The Complete Emissions Life Cycle Assessment of Electric Buses in the Australian Transport Sector
- Publication Type:
- Thesis
- Issue Date:
- 2022
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Australia is increasingly experiencing the environmental impact of global warming. In recent decades, society has gradually become increasingly aware of the harm caused to the global environment by excess fossil fuel consumption. Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions and their contribution to global warming are considered to be one of the most pressing environmental issues of the present day. Transportation is the third-largest contributor of GHG emissions in Australia, contributing to 18.9% of total GHG emissions. Therefore, there are strong and urgent incentives to reduce emissions from the transportation sector. This problem can be rectified through the electrification of the vehicle’s powertrain; consequently improving energy efficiency, reducing GHG emissions, and yielding a number of additional benefits. Thus, transitioning the transport sector to electrified powertrains have been perceived as the optimal solution to decarbonise the transport sector. This thesis employs a technique known as Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) to properly quantify and assess the environmental impacts from the transport sector.
First, this research starts by introducing Australia’s development in the transition to electrified heavy-vehicle powertrains, the LCA technique, research objectives, and the outline of this thesis. Next, this research conducted a study that evaluated and calculated the magnitude of GHG emissions produced from the implementation of electric bus charging stations. Results show that the operations phase is heavily dependent on the electricity grid-mixes carbon intensity and contributes the most greenhouse gas emissions (98.8%), followed by production (0.69%), recycling and disposal (0.48%), installation (0.01%), and transportation (0.01%). Then, an evaluation of the environmental impact of electricity generation and four different charging methods was conducted. The study finds that the optimal charging arrangement is to deploy electric buses with small battery capacity in urban and suburban settings, large battery capacity in highway settings, and recharge with opportunity pantograph chargers or stationary charging stations. Moving on, an LCA was conducted to investigate the production, assembly, transportation, maintenance, and decommissioning phases of diesel, hybrid, and electric bus production. The results show that the electric bus has a higher total environmental impact than the diesel and hybrid bus (18.2% and 14.7% higher, respectively). After that, this research assessed LCAs of Lithium-Ion Batteries (LIBs) from various literature sources and found that the average global warming potential and cumulative energy demand from LIB production were 187.26 kgCO₂e/kWh or 19.78 kgCO₂e/kg, and 42.49 kWh/kg, respectively. Finally, a summary and conclusion of this research as a complete entity concludes this dissertation.
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