ELECTRICAL ENERGY
There are more than 16 million electric cars driving on roads worldwide, which collectively consume roughly 30 terawatt hours of electricity every year. As a type of fuel for vehicles, electricity is undoubtedly the most environmentally friendly, since it doesn’t emit any of the traditional greenhouse gases ejected by vehicles, known as tailpipe emissions.
However, there’s still one environmental downside that hangs over the head of electric fuel: its origin. Although electrically powered vehicles are clearly the way forward in tackling emissions from cars, the initial electricity supply for electric vehicles largely originates from dirty energy. Coal and gas remain the largest sources of electricity globally. In the US, for example, the annual carbon emissions for an all-electric vehicle are around 1.7 tonnes due to the source of electricity, despite each vehicle emitting zero gases itself.
Only around 30 per cent of the world’s energy comes from renewable sources such as wind farms and solar panels.
As the world shifts to more renewable sources of energy, electric energy will only become greener and more environmentally suitable, unlike fossil fuel alternatives.
Bioethanol works on a similar principle as biodiesel, using agriculturally grown crops to produce a sustainable fuel. However, rather than extracting oils, bioethanol production involves fermenting vegetation and distilling it into a concentrated and combustible alcohol.
Bioethanol is already used at petrol pumps. When filling up their car in the UK, drivers will typically use E10 petrol. E10 petrol is a combination of 90 per cent petrol and 10 per cent ethanol – hence ‘E10’. There are also E85 fuels that consist of 85 per cent ethanol, reducing the amount of petrol used and thus tailpipe emissions, including nitrogen oxide pollution. However, one major drawback of high-bioethanol percentage fuels is their ability to create harmful ground-level ozone, as well as increasing emissions of a potentially carcinogenic chemical called acetaldehyde.