Webinar on Alternative Fuel Vehicle Air Pollutant Emissions (Text Version)

This is a text version of the video for Webinar on Alternative Fuel Vehicle Air Pollutant Emissions presented on Jan. 28, 2015.

COORDINATOR: Welcome and thank you for standing by. At this time all participants are in a listen-only mode until the Question and Answer session of today's call. At that time if you would like to ask a question you may do so by pressing Star 1. Today's meeting is also being recorded. If you have any objections you may disconnect at this time.
I now would like to turn the meeting over to Ms. Sandra Loi you may begin.
SANDRA LOI: Great thank you so much. Welcome everyone to a Clean Cities Webinar this afternoon. I hope everyone is doing well. Today's Webinar is Alternative Fuel Vehicle or AFV Air Pollutant Emissions Focused. Today we have Andrew Burnham from Argonne National Lab and he's part of the Clean Cities team there. He'll lead this Webinar today and we'll discuss issues related to the air pollutant emissions from Alternative Fuel and Advanced Vehicles.
He'll also discuss how various AFVs or alternative fuel vehicles differ from conventional vehicles and how this has changed due to recent regulations. So welcome again thank you for joining us today. We will have a Q&A at the end of the—of Andy's or Andrew's presentation—excuse me—and we also will be posting the PowerPoint as well as the recording on our Clean Cities Webinar Archived pages so be sure to take a look at that.
We host these Clean Cities Webinars on a monthly basis. We sometimes have more than one per month so thank you for those who might be stakeholders and not as familiar with the series and we appreciate you being here.
I'm going to go ahead and introduce our speaker and then let him go ahead and get started on his presentation. So Andrew Burnham is an Assistant Environmental Scientist at Argonne National Laboratory. Again as I mentioned he's part of our Clean Cities team where he has worked since 2004. At Argonne he developed tools and provides technical analysis regarding the environmental and economic impacts of Alternative Fuel and Advanced Vehicles for the Department of Energy's Clean Cities program.
In addition he performs life cycle analysis to help update the greenhouse gases regulated emissions and energy using transportation or the GREET model. So Andy I'll go ahead and let you get started. You may begin.
ANDREW BURNHAM: All right thank you very much Sandra and thank you everyone for joining in on this Webinar.
So today I'm going to talk about alternative fuel vehicles conventional vehicles and air pollutant emissions in general. First I'm going to give you a little outline of my presentation. I'll first start talking about air pollutant emissions in general and AFLEET tool which we developed for Clean Cities to look at these emissions as well as some other environmental and cost indicators of alternative fuel vehicles.
The next I'll talk about some trends air pollutants and the larger trends in the US and then so dig into motor vehicles. Then I'll get into some specifics on heavy duty diesel versus alternative fuel vehicle emissions. And then finally I'll touch a little bit on my duty gasoline first the AFVs as well.
So first thing I wanted to talk about when we talk about air pollutant emissions is well what are they? There's a wide range of air pollutant emissions and vehicles can have like several that are, you know, important for the emissions from them. So first I want to start off, you know, discussing each of some of the key emissions.
So one is carbon monoxide. The low levels can exacerbate cardio vascular disease basically reduces oxygen delivery at high levels it can be very poisonous. Particulate matter is something that can cause some serious health affects impacting the lungs and heart. Really the health impacts depend on the size.
So fine particulates which are typically called PM2.5 cause more damage than larger particulate matter you'll often hear about PM10 as well. Nitrogen oxides cause various environmental problems but the primary concern is ozone volatile organic protons have kind of the similar concerns. They have various environmental issues and health risks but the primary concern when we're talking about vehicles is its impact on ozone. And VOCs can be called actually a lot of different things and there's kind of different groups depending on which emission, you know, chemical it is.
So light duty vehicles it's regulated as non-methane organic gases and then for heavy duty vehicles it's non-methane hydrocarbon. So there's a lot of alphabet soup with these air pollutant emissions but, you know, this is hopefully a good way to get some of these things straight.
And then finally the—was talking about ozone which isn't a direct emission from vehicles it's actually produced from a reaction of NOCs, VOCs and sunlight. This can cause really serious health affects, you know, impacting the lungs and heart unintelligible, you know, a big concern as well as other key issues. So really the regulatory focus on vehicles has primarily been on particulate matter and ozone because those are the most widespread and biggest concerns relating to human health.
So getting back to what we have done in this area Argonne has supported Department of Energy's Clean Cities with various tools for the past 15 years and in that time we've been looking at air pollutant emissions as well as other emissions and environmental and petroleum use and other things like that. So the first tool that we developed was AirCRED which estimated ozone precursor and carbon monoxide emission credits from alternative fuel vehicles for state implementation plan. That tool was around for about a decade.
