoline price
is expected to move up. It is unlikely that PHEVs, and more so for
BEVs, will become generally acceptable by consumers until the
2020s at the earliest. Another challenge in the case of PHEVs
coupled with biofuels like cellulosic ethanol is the development of
marginal land in the face of the limited availability of cultivable
land in China (see, e.g., Cui and Kattumuri, 2010) and the need to
consider the impact of both direct and indirect land use change on
GHG emissions. Yet another challenge is the urgent need to
increase the production of clean electricity especially from safe,
nonfossil energy sources.
Acknowledgment
This project was supported by funding from Ford Motor
Company and British Petroleum. We would like to thank the
personnel of many major energy and auto companies for provid-
ing helpful information critical to the successful completion of
this project. We also thank the unnamed reviewers for their
helpful comments.
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