Air Quality Woes May Finally Force Paris to Rethink Its Love of Diesel Fuel

[cpzilliacus]

Atlantic Cities: Air Quality Woes May Finally Force Paris to Rethink Its Love of Diesel Fuel

France's air pollution crisis became yet more dramatic Monday, as Paris banned half of its region's cars from the roads.

After highly polluted air became trapped close to the ground across France last week by unseasonably warm weather, authorities introduced free public transport over the weekend in Paris, Bordeaux, Caen, and Rouen. Now Paris has announced that only cars with odd numbered registration plates will be allowed to drive as of 5:30 this morning. To enforce the ban, police patrols will monitor traffic and dole out €22 fines to transgressors. Should poor air quality continue–and it's highly likely it will–on Tuesday cars with even numbered registration plates will take to the roads alone. Many are already asking whether the temporary ban will really work, and whether such short-term measures will be enough.

[Chris]

Diesel is quite unpopular in the Netherlands for non-business use. Although diesel costs less ($ 7.50 per gallon instead of $ 8.90 per gallon for gasoline), there is an annual road tax that is prohibitively expensive. Even a small compact diesel car will cost you over $ 1,000 per year in road taxes. France has no separate road tax like many western European countries, instead, their road tax is within the price of fuel. So many people choose diesel because it gets better mileage, which is especially true for larger family cars. You can drive a sizable family car and still get 50 miles per gallon with diesel.

According to French Wikipedia, 77% of the passenger cars in France run on diesel;
77,3 % : part de véhicules diesel dans les immatriculations en France en 2008, contre 69,1 % en 2005.
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parc_automobile_fran%C3%A7ais

[Brandon]

Chris, do they use the ultra-low sulfur diesel there as we do now here (15 ppm)?  It was introduced so stronger emissions controls could be placed in diesel vehicles.

And does the problem stem from newer or older vehicles?

[Chris]

Ultra Low Sulphur Diesel was first introduced in Europe around 2004 and quickly became the dominant diesel fuel, as far as I know all diesel sold today (and in recent years) is ULS diesel. Also, most diesel cars and trucks have particle filters since 2005, so that problem is tackled as well.

Here is the Euro emission standard development over the past 2 decades:


Euro 5 is now widely implemented and Euro 6 is currently being introduced on new trucks.

Most cars in Europe have manual gearboxes and generally don't rack up as many miles as I've read from the U.S. Most people buy newer cars after it hits 200,000 km / 120,000 miles because of the expensive repairs, though diesel cars generally last longer than gasoline-powered cars.

Another thing in Europe is LPG / Autogas. Nearly all gasoline-powered cars can be converted to LPG, and since the fuel cost of LPG is generally half that of gasoline, it's gaining ground. LPG is very big in Poland and Italy and is increasingly more widely available throughout most of Europe.

[Brandon]

Then why has it become such a big problem in Paris?  There must be something else contributing toward the poor air quality other than just the vehicles.

[Chris]

I'm not sure. Paris is a very large urban area (population of 12 million) and is situated in a valley. It is a major industrial hub, nearly all trucking in France goes through Paris. It also has several airports, including one of Europe's busiest.

The air quality was also poor in Belgium, they had the speed limits temporarily reduced to 55 mph on freeways. A major contributor in Belgium is the widespread use of mazut for heating. Belgium has an incredibly dispersed population (just look at Flanders on satellite imagery) and lots of emissions from burning mazut, which is a low-quality heating oil. The Netherlands doesn't have this problem because we have large gas reserves, so most of our heating is from domestic gas production.

[Brandon]

Interesting.  Looking at Paris on Google Maps with the terrain function on, it looks fairly flat.  I know that Los Angeles used to get legendary smog due to the terrain - valleys surrounded by mountains.  However, Paris doesn't look much hillier than Chicago or Kansas City.  And Chicago is a major trucking center in the US and a major rail center, and our large freight trains use diesel fuel.

How deep is the valley that Paris is in?

[english si]

The weather (unusually high high pressure) has been causing an issue, trapping the pollution in the Northern/Western France/Belgium area for the last couple of weeks. Paris of course will have the worst of that due to being a big city, but Bordeaux and Caen (and Belgium) having issues too is saying that it is bigger than a localized weather issue of the type that causes LA-style smogs.

It's not smogs per se, anyway, but strict environmental regulations from the EU and fines for governments in areas that break the limit set, that are driving the measures to cut pollution.

I believe Paris is, due to the weather stopping dispersal of NOx, very close to a line where the government gets in serious trouble, hence the emergency measures of banning half the area's cars, etc. Like a lot of larger European urban areas it is close to/above a lower limit in a lot of places when things are normal, with those breeches tolerated provided that there is at least an appearance of an attempt to sort it out.

The UK is proposing similar medium term limit lowering to avoid EU fines. The RAC, the AA, and various other motoring groups pointed out the folly of lowering motorway speed limits in pollution hot spots - most of our cars run on petrol, and the NOx that is causing the pollution is coming off lorries who would be unaffected by lowering the limit to 60mph (as they can only do a maximum of 56mph).