The next tool that we worked on was just basically a tool for the recovery act grants to look at the greenhouse gas emission and air pollutant emission benefits for the—those grant proposals. And then most recently we released the AFLEET tool which estimates cost of ownership petroleum use greenhouse gas emission and air pollutant emissions of light and heavy duty vehicles. The tools available on the—Argonne's GREET Web site as well as the AFDC if you haven't downloaded it already.
So digging into what AFLEET does relating to air pollutant emissions it really is based off AirCRED which, you know, we used for a long time. So AirCRED was Department of Energy and EPA co-sponsored tool and it was developed using EPA's mobile model which is a model that calculates the emissions of different types of vehicles light duty and heavy duty the computer program. And then we also used annual emissions vehicle and engine certification data to examine the relative impacts of alternative fuels and conventional counterparts like gasoline and diesel.
EPA is typically solely focused on gasoline and diesel and historically have been, you know, that's their charge is to really focus on the big emitters so that's what they have focused on. But we do have data on alternative fuel vehicles and can, you know, make some assumptions to try and calculate and that's what we did with AirCRED. So we followed that approach with AFLEET but we now use EPAs MOVES model for gasoline and diesel emissions.
And so the MOVES model really updated what mobile did just basically improved the ability to estimate air pollutant emissions and can show really that the NOCs and PM emissions from vehicles were actually much higher than the previous estimates that mobile has done. And then as part of this process we kind of went through the various fuel associations to send them, you know, what we had done and show them, you know, try to get some, you know, peer review on the tool.
So that was an important part of this process. And we plan to continue to update the tool. So Argonne researchers have been examining the latest work related to heavy duty vehicle emissions so that work is ongoing but findings from that will be implemented in unintelligible months that is finished.
Now I'm going to talk about some air pollutant trends. One of the, you know, big goals of, you know, the Clean Air Act has been to reduce, you know, air pollutant emissions and improve the human health impacts of breathing air. And so we can see in this chart from 1980 to 2013 the ozone air quality has, you know, actually improved the emission—the amount of ozone in the air has decreased about 33% so there's been significant improvements. You know, for a long time a lot of counties are in—were in non-attainment.
You know, just recently, you know, it's been pushed that, you know, there's been much less than there has been in the past so that's the good news. Here is a chart from EPA that I think is an interesting kind of broad look of, you know, emissions and the economy and all of these things because, you know, there's a lot of things that go on that it can impact air pollutant emissions. We have the technology of the vehicles and how many vehicles are out there how many miles do they run.
You know, and then we can also think about other emission sources like power plants and industrial and manufacturing. And so some of those things have changed where, you know, it might been offshore to things like that. But we do still see that, you know, emissions just in general this is total emissions have decreased about 60% since 1980. So there's been, you know, significant improvement and vehicles have been a big part of that. You know, one of the other indicators that we see is that vehicle miles travel has increased, you know, pretty significantly since 1980.
It's flattened out recently but, you know, we still have seen emission reductions. So I want to talk a little bit about that. So the previous start had air pollutant emissions kind of combined together and that's really not a good way to look at emissions. You want to look at them individually because they all they have different impacts. So in this chart we can see what percentage of motor vehicle emissions account for the total emissions from the US. And so we can see that carbon monoxide is primarily from light duty vehicles this is the Red bars.
The Blue is heavy duty vehicles. So it's a major emission from light duty vehicles carbon monoxide. For NOCs it's actually equally a big source from heavy duty as well as from light duty. Particulate matter is lower than a lot of other sources but it's important because of the proximity of the emissions to the public but that's why there's a big concern there for vehicles. And then similarly there's a larger VOC emissions from light duty vehicles. So that gives you a little broad scope of, you know, what motor vehicle emissions are in relation to other sources.
So the regulatory focus has been on ozone and not specifically as NOCs typically drives ozone emissions VOCs can drive it in some cases but typically it's been NOCs that, you know, people are focused on and then also particulate matter. And the reason being is that 135 million people live in ozone non-attainment areas today so that's a significant portion of the US population.
And you can see obviously large regions of California are in non-attainment but also, you know, other areas in the country with major populous are in non-attainment areas. So, you know, it's a significant concern nationwide. Then when we look at PM about 63 million people are in PM2.5 non-attainment areas so a lot of the same regions but, you know, a little bit less. You know, again big concerns in California as well as the Northeast. One air pollutant that isn't necessarily a major concern today is carbon monoxide.
So there's no counties no population that is in non-attainment for carbon monoxide. So we've done, you know, a relatively good job at reducing those emissions. So, you know, regulations going forward typically have been pushing the PM and NOCs. And we can see that really in some of the regulations for heavy duty vehicles as well as light duty. And so on this chart we see that the heavy duty NOCs and PMs standards have been reduced by about 98% since 1988.
