SAE Update - October 2022 - 8

TECH FOCUS:SUSTAINABLE
ENERGY TECHNOLOGY
Globalizing sustainable mobility
compare an EV against the
other options for personal
mobility.
But that's still a small part of
the mobility picture. Human
mobility covers a massive range
of scales, from a single person
walking through huge transport
ships moving raw materials and
goods around the world to large
airplanes carrying people and
freight.
And even human mobility is
far from homogeneous. Going
from home to work could mean
a short walk, a bus or subway
ride, car-pooling, or driving fairly
long distances each way. And in
developing economies access to
good jobs, education, and health
care can require not just the
means of transport, but also the
infrastructure to enable it. As
mobility engineers, our duty is
not just to address one part of
the broader mobility space but
to consider how the work we do
integrates with that of our
colleagues working in other
areas.
Let's consider the scale of
mobility. The global population is
around 8 billion people, and
roughly 2 billion live in wealthy
urban areas. The majority of the
population does not have the
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October 2022
economic resources to access the most developed
mobility technology, nor in many cases the
infrastructure to support it (electrical grid, gaseous
fuel delivery, and so on). Sustainability ought to imply
that we are developing technologies and products
that can provide clean, efficient, and affordable
mobility to everyone - not just the wealthy urban
few. And when we consider the population, we also
need to consider how much energy we consume for
mobility. Most estimates are that mobility consumes
20% of global energy production today. That comes
out to the equivalent of 2.8 million tons of oil or 32
million megawatt hours of electricity per year.
Clearly it is not sustainable to simply use fossil
resources to continue to supply the mobility sector
with energy. But when the scale of the problem comes
into focus, it also does not appear sustainable to
attempt to switch the entire sector to the use of lowdensity
energy systems such as electricity and
hydrogen. This is not to say that there aren't
significant opportunities for those energy systems to
make dramatic reductions in local greenhouse gas
and pollutant emissions - there are. But building out
the electrical production and distribution system in a
sustainable way will require significant investment and
time. So we must develop parallel solutions that
satisfy the whole population.
This broader view of sustainable mobility ought to
include any viable technology. This could include
renewable fuels made from waste biomass, new
biofuels made from non-food crops using improved
production methods, hybridization to reduce carbon
emissions from vehicles that cannot yet be
electrified, and possibly even on-board carbon
capture to allow use of fossil fuels with reduced
greenhouse gas impact. No one of these
UPDATE
SAE Update - October 2022

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of SAE Update - October 2022
