Europe’s Latest Energy Insanity: Banning Combustion-Powered Cars?

T he European Union is currently considering regulations to ban combustion-powered vehicles by 2035. Such regulations would destroy Europe’s automobile industry, which in Germany, for example, employs over 3 million people and constitutes 12 percent of the nation’s industrial base. That’s unfortunate, say the EU Greens, but nevertheless the ban must be done, to avert the existential threat posed by climate change.

However, as with most Green ideas, the proposed reform makes no sense whatsoever. Its economic harm aside, it would do nothing to reduce carbon emissions. To understand this, it is necessary only to look at the numbers.

An automobile engine needs to burn about 80 grams of fuel in order to release 1 kilowatt-hour (kWh) of raw energy. Eighty-five percent of the fuel is carbon, while the rest is hydrogen. Internal-combustion engines are about 25 percent efficient, while diesels, which are popular in Europe, are typically 35 percent efficient. This means that, depending on whether it is diesel- or gasoline-powered, a car will release between 200 and 300 grams of carbon per useful kWh of motive power.

Now let’s look at how much carbon is released in the production of Europe’s electricity.

Nuclear-powered France produces an average of only 122 grams of carbon per kWh generated, according to figures from ElectricityMaps.com, for the period December 2021 through November 2022. This is less than the 200 gm per kWh released by diesel-powered vehicles. Put aside for a moment the carbon emissions and toxic pollutants associated with building electric cars: If you just wanted to reduce the carbon emissions associated with automobile use, you could do so in France by replacing combustion-driven cars with electric vehicles.

But in Green Germany and most of the rest of antinuclear Europe, the carbon emissions associated with power production are much greater than those generated by automobile engines. At 553 gm/kWh in Germany, they are twice as great. So rather than reducing carbon emissions from vehicles, abolishing combustion-powered cars in Europe would roughly double them. (The U.S. average is 371 grams of CO₂ per kWh, so until and unless we go nuclear in a big way, electric cars will do nothing to reduce carbon emissions here either.)

Furthermore, Germany has elected to replace part of the energy it previously obtained from its nuclear plants (before it shut them down in a fit of environmentalist virtue-signaling) with biomass. So powering all those cars with German electricity will involve burning down whole forests, resulting in massive conventional pollution and killing of wildlife.

But wait, there’s more. Because the Germans, not wishing to shut down their automobile industry, have proposed an alternative. Combustion vehicles will be allowed, the Germans say, but only if they use liquid fuels produced from carbon dioxide drawn from the atmosphere by electric power.

This is a very bizarre proposal. It is true that flex-fuel cars that will run equally well on gasoline and methanol can be readily built. Furthermore, depending on the price of oil, methanol can sometimes be competitive in price with gasoline. However, such methanol is manufactured by using either natural gas or coal as feedstock. These provide the source of the energy content of the methanol, so all that is necessary to produce it is to move that energy content into a more convenient form. In contrast, CO₂ has no energy content, so all the energy in such fuel would have to come from the carbon-intensive electric power being used to produce it. The useful power generated would then be cut further by the 25 to 35 percent efficiencies of the combustion engines burning such expensively produced “e-fuels.”

As if that weren’t nutty enough, the German proposal further requires that the CO₂ used to make the e-fuels be gathered from the atmosphere rather than from combustion sources such as fossil-fuel power plants or steel mills. This makes no sense whatsoever. The CO₂ content of air is about 420 parts per million (ppm). The CO₂ content in a smokestack can be as high as 200,000 ppm. So it is hundreds of times more expensive — and energy intensive — to gather CO₂ from the air than it is to take it from widely available concentrated artificial sources. But that is how the Germans propose to do it.

All this nonsense could provide great material for a satiric novel or an extremely funny movie. Unfortunately, it is not comic fiction but rather the sad reality of energy policy-making in Europe. The old continent’s citizens will suffer the consequences.