So it really made really significant progress and have pushed heavy duty engines to be much much cleaner than they were, you know, only 20, 25 years ago. To do so to get to these very low levels there's required heavy duty vehicle engine manufactures and vehicle systems to really implement engine controls such as engine controls and after treatment equipment such as diesel particulate filters for particulate matter and selective catalytic reduction for NOCs and it's typically called SCR and that's where you would use diesel exhaust fluid and a diesel vehicle to reduce the NOCs emissions.
Now here's a chart of heavy duty vehicles emission standards and we can see in this top line here that really fuel hasn't been a major focus for heavy duty vehicles. One they're kind of a small contributor so there hasn't been a lot of regulatory focus there but the big reductions have been for NOCs here and then for PM as well they've been reduced significantly.
Looking at light duty we see similar trends that carbon monoxide hasn't really been a huge focus even for light duty vehicles which are, you know, kind of the primary concern for the emissions just because, you know, we're not in really non-attainment status in the US for it. And the focus really has been on again on NOCs emissions as well as PM. The field standard kind of looks weird that why would they let the standard actually jump up. But really the changes have been to account for longer time frames of the vehicle.
So jumping from Tier 0 to Tier 1 standards they wanted to make sure that the vehicle's emissions were good for longer periods of time because vehicles are now lasting much longer than they use to and so that's kind of an important, you know, factor to think about when we're talking about emissions especially on gasoline and diesel that these vehicles are lasting a long time so there's concerns with deterioration of their emissions that they can get much worse as they get older.
And that's where, you know, alternative fuel vehicles may have some benefits because they don't necessarily need to have certain after treatment equipment that may sale in gasoline and diesel. So that's something to think about. Now with the standards tightening one of the interesting aspects of understanding like where do air pollutant emissions come from is to realize that vehicles don't have to all the same they drive differently and there can be concerns with gross emitters where a vehicle may not be operating like it should be.
And in this chart what we see is that for light duty vehicles for, you know, several different pollutants, you know, 10% of the vehicles account for, you know, 80%, 90% nearly 100% of different pollutions. So it's a very small percentage of light duty cars that cause a lot of the pollution. So, you know, there's been efforts to reduce emissions from vehicles by inspection and maintenance programs so in your state you might have to go and get your vehicle tested.
That's the reason why to make sure you're not a gross emitter. And if you are then you're supposed to go get the vehicle fixed so it doesn't have those concerns. When we look at heavy duty it's actually, you know, somewhat different that basically there's no clear trend that, you know, there's a significant amount of vehicles causing a lot of the emissions and this is just for NOCs but, you know, that's the general trend is that heavy duty vehicles we're not seeing as many gross emitters. For light duty we do see that.
So some of the ways that—other ways other than inspection maintenance to try and address that is to, you know, as I talked about a little bit is the certification standards or trying to make sure that there's onboard diagnostics and there's ability to really analyze, you know, how long the after treatment and omission control will last for and, you know, try to push the auto makers to, you know, guarantee that—those equipment won't fail and if does fail give the user some type of a warning that, you know, you need to go get your vehicle checked.
So with those kind of factors together, you know, the tightening of emission standards the pushing of increased onboard diagnostics and inspection and maintenance we have seen, you know, a reduction and omission. So, you know, what this chart actually shows is that, you know, really there's turnover of all the vehicles and those vehicles typically, you know, are vehicles that were built on your less strict emission standards.
So as we go from, you know, the 1990 where pretty much all of the, you know, there's a significant amount of vehicles under Tier 0 standards which are basically like the initial standards and very high emissions. At some point we got rid of those and next was Tier 1 and so, you know, 2001 is significant, you know, portion of vehicles with Tier 1. And now today, you know, a significant apportion of the vehicles are Tier 2. So, you know, that's kind of the progress that has been made to reduce emissions at least from gasoline and diesel.
But where are we today, you know, kind of comparing let's say a decade ago of the emissions from light duty and heavy duty vehicles? So we've seen VMT kind of plateau it's, you know, in the last ten years of, you know, maybe 5% higher than it was in 2002 but vehicle emissions have dropped, you know, between 40% to 50%, you know, depending on the pollutant. So significant progress has been made but, you know, there's still work that needs to be done.
And next I'm going to talk about heavy duty diesel and alternative vehicle emissions. So kind of I've demonstrated, you know, the stricter regulations have resulted in significant improvements and diesel emissions. So what we have in this chart is kind of the testing of different emission standard vehicles. So we have a 1998 vehicle a 2007 vehicle and a 2010. But each of these are under different emission standards.
And as you kind of go left from right you see basically the diesel emissions and this—these are for transit buses have gotten significantly lower than they were, you know, compared to the 1998 and sometimes the 2007 vehicle for carbon monoxide for hydrocarbons or VOC NOCs is significantly reduced kind of in a step wise manner and then PM again, you know, very significant reductions in diesel emissions.
