Environmental Cost of Battery Manufacture

[peter]

One criticism often leveled at BEV's is that large battery packs are environmentally costly to produce, and that the GHG cost to manufacture a BEV with large battery is 3-4x that of a typical ICE and that this accounts for the predominate GHG component over the lifetime of the car.

See http://www.designnews.com/author.as...dustry_auto,bid_318,aid_254150&dfpLayout=blog

which references a summarized paper here: http://www.issues.org/28.4/p_michalek.html

Here's another interesting pdf by same guy I found with some actual numbers http://esd.mit.edu/symp09/presentations/day3.session2c.michalek.pdf. This is primarily concerned with PHEV battery sizing, but also implies that a bigger battery doesn't mean least GHG lifetime emissions.

So is this complete FUD or is there merit here? Nissan's website claims no environmental difference in manufacturing the Leaf vs. comparable ICE - which I also find hard to believe.

Where are the other studies on this topic?

I'm primarily interested only in the issue of environmental cost of manufacturing the battery, not actual use (electric vs. gas). I apologize if this has been covered previously, but my forum search attempts failed.

Thanks.

 

[surfingslovak]

This is one of the best and most authoritative recent papers I was able to locate. It appears to factor in both battery manufacturing and disposal.

Lifecycle Analysis Comparison of a Battery Electric Vehicle and a Conventional Gasoline Vehicle

 

[ydnas7]

Michalek is complete FUD

Nissan had an LCA of the LEAF undertaken (Japan Environmental Management Association for Industry (JEMAI)) for a nominal 100,000km http://www.nissan-global.com/EN/ENVIRONMENT/CAR/LCA/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

interesting thing is, pro-rata this to 150,000km and the upstream emissions of an ICE (ie refinery emissions) equal to embedded emissions of battery + electrics.

or another way to put it, LCA need to come from Korea or Japan, at least they understand enough to know how to make batteries
http://www.electrochem.org/dl/ma/202/pdfs/0068.PDF" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
its 10 years old and process have improved, but the approximation for vehicles were 75kg-CO2/kWh lithium-ion batteries
75kg-CO2/kWh is about 23kgs of fuel/kWh
23kgs of fuel is about a weekly top up in a ICE car, so about 6 months of refuelling a ICE car is about the same as making a LEAF battery pack

 

[hill]

Doesn't matter - the web will promulgate battery toxicity and inability to recycle 'till the cows come home. To this day, know-it-all's will spoute to me - at least 3 or 4 times per year - the 'truth' about the sudberry mines in canada. :lol:

.

 

[adric22]

I don't bother to argue over facts with these people. You'll always find the people who bring up the coal power, or the battery toxicity, or the strip-mining, are always people who drive big trucks or Hummers and have zero concern about the environment. I find it hard to take environmental advice from them since they seem to be biased for their own reasons. Its like getting a lecture about my health from an obese person who smokes 3 packs of cigarettes per day. So anyway, when they start on those topics I call them out on it. I ask them if they are tree-hugging environmentalists? If not, why are they so concerned about the coal power or the toxic batteries? If they say I bought the car because I'm an environmentalists then I tell them they are making assumptions about my reason for wanting an electric car.

 

[peter]

This is one of the best and most authoritative recent papers I was able to locate. It appears to factor in both battery manufacturing and disposal.

Lifecycle Analysis Comparison of a Battery Electric Vehicle and a Conventional Gasoline Vehicle

Interesting report. Though showing the BEV's favorable in terms of total lifecycle, it does confirm that the energy to manufacture the batteries is significant and is many times the energy to produce the rest of the car. Why is that?

If accurate, this would tend to argue that Telsa's approach of using huge batteries would likely make them less environmentally sound than a conventional ICE over total lifecycle just due to the battery manufacturing.

 

[peter]

fwiw - a number of interesting papers on this subject at Argonne site http://www.transportation.anl.gov/technology_analysis/battery_recycling.html

And a reference in one of those papers led me to "Contribution of Li-Ion Batteries to the Environmental Impact of Electric Vehicles" - http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es903729a

Which had the more reassuring conclusion:

"The main finding of this study is that the impact of a Li-ion
battery used in BEVs for transport service is relatively small.
In contrast, it is the operation phase that remains the
dominant contributor to the environmental burden caused
by transport service as long as the electricity for the BEV is
not produced by renewable hydropower."

As usual these numbers seem to be all over the map depending on who's paper you read... sigh, wish I had to time to really read these papers...