Abstract:

As electric vehicles continue to become more affordable and their sales share continues to grow, it will be increasingly important to understand the life-cycle environmental impacts of the technology. This briefing reviews recent research regarding greenhouse gas emissions from the manufacturing of lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles. The authors analyze this research in the overall context of life-cycle emissions of electric cars as compared to conventional internal combustion vehicles in Europe. Finally, they discuss the primary drivers of battery manufacturing emissions and how these emissions could be further mitigated in the future. Although there are still many open questions, the authors make a number of observations on this topic, i.e. (1) Electric cars are much cleaner than internal combustion engine cars over their lifetime. (2) Battery manufacturing life-cycle emissions debt is quickly paid off. (3) Grid decarbonization offers a significant opportunity to reduce the impact of battery manufacturing. (4) Incorporating electric vehicle life-cycle manufacturing emissions into vehicle regulations would be misguided.