Improving Energy Intensity in the Automobile Manufacturing Sector

While energy usage supports modern life, it is important to recognize that it comes with environmental costs. These costs include pollution impacts, social impacts, and global warming impacts from greenhouse gas emissions. While some of the associated costs are linked to energy use, such as through nonrenewable fuel consumption, many are still attributed to building energy production infrastructure. Considering that energy consumption is not likely to slow down in future years, it is therefore essential to improve energy efficiency in consumption to reduce or avoid building new energy infrastructure. This cannot be managed with broad solutions, but through industry-by-industry analysis, opportunities for improving energy efficiency appear. Through my research, I examine the automobile manufacturing industry and propose methods to reduce energy intensity in car production. This is accomplished through using publicly available information from research papers, corporate sustainability reports, and other datasets. In this thesis, I find that energy efficiency can be improved by substituting materials within passenger vehicles, optimizing the supply chain transportation steps, making specific policy changes, and employing new manufacturing philosophies modeled after lean manufacturing procedures. Although some of the findings are only applicable to the automobile sector, many could be used for the whole industrial manufacturing industry. These recommendations would allow for continued development and expansion while reducing the incremental energy requirements, with the aim of stopping further total energy consumption completely.