The Life Cycle Assessment Of Energy Externalities In Road Transport

Road transport has made great contributions to the economic constructions and people’stravelling, at the same time it also imposes negative externalities on society. Theseexternalities include environmental and road damage, accidents, congestion, and oildependence. The cost of these externalities to society is in general not reflected in the currentmarket prices in the road transport sector. Among these, environmental damage, especially therelated problems caused by the emission pollutants is being highly concerned nowadays.Recently, automotive manufacturing industry has become a big fuel consumer in Chinaand an important source of air pollution. So an accounting method focused on GHGs andother pollutants emission in Chinese road transport sector is essential and practical significant.This paper proposed a whole-life cycle methodology to account the energy consumed andpollution emitted in China, which is based on GREET2011model. And then monetize theeffects caused by pollutants, which is comfortable for us to evaluate.In this study, the basic knowledges of externalities were first introduced and also theexternalities of road transport sector were brought into discussion, especially the analysis ofits effects of environmental externalities. These include the pollutant types, impact pathwayand monetized method. Then the theory and framework of life cycle assessment wereexplained and applied in the field of energy analysis. Later the life cycle process of threetypes of road transport energy including oil, biomass and natural gas were generallydescribed.Finally, upon these, the life cycle energy and environmental assessment was conductedfor eight kinds of fuel used in road transport sector. The scope covered all stages in the lifecycle of these energies including mining, processing and vehicle operation. Finally, themethod of Mean Value Transfer was employed to monetize the environment external cost ofthe whole life cycle and each stage pollutants emitted for each kind of energy. The resultsindicate that the biggest two of the environmental external cost are DME (0.43yuan) and M90(0.38yuan), the smallest one is BD20(0.097yuan) for which the negative externality of energyis relatively small.