Life Cycle Assessment of Electric Vehicle Batteries: An Overview of Recent Literature

In electric and hybrid vehicles Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs), batteries play a central role and are in the spotlight of scientific community and public opinion. Automotive batteries constitute, together with the powertrain, the main differences between electric vehicles and internal combustion engine vehicles. For this reason, many decision makers and researchers wondered whether energy and environmental impacts from batteries production, can exceed the benefits generated during the vehicle’s use phase. In this framework, the purpose of the present literature review is to understand how large and variable the main impacts are due to automotive batteries’ life cycle, with particular attention to climate change impacts, and to support researchers with some methodological suggestions in the field of automotive batteries’ LCA. The results show that there is high variability in environmental impact assessment; CO2eq emissions per kWh of battery capacity range from 50 to 313 g CO2eq/kWh. Nevertheless, either using the lower or upper bounds of this range, electric vehicles result less carbon-intensive in their life cycle than corresponding diesel or petrol vehicles.