Investigating the Future of Road Freight Transport in Europe under Different Scenarios

Fighting climate change has become a major task worldwide. Alongside the United States and China, Europe is considered as one of the biggest greenhouse gases (GHG) emitters. Therefore, the European Union (EU) has set long term strategies to reduce emissions. One of the key energy sectors to emit greenhouse gases is transportation. In this context, EU has turned its eye toward cutting emissions from the transport sector and has recently put its stamp of approval on a reworked law banning all new sales of internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles from 2035. Despite representing only 2% of the vehicles on the road, trucks account for more than a quarter of road transport emissions in the EU and have been increasing every year since 1990. In order to investigate the impact of transportation projected policies on the heavy-duty sector, we develop the Mobility and Energy Transportation Analysis (META) Model, a python-based model to project market penetration of conventional and alternative fuel technologies, energy demand and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Moreover, we investigate the impact of introducing e-fuels-produced through a process involving carbon capture and hydrogen production from renewable energy- as a refueling option for ICE conventional vehicles. Adding to battery electric vehicles and fuel cell electric vehicles, META explores the opportunities of Mobile Carbon Capture (MCC) in decarbonizing the heavy-duty sector and penetrating the market shares up to 2050. The study shows that MCC could represent an economically promising solution to decarbonize the heavy-duty sector, through its decreased total cost of ownership (TCO) and marginal abatement cost (MAC) values compared to battery electric trucks (BETs) and fuel cell electric trucks (FCETs) until 2035.