AAAR 33rd Annual Conference
October 20 - October 24, 2014
Rosen Shingle Creek
Orlando, Florida, USA
Abstract View
Estimating Climate and Health Costs from Emissions of On-road Gasoline and Diesel Vehicles
SHANTANU JATHAR, Allen Robinson, University of California, Davis
Abstract Number: 374 Working Group: Health Related Aerosols
Abstract On-road gasoline and diesel vehicles account for more than three-quarters of the fuel used by the transportation sector and therefore are a significant source of greenhouse gases, air toxics and ozone- and aerosol forming precursors. Transportation research and policy analysis studies lack a nuanced treatment of air pollutants. For example, these studies focus on emissions at the ‘tailpipe’ that often ignore the distinction between primary (directly emitted like carbon monoxide or elemental carbon) and secondary pollutants (chemically formed in the atmosphere like ozone or sulfate), which have different spatiotemporal patterns and therefore different climate and health effects. Further, to the best of our knowledge, these studies have ignored the atmospheric formation for secondary organic particulate matter.
In this work, we used two large datasets, one that measured primary pollutants (Kansas City PM characterization Study) and the other that measured both primary and secondary pollutants (May et al., 2014; Gordon et al., 2013a,b) to build distributions of emission factors for primary and secondary, gas- and particle-phase pollutants for on-road vehicles. We used these distributions to characterize the inherent vehicle-to-vehicle variability. Using a Monte-Carlo simulation and published cost estimates for climate and health effects, we estimated pollutant-resolved marginal climate and health costs in cents-per-mile for on-road gasoline and diesel vehicles as a function of engine emissions standard and/or control technology. Light-duty gasoline vehicles, medium-duty uncontrolled diesel trucks and diesel particulate filter equipped diesel vehicles have marginal climate+health costs of 0.9 to 2.2, 5.2 to 19.7 and 3.9 to 5.0 (5th to 95th percentile) cents-per-mile respectively. We find that for all vehicles, climate costs, which are dominated by CO2, outweigh health costs. Health costs are dominated by secondary organic particulate matter formation for gasoline vehicles, by elemental carbon emissions for uncontrolled diesel vehicles and appear to be negligible for diesel particulate filter equipped diesel vehicles.