Now looking at fuel affects when we talk about well what about alternative fuel vehicles. One of the big concerns when people were trying to implement biodiesel was the concern that it would increase NOCs
And so now that we've moved to the 2010 emission standards where diesel vehicles pretty much all need to use SCR to control NOCs we've seen that the emission control technologies have really overshadowed the fuel affects for biodiesel that, you know, here the two diesel tests on the left and then here are some of the biodiesel tests and we really don't see much difference at all. There's a little variation between the fuels but in general the FDR technology has taken care of that.
So biodiesel doesn't have really higher emissions or lower emissions you can basically consider them pretty similar. Now when we look at particulate matter, you know, and let's compare diesel and natural gas engines both have, you know, made great progress. So in this first chart we look at certification data and we see the heavy duty diesel and actually was above the standard when it was released in 1996 and the heavy duty natural gas was significantly below. And so, you know, there's significant reductions, you know, for the natural gas engine.
And now today the engine that's getting certified at nearly 0 emissions so, you know, under the testing procedures there's really no difference between a natural gas and a heavy duty diesel. So that's kind of really showed the, you know, the standard have really pushed emissions down for diesel and, you know, you might not see, you know, alternative fuel vehicles showing any benefits, you know, for certain pollutants.
And when we look at end use testing, you know, you can get some different results because there's, you know, the standard on the certification where they, you know, tested one way. But if you test the vehicles while they're being used, you know, you can get different results. But actually, you know, California has done recent testing and showing that these diesel vehicles with particulate filters have really just, you know, really reduced the particulate emissions down to 0 so they've really made some great progress.
As part of this California testing they've done some comparisons of alternative fuel vehicles so I'll be talking about that in a little bit as well. So we've seen the similar improved certification improvements for NOCs. Here again is the 1996 Cummins engine and they had, you know, the diesel and natural gas version. We see the natural gas version having, you know, significantly lower emissions and here in 2013 the, you know, the standards have tightened significantly.
There is still some, you know, small benefit but kind of on an absolute basis it's pretty small it's only .1 grams and, you know, even though it's 50% lower compared to the older engine technology which was only 33% lower but had, you know, a much bigger absolute value. So when we look at unintelligible testing of diesel engine it shows that there still needs to be progress made. So California tested some vehicles with the SCR systems and what they found was that the vehicles were not always meeting the emission standards basically.
And so they are concerned that, you know, SCR performance in the real world isn't the same as it is on a certification test. So some of the things in the real world that concern, you know, people like diesel SCR is cold starts kind of operating conditions that won't get the SCR to work properly and then deterioration of the after treatment equipment as well. So I have a couple of more slides on this because it's an interesting area and it's really where the regulatory focus is.
So what the testing has shown is that SCR is highly effective at highway speeds but there's a big potential for off cycle emissions. So where we see, you know, basically this is a chart that shows diesel hybrids and natural gas vehicles. All the vehicles show very very low emissions at highway speeds 40, 50 miles per hour. The after treatment equipment on diesel works fine and natural gas, you know, is low in general.
But once we get into some of the lower speed driving conditions where you have lots of stop and go potentially or you're just starting the vehicle and, you know, it's warming up there's potential for diesel, you know, higher emission. So, you know, that's concerning to, you know, the air pollutant and air emission regulators because of, you know, the potential that even though the certification data shows very low emissions, you know, you don't actually see them in the real world.
And for natural gas we're actually seeing, you know, these little triangles show that they actually operate pretty well even at these lower speeds and lower, you know, stop and go driving. So that's been an interesting, you know, recent testing results. So what we've seen is California look at kind of some different scenarios of driving natural gas unintelligible report trucks in different duties like also they look at a near dock situation, you know, near the port local delivery and then something farther regional hallway of driving, you know, on the highway.
And what they found was that the diesel emissions were significantly higher in these near doc report operations they were slightly lower in the local, you know, operations more stop and go and then regional they're, you know, pretty low. But when we compare them to the spark ignite of natural gas or the HPDI natural gas they're more than significantly higher and then especially as you get more to these port type driving cycles the emissions are very very high. So the natural gas trucks don't, you know, exhibit this kind of concern because they don't use SCR.
And so this is, you know, again, you know, a big concern especially in California for those who are interested in, you know, making sure ozone emissions are very low.
And then moving on to a different pollutant carbon monoxide so I get a lot of questions when we do, you know, AFLEET analysis is that, you know, strangely enough that natural gas isn't always cleaner and alternative fuel vehicles aren't always going to be cleaner. And this then we can, you know, be a good example is carbon monoxide.
