U.S. EPA funds study on alternative fuel vehicle emissions

The University of California, Davis, is launching research into how new alternative fuel vehicle emissions will affect air quality, with funding from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The EPA is putting up $900,000 for the project, which will look at flex-fuel, hybrid, plug-in hybrid and biodiesel vehicles.

"We know from past studies that motor vehicles are a major source of airborne particles in California and across the United States, and higher concentrations of airborne particles are associated with higher death rates," said Michael Kleeman, the project's lead researcher and a UC Davis professor of civil and environmental engineering.

"Now comes climate change, with shifts in patterns of air temperature and humidity levels. Those shifts will affect the particle emissions from cars and trucks and how those particles age in the atmosphere. So the net effect of climate change on vehicle emissions in the coming decades has major public health implications in California."

Kleeman will collaborate on the four-year study with Shuhua Chen, an associate professor of atmospheric science at UC Davis, and James Schauer, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The researchers plan to take hundreds of air samples from exhaust pipes of alternative-fuel vehicles and analyze the size and chemical composition of the exhaust particles under a range of temperature and humidity conditions.

Kleeman is also working on a related project that's funded by the EPA, looking at how the rise in zero-emission vehicles, such as all-electric vehicles and fuel-cell hybrid vehicles, which run on hydrogen, will affect future air quality in California. Even though these vehicles have no tailpipe emissions, the university said there may be emissions produced when the electric or hydrogen fuels are manufactured.