Quantifying the Environmental Impacts of Battery Electric Vehicles from a Criticality Perspective

Electric vehicles have become the most promising alternative to internal combustion engine cars for the current mobility transition from fossil-fuels. Within them, battery electric vehicles appear to be the chosen technological solution, which mostly use Lithium-ion batteries. This has increased the demand for such batteries exponentially, and consequently for the raw materials to manufacture them. To assess the sustainability of this transition, holistic analyses are required, for which Life Cycle Assessments (LCA) are used. Nevertheless, LCA runs short in evaluating the impact of critical resource consumption. The recommended indicator by the European Commission is the Abiotic Depletion Potential (ADP), but it is insufficient. To address this gap, this paper presents a solution by applying a set of indicators which considers criticality of materials. It uses two methods to characterize the consumption of critical raw material: the Criticality Weighted ADP for the Economic Importance (CWADP) and the weighted GeoPolitical-related Supply Risk (GeoPolRisk/P). To exhibit the functionality of these methods, a case study is presented for transportation of passenger cars, including internal combustion vehicles, and three types of battery electric vehicles. For the battery electric vehicles, three different types of lithium-ion batteries are taken into account. The results show how including criticality of raw materials in the impact assessment methods changes the outcome of the analysis on whether battery electric vehicles are an environmentally sustainable alternative to internal combustion vehicles. Both methods show that battery electric vehicles have a higher consumption of critical raw materials. While battery electric cars present a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions of up to 77% per km of transportation, the use of economically important critical materials is increased up to 210%, and the use of critical materials with supply risk is increased up to 163%. The increased use of critical materials could cause potential problems with concurring markets for use of precious metals and create raw material supply chain bottlenecks for lithium and cobalt.