So spark ignited heavy duty natural gas engines historically have had higher carbon monoxide emissions and then even today their emissions are much higher. The reason why is that diesel engines use a different type of combustion called lean burn and so what lean burn means is that there's just more oxygen available to oxidized carbon monoxide and to CO2. Spark ignited natural gas engines use a different type of combustion and it's called stoichiometric there's less oxygen available and thus it has higher emissions.
They're all under the standard which we see here and significantly so it's just, you know, without, you know, significant push from regulators to maybe add some after treatment or anything like that the vehicle manufacturers and engine manufacturers for alternative fuel vehicles, you know, might just feel comfortable with where they are without, you know, wanting to add a lot of expensive equipment to that.
Now looking at propane vehicles there hasn't been a lot of tests of heavy duty propane but a recent analysis kind of is part of this California study, you know, there's been a little bit of work on that. And so and then the other area that had shown some results for propane is the certification data. So when we look at certification data we see that there is some emission benefits for NOCs for the recent propane kind of medium heavy duty engines. But in some cases they have higher emissions.
They're still meeting standards but their emissions are—can be slightly higher. So why does this potentially happen? Well propane engines are conversions of gasoline engines and so what we found is that the deterioration factors is—which is basically the way that a lot of manufacturers try to estimate what the emissions are of a vehicle, you know, at 50,000 or 100,000 miles but they don't always just run the engine for 100,000 to see what the emissions are at that point that would take a long time.
So what they do is they kind of do some tests to see what happens to the equipment how does it deteriorate and then they apply factors. Well what we have found is that for, you know, small volume manufacturers which are typical of, you know, like propane engine vehicle manufacturers is that their emissions are for deterioration factors are actually higher than those of gasoline.
So the OEMs are able to, you know, they have the money they're able to, you know, do more detailed testing to show that their engines won't deteriorate but propane often gets just kind of factors from the regulatory agency from sometimes outdated tests. So that's an area that I think is potentially interesting that, you know, that needs more research, you know, more detailed deterioration tests could actually show that these propane vehicles actually have lower benefits or lower emissions.
The only real on use—end use testing that we've found, you know, doing research on this have been on some pre-2010 standard propane vehicles and diesel vehicles so this means they weren't required to reduce NOCs significantly but we still can, you know, hopefully gain a little knowledge from this testing. And so this is school buses and what I found was that the NOCs emissions for propane were actually very very low compared to diesel.
These diesels didn't have SCR and if, you know, if they did you would expect these diesel emissions to be lower but this results, you know, still pretty interesting that the propane had, you know, still very low NOCs. And then when looking at particulates these diesel vehicles had, you know, particulate filter end, you know, in the results for propane that they're actually still, you know, significantly lower than those with particulate filters.
Again we see this trend of spark ignited, you know, vehicles with stoichiometric combustion having much higher feel than diesel diesel's very loud. So I think, you know, we continue to see that trend. But more work needs to be done in this area to really understand, you know, this I think and hopefully, you know, we'll see from that California testing better results.
So kind of in conclusion to the heavy duty vehicles we've seen that the standards have become increasingly strict. They've required significant improvements and engine controls and after treatment systems. Alternative fuels have, you know, they're possibly taking advantage of this by having simpler and less costly after treatments. The emissions may be lower they might not be but they don't necessarily need particulate filters or SCR systems which can add, you know, thousands of dollars to certain, you know, vehicle types.
But we have seen some certification benefits for AFVs but, you know, those benefits have diminished at least on the certification side. There might be relative benefits, you know, it might be 50% lower but, you know, the absolute number it's smaller. But, you know, more importantly the certification is what are they doing in the real world? So end use benefits are possible for AFVs especially if diesel controls or after treatment don't operate properly.
So and then and kind of as I showed with the carbon monoxide concern for spark ignited alternative fuels may not always be better for every pollutant due to differences and, you know, engine types and controls and after treatment. So California had recently adopted some optional NOCs heavy duty standards to incentivize further reductions. So you can certify at basically I think 50% lower or 75% lower or 90% lower than the actual standard. And they've provided some funding through the Carl Moyer Program to, you know, get grants to actually get these engines out there.
And them funding work primarily with the natural gas vehicles to see if they can get, you know, these very, very low NOCs emissions and, you know, they've potentially could, you know, go to a standard of, you know, .02 instead of .2 and that would push, you know, diesel even further and, you know, if the natural gas vehicles are able to meet that standard that would, you know, show a benefit and hopefully, you know, increase their sales.
Now I'm going to, you know, talk a little bit about light duty gasoline and alternative fuel vehicle emissions. Some recent analysis that we've done light duty AFVs and hybrids has shown that they can typically show some, you know, emission reductions compared to their gasoline counterparts.
It often depends on the model of vehicle but for compressed natural gas we can see, you know, 20% reduction in NOCs 40% reduction in VOCs and, you know, 25% in CO 85 vehicles also show, you know, some benefits as well, you know, close to 30% reduction for NOCs and CO and then, you know, maybe 5% reduction from VOCs. We have the same kind of issue for propane that we saw for heavy duty that for NOCs and CO they're, you know, pretty much the same, you know, maybe a slight increase.
