Sustainable Mobility

Technical and environmental challenges for the automotive sector

Week 1 Session 3 Pollution and pollutants part 1 :

Pollution and legislations
Maria Thirouard

IFPEN / IFP School 2014

This first part is going to be focused on the environmental context, pollution and legislation.

Environmental Context
We are constantly receiving information about climatic changes. The impact of human activity on
these changes is a general concern. But the equation is not easy to solve.
We would like to reduce the impact we have on the planet without dramatically changing our living
standards and of course, it is impossible to forget the economic factor which will be the driving
force of the final solution.
The transport sector is one of the main sectors contributing to certain pollutant emissions. But to
understand why, we need to look at how the pollutants are produced in thermal engines.

Pollution and Pollutants

Oil is the energy most commonly used for
transport. We will see how the oil is transformed
into fuel. For now, you need to know that the fuels
are molecules with a high content of Carbon and
Hydrogen.
In some cases, sulfur or oxygen can also be found
in the fuel. Since the molecules are different in
size, we use a general term to describe the
chemical composition of the fuel. This is CxHyS.
In thermal engines, the fuel reacts with the air during combustion.
The air is mainly composed of Nitrogen and Oxygen. So what are the products of combustion?
There are quite a few.
If combustion is complete, then, CO2, Nitrogen and water are produced. If the fuel contains sulfur,
then the sulfur reacts with oxygen to produce SO2. In that case, SO2 is also produced during
complete combustion.
However, complete combustion is very rare.

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IFPEN / IFP School 2014

When combustion is not complete, in addition to CO2, Nitrogen and water, other products and
gases are produced.
The main ones, those which are produced in highest concentration, are:
- carbon monoxide or CO
- unburned hydrocarbons or HC
- nitrogen oxides or NOx
- and particulates emissions.
These products are classified as pollutants because they produce an undesired effect either on the
environment or on peoples health.
This is why several emissions regulations have been developed in some countries.

The pollutions effect is different depending on the scale we look at.

We can talk about local or global pollution. The difference is important because the risks, the
influencing factors and also the measures to control pollution will be different from one scale to
another.
When we talk about local pollution, we are referring to the pollution in the scale of a city. We
might have a pic of local pollution for several hours or days. Weve already seen episodes of high
local pollution in cities like Paris, London or Shanghai.
Local pollution primarily affects peoples health. Some of the pollutants coming from the transport
sector contributing to the local pollution are CO, HC, NOx and soot, in other words, the products of
incomplete combustion.
Global pollution refers to the pollution of the planet. Global pollution concerns the global
warming. Most of the global warming is being caused by increasing concentrations of greenhouse
gases produced by human activities. CO2 is commonly known as a greenhouse gas.
It is important to understand that, since CO2 is a product of complete combustion, it is not
regulated in the emissions legislation. Every time oil-based fuel is burned, CO2 is produced.
Even though we cannot avoid producing CO2 out of combustion, what we can do is try to reduce to
the minimum the CO2 emissions.

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The amount of CO2 produced is directly proportional to the amount of fuel consumed by the car.
This means that cars with lower fuel consumption produce less CO2 emissions.

Legislation and pollutant emissions

Some governments are forcing car manufacturers to produce cars with lower fuel consumption.
This is an important measure to reduce CO2 emissions. With The Kyoto Protocol, industrialized
countries all over the world signed a treaty that sets binding obligations to reduce emissions of
greenhouse gases. The goal is to prevent dangerous human-induced changes in the climate system.
This graph shows the decreasing trend of CO2 emissions for all new cars sold throughout the years.
The US is in green, Europe in blue, Japan in yellow and China in red. As a consequence of the Kyoto
Protocol the transport sector in these countries has undertaken to reduce the average fleets
emissions of new cars sold.
The goal in Europe is to achieve 95g of CO2/km in 2020 for the average car fleet.

Source: The International Council on Clean Transportation

The transport sector is one main contributor to the greenhouse gases. In this graph you can see an
example of CO2 emissions in the atmosphere throughout the years in France. In red you have the
transport sector.

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CO2 produced by the transport sector is around 20% of the total emissions.

You can see on the following graph, the emissions of CO, NOx and particulates, emitted throughout
the years in France by different contributors.
In red you have the transport sector. You can see here that the part of those pollutants produced
by the transport sector is very high. You can also see that there is a continuous reduction of the
pollutant emissions over the years. This is a consequence of cleaner engine technologies introduced
by car manufacturers as a response to emission regulations.

Emissions legislation includes not only specific emissions limits, but also specific driving cycles and
test procedures. Laws on emissions are introduced successively in stages and the limits are
continuously decreasing.

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Lets see the European example:

The first stage of the emissions legislation was called Euro 1. It was introduced in 1992. The limits at
that time are shown in red. At the end of 2014, the Euro 6 stage was effective. This is shown in
blue. As you can see, legislation becomes more stringent as time goes by.

In the same way, many other countries have developed a legislation.

There are 3 main legislations in the world that you can see in the next map:
- the European, called Euro 1 to 6,
- the United States, called Tier I or II,
- and the Japanese legislation.
For now, each country follows one of those three regulations.
You can see the countries following the European legislation are in different shades of blue. The
countries following the US legislation are in different shades of brown. The Japan-based legislation
is currently followed by Japan and is represented here in green. Not all the countries are at the
same limits but the goal is the same: to force the transport sector to produce cleaner vehicles.

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However, the problem is not that simple. Producing cleaner vehicles is of course going to help. But
there are many other factors to take into account.
To name two, we can mention the demographic factor and the average age of the fleet.
The demographic explosion is going to increase the demand for mobility. So even if cars are
cleaner, if the number of cars continues to increase, the pollutant emissions are going to increase
too. In Europe and the US the car market is pretty stable, but this is not the case in countries like
Brazil, China or India.
Another important factor is that the emissions legislation only applies to new vehicles. The average
age of the vehicle fleet is variable in each country. In Europe and the US the average age is around
10 years. When weve seen how much the legislation has changed over time you can understand
that the efforts we make to produce new cleaner cars are partly counter-balanced by the old cars
that are still running
This is not an easy problem.

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IFPEN / IFP School 2014