Projection of end-of-life electric vehicle batteries in India considering net-zero targets: a step towards circularity

Road transportation and infrastructure development in India have seen significant growth over the years improving the connectivity across the country. However, transport sector leaves behind a significant carbon footprint across various modes of transport accounting for 14% of the energy related emissions. Electrification of transport sector is the key driver of India’s goal to achieve net-zero targets by 2070. This transition will create a huge volume of battery waste in the coming years. The impact of electric vehicles (EV) battery waste on environment sustainability and circularity in supply chain of these dead batteries need to be explored. Therefore, the waste management infrastructure for processing EV battery waste and recycling the critical raw materials extracted from these wastes in the value chain is underdeveloped in India. To ensure sustainable net-zero transition, understanding the end-of- life (EOL) process of EV batteries and their circularity in the value-chain becomes imperative. The study presents future projections of vehicle sales and estimates corresponding vehicle stock in India until 2050 under three scenarios: a) Business-as-usual (BAU); b) transformative scenario (TS); and c) accelerated scenario (AS). By utilizing the projected volume of batteries existing in the economy, the study forecasts the amount of waste generated until 2050 to gauge the circularity of critical materials recovered from the waste. The novelty of the study lies in the composition and computation of the EV battery waste projection. First, unlike other studies, it presents projections for a broad range of vehicle segments including two-wheelers, three- wheelers, private cars and commercial cars, buses and trucks. Second, unlike other Indian studies, it estimates the EOL of batteries by calculating the volume of failed batteries using the Weibull distribution, considering their respective reduced and extended services. With the estimation of these EOL batteries, the study calculates the waste generated until 2030 for each segment and the % of critical minerals (e.g., Lithium, Cobalt, Nickel and Phosphorous) recovered from these wastes. The battery waste generate yearly is expected to reach 37-80 GWh by 2030 which is expected increase further by 7 folds by 2040 and 10 folds by 2050. The recovered materials can meet 28-43% of critical raw materials needed in battery manufacturing in 2050.