And then VOCs are higher for the propane vehicles. I think, you know, this, you know, similar issues with deterioration factors need to be addressed there that if, you know, the small volume manufacturers are propane light duty cars and trucks can show that their emissions don't deteriorate that fast we will see that these vehicles have some, you know, air pollutant emission benefits. Now I haven't talked too much about hybrids at all but one day we'll fill that in as well that, you know, hybrids, you know, can show emission reductions as well.
Further work is needed to examine like plug in hybrid electric vehicles. There is some concern in that area related to the kind of operation of those vehicles where you might be driving all electrically where you're only using a battery and then you might need to accelerate, you know, very hard to get on an on-ramp to go to the freeway. And so in some of those vehicle systems that might turn on the engine and the concern is that, you know, if the after treatment equipment like the catalyst are not warmed up or they're not at the proper temperature you could have high emissions in those situations.
So I think further work needs to be done on that but looking at certification data typically the plug ins are pretty clean and their meeting standards obviously they're out on the road. One of the interesting trends for light duty vehicles is that really there's been a significant interest in gasoline direct injection. Vehicles—so the market share of gasoline direct injection has increased from about 4% in 2009 to nearly 40% in 2014.
The reason why OEMs are doing gasoline direct injection is that they can use basically smaller engines with turbo charging and then they can maintain the performance that people want but also improve fuel economy. The problem with these vehicles is that testing has showed that they can increase the amount of particulate matter like by on a mass basis so they have more particulate emission and they're also increasing the number of fine particulates.
So there is, you know, big concerns there that, you know, if we are pushing these vehicles to, you know, improved fuel economy but they might be also causing some health concerns. So there have been some, you know, technical solutions, you know, bought about to try to maybe address these. So it might need a particulate filter kind of similar to what is happening with the heavy duty diesels.
So this may provide some opportunity for alternative fuel vehicles or hybrids or plugins potentially at a lower cost where these vehicles might not need a particulate filter, you know, and so that might reduce the incremental cost. I think that's, you know, still something a bit of a question mark. But I think it's an interesting area to think about.
So light duty vehicles, you know, its similar trends compared to heavy duty. The standards have become increasingly strict. It's required significant improvement in engines and controls and there's really been a push to continue to reduce passenger car and truck emissions. So EPAs Tier 3 standards are being coordinated with California standards as well as some of the greenhouse gas standards.
And what these standards are going to do is increase the durability of gasoline and other light duty vehicles so they're trying to push again to make sure that there's not gross emitters. And then by 2017 this rule is going to reduce sulfur content by two-thirds and it's going to reduce NOCs and VOCs by about 80% particulate matter by 70% and carbon monoxide by 75%. So there's going to be significant amounts of, you know, reductions and emissions from new vehicles, you know, gasoline and alternative fuel vehicles, you know, the same.
What potentially, you know, an advantage for all fuels is that they, you know, may have simpler less costly after treatments so, you know, as I mentioned before the direct injections may require particulate filters. Thought restrictive standards still pose some challenges for AFVs as well. They have to meet these real strict standards and it's going to take engineering work to get there.
And the regulatory focus is really kind of pushing towards 0 emission vehicles like battery electric all electric vehicles and fuel cell vehicles to try and reduce the air pollutant and other concerns from these vehicles. So California and nine other states, you know, a lot in the East Coast have adopted these 0 emission vehicle programs to kind of push standards or push vehicles, you know, to be 0 emitting.
Well in summary, you know, AFLEET has been using the EPA's MOVES model to estimate the emission certification results to compare alternative fuel vehicle and conventional counterparts. We're updating this based on the latest research that's being done in the area to try to incorporate more end use testing and understand those—that situation. The EPA's light and heavy duty standards have become increasingly strict both conventional and alternative fuel vehicles that made significant reductions to meet those standards.
And what we've seen is all the fuels continue to have some emission benefits the absolute certification benefits or absolute benefits are smaller than they were in the past everything's gotten cleaner. But there still is, you know, some relative benefits. And we also have seen some, you know, testing that they're showing that there's end use emission benefits possibly as well for some alternative fuel vehicles. Future standards will pose, you know, potential opportunities and challenges for AFVs.
The potential of challenges to, you know, do the engineering to meet these standards but the potential, you know, benefits are that they again could have less cost after treatment and they have the ability to get to, you know, 0 emissions if you go to, you know, better electrical fuel cells.
So I want to thank Clean Cities for sponsoring some of this work some of my colleagues Hal Michael and Marcy from Oregon and supporting this work as well. So if you guys have any questions I'd be happy to take any.
