Energy use and life cycle greenhouse gas emissions of drones for commercial package delivery

Joshuah K. Stolaroff (), Constantine Samaras (), Emma R. O’Neill, Alia Lubers, Alexandra S. Mitchell and Daniel Ceperley
Additional contact information
Joshuah K. Stolaroff: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Constantine Samaras: Carnegie Mellon University
Emma R. O’Neill: SRI International
Alia Lubers: University of Colorado at Boulder
Alexandra S. Mitchell: SRI International
Daniel Ceperley: SRI International

Nature Communications, 2018, vol. 9, issue 1, 1-13

Abstract: Abstract The use of automated, unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) to deliver commercial packages is poised to become a new industry, significantly shifting energy use in the freight sector. Here we find the current practical range of multi-copters to be about 4 km with current battery technology, requiring a new network of urban warehouses or waystations as support. We show that, although drones consume less energy per package-km than delivery trucks, the additional warehouse energy required and the longer distances traveled by drones per package greatly increase the life-cycle impacts. Still, in most cases examined, the impacts of package delivery by small drone are lower than ground-based delivery. Results suggest that, if carefully deployed, drone-based delivery could reduce greenhouse gas emissions and energy use in the freight sector. To realize the environmental benefits of drone delivery, regulators and firms should focus on minimizing extra warehousing and limiting the size of drones.

Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-02411-5 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:9:y:2018:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-017-02411-5

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-017-02411-5

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().