Australia has been warned that it needs to adopt the strongest strongest international fuel efficiency standards available today if it has any chance of achieving its net zero targets, and to ban sales of new fossil fuel cars by 2035.
It has also been warned that adopting the main car lobby’s push for voluntary standards and traceable credits would be the equivalent of doing nothing and would condemn Australia to retaining the dirtiest and most polluting car fleet of any advanced economy.
The assessment has come from the high respected International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) in its paper Fuel efficiency standards to decarbonize Australia’s light-duty vehicles.
“Only the most ambitious scenario considered, the one aligned with world-class standards, would come close to fully decarbonising Australia’s light duty vehicle fleet by 2050, as it eliminates 95 per cent of well-to-wheel CO2 emissions,” the ICCT says.
It suggested Australia needed to go even further than that, and ban the sale of new internal combustion engine vehicles by 2035 and speed up the electrification of the grid.
“To achieve a fully decarbonized or almost fully decarbonized (light vehicle) fleet by 2050 … (Australia needs to) adopt stringent standards starting no later than 2024 that align with the world-class ambition and achieve 100 per cent ZEV sales by 2035,” the report says.
Australia ranks poorly on fuel efficiency and emissions for both passenger cars and utility vehicles (utes), but the car lobby doesn’t want to change.
The ICCT says the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries’ (FCAI) fuel efficiency standards proposal is not only inadequate to promote EVs, it would allow backsliding of internal combustion vehicle emissions – leading to more costs for consumers, and more emissions.
The middle road, a state-led drive to encourage more EV adoption, will get the national fleet to 87 per cent EVs, but does see existing emissions from internal combustion cars fall to the same level as under the best case scenario, 123 g/km.
The ICCT Â suggests lumping all passenger and light commercial vehicles into the same category as a way to prevent car makers from cherry picking more lenient standards, and setting up a strong compliance and monitoring program.
It also suggests Australia needs to adopt more stringent testing procedures because the current one underestimates emissions by more than one third.
Transport is Australia’s #3 emitter
Average carbon dioxide emissions for Australian passenger cars next year is expected to be 177 g/km, down from 181 g/km in 2019 thanks to technology upgrades.
But it remains one of the highest in the world and the one fuel efficiency test Australia does have, the 1997 New European Driving Cycle (NEDC) test, is no longer functional for today’s vehicles. By 2018, results from the NEDC versus real world use diverged by 38 per cent.
Currently, transport accounts for a quarter of Australia’s emissions, behind electricity generation and stationary energy sources. Passenger cars and light commercial vehicles — together these are light duty vehicles — account for 12 per cent of the country’s total emissions.
In November, the new federal government launched a consultation process on mandatory national vehicle fuel efficiency standards in order to make a dent in those high numbers, give Australians an incentive to buy EVs, and meet new emissions targets of 43 per cent reduction by 2030 below 2015 levels and net zero by 2050.
It plans to issue a discussion paper by the end of the year, amid high support among Australians for both EV uptake and fuel standards, according to The Australia Institute.
But from a transportation perspective, if it wants to reach those targets the government’s standards will have to go further than international best practice: the report’s state-led scenario will get the transportation sector to 42 per cent reduction by 2039, and the world-class scenario to 43 per cent by 2037.
“In 2030, both scenarios have roughly the same emissions level as the reported 2005 level. Thus, Australia will likely need to use additional measures to reach such emissions reduction earlier,” the report says.
43% only possible with most stringent option
The ICCT paper compares four scenarios: baseline, the FCAI option, state-led targets, and a federally imposed adoption of world class standards.
The baseline scenario assumes fuel efficiency changes of about 3 per cent a year from 2024 from improving technology generally, and minimal EV sales, getting Australia to fleet-average emissions of 110 g/km by 2050.
The car lobby group scenario is FCAI’s proposal in 2020 for voluntary emissions targets for light and heavy passenger cars, which does not include a mechanism to assess compliance nor any penalties for non-compliance.
It also gives vehicles credits for using new low-emissions tech that isn’t looked at in its testing — a detail the ICCT report says would make EV sales under this scenario the same as under the doing-nothing baseline. The ICCT expects average emissions of 83 g/km by 2050.
“We did not include the various FCAI credits in our modeling. Including those credits further lowers the stringency level of the FCAI target. For example, with FCAI super credits, the EV sales share would drop to 6 per cent in 2025 and 9 per cent in 2030, and these are significantly lower than our assumed levels,” it said.
For the state targets-aligned scenario which looks at individual EV targets, the report assumed EV sales to double every five years
“The more stringent scenario with a State-targets aligned national standard would get Australia to fleet-average emissions of 82 g/km in 2030 and 19 g/km in 2035. Furthermore, the world-class standards scenario would need to reach 50g/km fleet-average emissions in 2030—less than half of FCAI’s proposed target—and 0 g/km in 2035,” the report said.
Rachel Williamson is a science and business journalist, who focuses on climate change-related health and environmental issues.