SANDRA LOI: Great thank you so much Andy. Simone can we go ahead and open up the lines for questions please?
OPERATOR: Certainly at this time if you would like to ask a question you may do so by pressing Star 1. Please record your first and last name clearly as your name is required to introduce the question. To withdraw a question you may do so by pressing Star 2. Once again at this time if you would like to ask a question please press Star 1.
SANDRA LOI: Great thank you. While we're waiting again thank you to Andrew for his presentation today some really great information. I do have one question that came in online Andrew if you want to go ahead and take that now. The question is, “Why isn't methane included in vehicles VOCs?”
ANDREW BURNHAM: So one of the things I didn't talk too much about was the differences between greenhouse gas emissions and air pollutant emissions. So sometimes, you know, we—people can get confused as, you know, what is a greenhouse gas emission and what is an air pollutant emission? So methane is really the primary concern for methane CH4 is its impact on climate change while VOCs or non-methane hydrocarbons the concern is typically related to its impact on ozones.
So it's really just that different chemicals or different pollutants can react differently. And so methane doesn't have major concerns creating ozone so that's really why it's not included.
SANDRA LOI: Okay great thank you. Simone do we have any questions on the phone line?
COORDINATOR: There are no questions in queue at this time. But as a reminder if you would like to ask a question you may do so by pressing Star 1. No questions in queue at this time.
SANDRA LOI: Okay great. Andrew did you have anything else you wanted to add or- oh hold on one second I see another one online. I'll go ahead and give you this one. “Do these measures include wells to wheel data or just tailpipe emissions and how would measuring one or the other impact the results?”
ANDREW BURNHAM: The focus of the presentation was on the tailpipe emissions so there is definitely differences between tailpipe and well to wheels. So well to wheel or life cycle emissions tries to account for the emissions from all the sources related to producing a fuel transporting the fuel to get to your vehicle. So let's say for, you know, natural gas you have to drill while you pump it out and there's some transmission through pipelines and processing you through that process you want to calculate all the emissions of all the equipment required to get that natural gas into your car.
Here what I was talking about is really the emissions coming from the tailpipe. And the real reason why, you know, the focus is on tailpipe emissions is, you know, for vehicle emissions air pollutant emissions you're primarily concerned with exposure to humans and, you know, the public in general. So, you know, that typically happens in urban areas and the emissions happen, you know, kind of where you area.
When you look at the life cycle a lot of the emissions can be shifted to areas, you know, ten miles 100 miles maybe 1,000 miles away because, you know, they don't all happen in the same place you can be getting say oil from, you know, internationally from the Middle East or something like that. So it's just, you know, it's basically kind of the question you want to answer, you know, how do these emissions impact health in my area? So when you're trying to address that question you really want to look at vehicle emissions.
And then, you know, you might want to look at if there's any other sources of emissions elsewhere that contribute like refineries or things like that that might also impact. So that's kind of the difference.
COORDINATOR: We have a question in queue.
SANDRA LOI: All right go ahead.
COORDINATOR: Steve Russell your line is open sir.
STEVE RUSSELL: Great I—recently Heavy Duty Trucking has just released this study on Clean Diesel Exhaust Shaped for Animal Lungs Probably Humans and they lead off by saying, “Modern diesels burn so cleanly that laboratory rats suffered no lung illnesses during a lengthy study of their exposure to exhaust gasses, according to the Health Effects Institute, which is releasing a report today.” I'm not sure I believe this but it is coming from the diesel industry the trucking industry.
In response to that.
ANDREW BURNHAM: I haven't seen that study so I can't respond to it directly but I think what the recent testing has shown that diesel vehicles can operate very cleanly if everything's going, you know, as planned. Basically if the SCR is working as it should if the particulate filters are acting as it should the emissions should be very low. The concern is that, you know, those things, you know, can fail SCR requires, you know, an operator to actually put SCR, you know, this diesel exhaust fluid on the vehicle.
And then it requires, you know, some, you know, some of the particulate filters can require maintenance and things like that. So there's just concern with, you know, when they're not operating correctly. And so that's probably, you know, the—would be my take away from, you know, trying to address that.
STEVE RUSSELL: The other concern I have is that, you know, there are many older vehicles on the road today that percentage of new vehicles is very small so we're still being exposed to amazing amounts of pollutants because people just aren't buying the new trucks.
ANDREW BURNHAM: Yes…
STEVE RUSSELL: Their assumption…
ANDREW BURNHAM: …a that's an important thing and so I talk about that when I discuss AFLEET in general is that, you know, the biggest bang for you buck to improve emissions from vehicles is to get the oldest dirtiest, you know, vehicles off the road. And so, you know, that can be done in different ways but, you know, getting those older vehicles that, you know, are again dirty or, you know, if you're doing some inspection and maintenance program to try and find the gross emitters, you know, that's also an effective way to reduce emissions.
