Different energy mixes will fuel plug-in hybrid cars

Few drivers know exactly which well in which country their gasoline comes from, and from an environmental standpoint, it may not matter.  Burning petroleum from the United States, Canada, Russia or Iran would each release large amounts of harmful greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

However, the blossoming development of market-ready plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) will change this calculation. 

Unlike petroleum, which comes almost uniformly from drilled wells, the electricity to be consumed by PHEVs originates in a number of different natural resources: in the form of renewables such as wind and solar energy and non-renewables like coal and natural gas.

The manufacturing process for each of these different sources of electricity results in different quantities of greenhouse gas emissions, and therefore each has a markedly different impact on the environment. 

Scientists at the US Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory have begun to examine the precise effect of this new portfolio of different fuel sources for plug-in vehicles on our environment.

Led by engineers Michael Wang and Amgad Elgowainy, the Argonne team expanded and used the laboratory's Greenhouse Gases, Regulated Emissions and Energy Use in Transportation (GREET) model to assess which types of power plants are likely to generate the electricity used by PHEVs in different regions of the United States.