ESG Economist - Emission scenarios for road mobility

Whereas GHG emissions for the Netherlands declined by 29% between 1990 and 2022, GHG emissions from mobility declined by only 8%

We have defined three possible future emission scenarios for cars, buses, vans and trucks namely policy/positive scenario, a base scenario and a negative scenario

For the policy scenario, which is also the positive scenario, we assume that the targets that the government has set will be reached and the charging and fuelling infrastructure will be ready on time. In this scenario, we also assume that the technologies develop in such a way that shortages of metals and/or batteries will be avoided and that marginal abatement costs of crucial technologies will decline and stimulate the adoption of zero-emission vehicles.

In our base scenario, we take government policy as a starting point but also incorporate some of the bottlenecks such as affordability, shortages of metals and batteries, delay of infrastructure readiness. The marginal abatement costs of the crucial technologies will decline but not enough to considerably stimulate the adoption of zero emission vehicles beyond the early movers.

In the negative scenario, we assume that there are substantial bottlenecks. The affordability remains an issue in cars as prices will rise due to substantial shortages in metals and/or batteries. The technologies will remain expensive resulting in a substantial longer use of old vehicles with internal combustion engines. Moreover the infrastructure will be far from ready for both battery electric vehicles and for fuel cells. There remains limited availability of green hydrogen and synthetic fuels for road transport and they remain expensive.