Estimating the Energy Demand and Carbon Emission Reduction Potential of Singapore’s Future Road Transport Sector

About 20 % of the world’s CO₂ emissions originate from transport. Many countries are committed to decarbonizing their transport sector. Singapore pledged to electrify a whole host of its land transportation fleet which includes private cars, public buses, ride-hail vehicles, and motorcycles. This paper proposes a simple empirical framework to estimate the future energy demand after 100 % electrification has been realized for nine selected road transport vehicle sub-classes and calculate the carbon emission reduction potential based on various scenarios. The present energy demand for each vehicle sub-class is first calculated based on parameters like petrol and diesel consumption, heat value and density of petrol and diesel, population of vehicle type, and average mileage per vehicle sub-class. Several scenarios are presented, and an analysis is carried out to derive a range of emission factors which are used to estimate the carbon emission reduction potential. Relative to the present day, the future energy demand estimates reveal an overall reduction of 73.60 %. Full electrification and a “clean” power generation mix could lead to an emission reduction as high as 93.64 % across all vehicles sub-classes, with private cars having the highest reduction potential.

Energy demand, Road transport, Carbon emissions, Decarbonisation, Singapore

10.3390/su16114754