Smart mobility - well-to-wheels efficiency of internal combustion

engine vehicles

Michal Sura michsoora@gmail.com

The EU has adopted very ambitious targets to fight climate change. The European
Commission (EC) currently has two goals to be achieved by 2030 and 2050. By 2030,
the EC’s goal is reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 55% compared to 1990
levels. The next EU’s goal is to be carbon neutral by 2050. Carbon neutrality is a
balance between emitting carbon into the atmosphere and absorbing carbon from the
atmosphere by forests, oceans, soil, etc. We should stop cutting down forests and
reduce fossil carbon emissions to achieve desired equilibrium. It would need to plant
millions of trees for carbon capture, but it cannot solve the climate crisis alone. It needs
to reduce fossil carbon emissions produced by human activities. We need the transition
towards zero-emission vehicles in the transport sector. Vehicles with internal
combustion engines still have their supporters who claim that these vehicles can also
use fossil-free biofuels or hydrogen and still have a potential to keep step with other
alternative zero-emission propulsion systems. However, we do not want to address this
issue in this article, we would like to quantify the efficiency of well-to-wheels internal
combustion engines for comparison with other propulsion systems.

Internal combustion engine

An internal combustion engine (ICE) is a heat engine in which the combustion of

a fuel occurs with an air in a combustion chamber.

ICEs are mostly powered by fossil fuels like gasoline or diesel. In the following, we
would like to describe the well-to-wheels efficiency of ICE powered by mentioned fossil
fuels.
Crude oil recovery

The oil recovery is a process of extracting crude oil from an oil field. Past
published data in the United States showed energy efficiency from 97% to 99% for oil
recovery. In some parts of the world, the efficiency could be as low as 96% (1).
Published data by European Commission (Joint Research Centre Institute for Energy
and Transport) the energy efficiency 97.3% (2). We can see that the efficiency ranges
from 96% to 99%, let’s say that the energy efficiency of oil recovery is 97%.

Crude oil transportation to the refinery

Crude oil to EU market is transported by sea and pipelines and energy efficiency
is 99% for crude oil transportation (2)

Crude oil refining

There is 100 kJ energy needed to produce 1 MJ refined diesel and 80 kJ energy

needed to produce 1 MJ refined gasoline (2). It means that diesel refining is 90%
efficient and gasoline refining is 92% efficient.
Gasoline and diesel fuel distribution from the refinery

The total average figure for Europe is estimated at 20 kJ per MJ of delivered fuel,
it means that energy efficiency is 98% for gasoline and diesel fuel distribution (2). The
energy efficiency of gasoline and diesel fuel distribution is almost comparable to values
from Bossel & Eliasson work (3), see below.

The energy efficiency from well to a vehicle’s tank consists of partial efficiencies
from a chain of partial efficiencies. 97% (crude oil recovery efficiency) x 99% (crude oil
transportation efficiency) x 90/92% (crude oil refining efficiency) x 98% (fuel distribution
efficiency) and the total energy efficiency from well to vehicle’s tank is 86% in case of
diesel fuel and 87% in case of gasoline. But let’s supposed that average crude oil
refining efficiency (gasoline and diesel) is 91%.

0.97x0.99x0.91x0.98=0.86

We can see that efficiency from well to a vehicle’s tank is 86% (for both types of fuel)
and it is obvious that 14% of energy was “lost” in the process.

The fuel consumption and efficiency of ICE vehicles depends on variables such as load,
speed, size and temperature of the engine, as well as ambient temperature. In this figure below,
the utilized engine power is shown on the x-axis along with the resulting energy efficiency
coefficient on the y-axis for diesel and gasoline (4).
 We can see that the peak efficiency for diesel vehicles is around 40% (at
p=0.17), while the peak efficiency for gasoline vehicles is approximately 30% (at
p=0.2). But the efficiency for diesel vehicles is only 10-12% and 15-18% for gasoline
vehicles at 80% of utilized engine power.

There is efficiency approximately 28% for diesel and gasoline engines at 40% of
utilized engine power, so let’s suppose 28% efficiency for both types of engine.
Let’s calculate the total well-to-wheels efficiency for ICE vehicles. So here we go,
86% (well to tank efficiency) x 28% (tank to wheels efficiency) and the result is 24%.

0.86x0.28=0.24

Well, we found that well-to-wheels efficiency of the internal combustion engine

vehicle is 24% and we were very generous in the case of tank to wheels efficiency. If
well-to-tank efficiency is 10%-12%, well-to-wheels efficiency is less than 10%.

1, https://greet.es.anl.gov/files/wft2tv3v
2,https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/bitstream/JRC85326/wtt_report_v4a_april2014_pubsy.pdf
3, https://afdc.energy.gov/files/pdfs/hyd_economy_bossel_eliasson.pdf
4, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306261920309752