The heavy-duty vehicle future in the United States: A parametric analysis of technology and policy tradeoffs

Abstract

We present a parametric analysis of factors U.S. Class 7-8 trucks through 2050. Conventional diesels will be more than 70% of U.S. heavy-duty vehicles through 2050. CNG trucks are well suited to large, urban fleets with private refueling. Ultra-efficient long haul diesel trucks are preferred over LNG at current fuel prices. a b s t r a c tWe present a parametric analysis of factors that can influence advanced fuel and technology deployments in U.S. Class 7-8 trucks through 2050. The analysis focuses on the competition between traditional diesel trucks, natural gas vehicles (NGVs), and ultra-efficient powertrains. Underlying the study is a vehicle choice and stock model of the U.S. heavy-duty vehicle market. The model is segmented by vehicle class, body type, powertrain, fleet size, and operational type. We find that conventional diesel trucks will dominate the market through 2050, but NGVs could have significant market penetration depending on key technological and economic uncertainties. Compressed natural gas trucks conducting urban trips in fleets that can support private infrastructure are economically viable now and will continue to gain market share. Ultra-efficient diesel trucks, exemplified by the U.S. Department of Energy's SuperTruck program, are the preferred alternative in the long haul segment, but could compete with liquefied natural gas (LNG) trucks if the fuel price differential between LNG and diesel increases. However, the greatest impact in reducing petroleum consumption and pollutant emissions is had by investing in efficiency technologies that benefit all powertrains, especially the conventional diesels that comprise the majority of the stock, instead of incentivizing specific alternatives.

Impact of biodiesel on regulated and unregulated emissions, and redox and proinflammatory properties of PM emitted from heavy-duty vehicles

“…There has been an increase in the number of heavy-duty vehicles (HDVs) worldwide as a result of economic growth. In the United States (US), HDVs accounted for 12.1% of total petroleum consumption in 2012 and transported 70% of freight by tonnage (Askin et al, 2015). The emissions from these trucks can have adverse consequences on the environment and human health.…”

Review of life cycle greenhouse gases, air pollutant emissions and costs of road medium and heavy‐duty trucks

“…One example is papers that project emission factors for the future. For example, Askin et al (2015) provide an evolution of emission factors from 2010 to 2050 for PM 2.5 , NOx, and GHG in mg/ton-mile F I G U R E 1 Systematic review visual summary and fuel consumption for compressed natural gas (CNG), liquefied natural gas (LNG), and hybrid. Only the values of 2010 and 2050 were used in the data compilation, disregarding the intermediate ones.…”

“…Concerning CNG GHG WTW emissions, authors show different values due to efficiency, different assumptions about methane leakage in the natural gas transport phase (Askin et al, 2015;Tong et al, 2015), and projections for future values, as the one in Askin et al (2015) (514 g/km in 2050), are optimistic about the improvements made in the natural gas pathways to control methane emissions. For biodiesel, authors name high energy consumption as the main F I G U R E 4 Box plot of GHG emissions (gCO 2e /km) for each technology (top) and accumulated probability of the absolute difference between diesel and each technology (bottom, negative values represent higher diesel values) reason for the low environmental performance (Ližbetin et al, 2018) and state that its emissions in the production phase equal those of diesel (Sen et al, 2017).…”

Pollution Tradeoffs for Conventional and Natural Gas-Based Marine Fuels

“…For our upstream analysis we employ the Greenhouse Gases, Regulated Emissions, and Energy Use in Transportation (GREET) model developed by Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), Version 2018 [43]. GREET allows researchers to evaluate fuel production emissions for a wide variety of fuels obtained using over 100 different pathways and has been used extensively in previous work to evaluate alternative fuels for transportation technologies [7,37,39,[44][45][46][47][48][49]. For downstream emissions analysis we use the Total Energy and Environmental Analysis for Marine System (TEAMS) model developed by a subset of these authors with support from the US Maritime Administration.…”