Electric Vehicles and Advanced Biofuels

The decarbonization of the transport sector is fundamental to achieve emissions reductions consistent with the 2 degree goal. It must start with the decarbonization of personal vehicles, and then extend to heavy-duty vehicles, aviation, and ocean shipping. The potential for this lies in high performance batteries, hydrogen fuel cells, advanced biofuels and synthesized fuels, but all of these are still pre-commerical or at least not yet deployed at a very large scale. Electric vehicles can only be considered a genuine low carbon solution is the electricity is produced using low carbon energy sources; that is why it is so important to design comprehensive, deep decarbonization strategies. The battery life of these vehicles must be improved and electric vehicle batteries must be required to achieve higher energy and power density, lengthen the vehicle range and owe the upfront costs. Public-private partnerships with cities and local authorities will play an important role and infrastructure networks will have to be built up. Liquid biofuels present an interesting prospect for decarbonization efforts, but have a clear downside in that they consumer land and water resources, but interesting developments in the use of algae, bacteria, and other non-foodstuff products to produce biofuels could be promising, along with efforts to produce fuels directly from sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide in a process called artificial photosynthesis. This video is part of the module The Key Technological Challenges of Deep Decarbonization.

This video is licensed under the CC BY-NC-SA license.