Assessments on emergy and greenhouse gas emissions of internal combustion engine automobiles and electric automobiles in the USA Ran Jing 1,2,a , Chen Yuan 2,a , Hamidreza Rezaei 2 , Jin Qian 3 , Zhen Zhang 1,* 1 College of Natural Resources and Environment, Joint Institute for Environmental Research & Education, South China Agricultural University, Guangzhou, 510642, China 2 Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Maryland at College Park, MD, 20742, USA 3 Research & Development Institute in Shenzhen & School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi'an, 710072, China article info Article history: Received 17 May 2019 Received in revised form 20 November 2019 Accepted 25 November 2019 Available online 24 December 2019 Keywords: Emergy Emergy Index Electric automobiles Greenhouse gas emissions Internal combustion engine automobiles abstract Increasing energy consumption in the transportation sector results in challenging green- house gas (GHG) emissions and environmental problems. This paper involved integrated assessments on GHG emissions and emergy of the life cycle for the internal combustion engine (ICE) and electric automobiles in the USA over the entire assumed fifteen-year lifetime. The hotspots of GHG emissions as well as emergy indices for the major pro- cesses of automobile life cycle within the defined system boundaries have been investi- gated. The potential strategies for reducing GHG emissions and emergy in the life cycle of both ICE and electric automobiles were further proposed. Based on the current results, the total GHG emissions from the life cycle of ICE automobiles are 4.48E þ 07 kg CO 2 -e which is 320 times higher than that of the electric automobiles. The hotspot area of the GHG emissions from ICE and electric automobiles are operation phase and manufacturing process, respectively. Interesting results were observed that comparable total emergy of the ICE automobiles and electric automobiles have been calculated which were 1.54E þ 17 and 2.20E þ 17 sej, respectively. Analysis on emergy index evidenced a better environ- mental sustainability of electric automobiles than ICE automobiles over the life cycle due to its higher ESI. To the authors’ knowledge, it is the first time to integrate the analysis of GHG emissions together with emergy in industrial area of automobile engineering. It is expected that the integration of emergy and GHG emissions analysis may provide a comprehensive perspective on eco-industrial sustainability of automobile engineering. © 2020 The Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sci- ences. Published by Elsevier B.V. * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: zhangzhen_23102@163.com, zzhangal@scau.edu.cn (Z. Zhang). a Both Ran Jing and Chen Yuan contributed equally to this study. Available online at www.sciencedirect.com ScienceDirect www.elsevier.com/locate/jes journal of environmental sciences 90 (2020) 297 e309 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jes.2019.11.017 1001-0742/© 2020 The Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Published by Elsevier B.V.