And then what we've seen is that, you know, alternative fuel vehicles, you know, have the ability to, you know, potentially have better emissions in situations where, you know, the diesel might not be operating, you know, the exact way it should be. SCR fails or particulate filter fails because some of the equipment is simpler and doesn't need the maintenance you have, you know, are more guaranteed, you know, guaranteed chance that, you know, the emissions are going to be low from those vehicles.
And so California has really been pushing, you know, the NOCs standards and have been funding development of natural gas vehicles to try and meet those standards they really want to see, you know, heavy duty vehicles be extremely low emissions. And they almost they call it basically having power plant level emissions or reducing the emissions to such a low level that they're basically equivalent to a natural gas and power plants. So, you know, there's been a lot of focus on that. And so I think that's an interesting area to look at.
STEVE RUSSELL: Okay thank you.
COORDINATOR: Again as a reminder if you would like to ask a question you may do so at this time by pressing Star 1.
SANDRA LOI: All right thank you. We have another question that came in online Andrew. “Are there a measure—are there measurements of NU's PM2.5 emissions from heavy duty CNG?”
ANDREW BURNHAM: Yes we do have that I didn't present those results they're very low. And I think we, you know, with Argonne—Argonne's developing a report on that and I think they're, you know, in the same ballpark I'd have to kind of pull up the numbers but if whoever asked that question wants to see that I can send them some tables or references to show them what the numbers are but their at least equivalent or lower than diesel.
SANDRA LOI: Great thank you. Simone any other questions on the phone?
COORDINATOR: Currently at this time there are no questions in queue.
SANDRA LOI: Great. We're about two minutes from the top of the hour. Andy or Andrew I don't know if you had any additional or final thoughts? And just as a reminder we will be unintelligible the recording and the PowerPoint—oh I see another question coming in—on the Clean Cities Webinar our unintelligible pages so look for that.
Let me go ahead and give you this question. “You mentioned biodiesel not having higher or lower NOCs emissions when compared to regular diesel. Do you mind letting us know when the study was done it seems like they've been getting some back and forth at their—in their area at the state level?”
ANDREW BURNHAM: Well we've looked at two different studies on this. One was a study of buses and it was basically they tested European vehicles in the 2002 timeframe and then in the US they tested US vehicles so I presented the US vehicle result. And those included, you know, the 2010 emission standard vehicles. So they are the most recent vehicle, you know, types.
So and then there's been some studies by NREL actually, you know, has looked at this as well as they've seen, you know, there is some variance but they've, you know, basically concluded that there's really no, you know, significant difference between, you know, B20 and diesel for NOCs emissions. So if that person wants to, you know, follow up with me I can send them the studies.
But those were also, you know, post 2010 engines that NREL tested.
SANDRA LOI: Okay great another question. “Is measuring only from the tailpipe how would a study convert emissions of BEV's and PATVs against legacy and other alternative fuel types?”
ANDREW BURNHAM: Yes that's a really good question and I think, you know, these type of emission factors and what AFLEET can do and, you know, give you a sense of what emissions might be if you are in a metropolitan planning organization or some area that's, you know, focusing on the air pollutant emissions in the region you have to develop inventories.
You have to kind of take it to the next step you say what are the emissions from the vehicles, you know, and you might want to look at the other sources, you know, where are the power plants in our area.
So it would require, you know, some further study. We do have in the GREET model which, you know, I think Sandra talked about that they work on here is we do have some comparisons of the upstream versus the vehicle level emissions. So you can use that to get a relative sense of, you know, which one's higher which one's lower. And then depending on, you know, what power plants are in your area and things like that you can potentially do an analysis that way.
SANDRA LOI: Okay great. Any other show phone questions?
COORDINATOR: There are no questions in queue at this time.
ANDREW BURNHAM: And then I think Sandra is sending out the slides some of the backup slides kind of talk about the—EPA's national ambient air quality standards and one recent development is that they have proposed to reduce the ozone levels that are allowed and so that's something that's going to, you know, kind of part of what light duty vehicles emission standards are getting, you know, lower because they're trying to meet those standards.
So there's a couple of backup slides that are, you know, kind of talk about what areas are in non-attainment and what EPA, you know, projects for that so people are interested in that and those are in the back up slides as well.
SANDRA LOI: Right well thank you for including those and if anyone wants to reach out to Andrew his email is there it's aburnman@anl.gov. You can also reach out to myself Sandra Loi. And I guess we'll go ahead and wrap up for today. Thank you Andrew for your presentation again with information. Thank you for sharing with all of us. And as I mentioned it will be available on the Clean Cities Webinar Archives pages and don't hesitate to reach out if you have any additional questions later on.
And again thank you everyone for joining us today.
COORDINATOR: This now concludes today's meeting. All lines please disconnect.