Electric cars, assessment of green nature vis a vis conventional fuel driven cars

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the energy and emissions associated with electric vehicles, comparing them to conventional cars, and finds that current manufacturing processes make electric cars less environmentally friendly without technological improvements.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analytical assessment of embodied energy and emissions for electric vehicles, highlighting the need for technological advancements to improve their environmental impact.

Findings

Electric vehicle manufacturing emissions exceed those of conventional cars.

Battery assembly is the largest contributor to electric vehicle emissions.

Current technologies do not allow electric cars to be environmentally better than combustion engines.

Abstract

A comprehensive analysis of energy requirements and emissions associated with electric vehicles, ranging from mining and making the rare-earth magnets required in electric motor to assembling the Li-ion battery, including charging and regular running of the electric vehicles has been performed. A simple, analytical procedure is used to determine the embodied energy and emissions. The objective is to assess the potential of electric cars to reduce green house gases emission to limit global warming to < 1.5 degrees C by the Year 2050 as per IPCC recommendations and also to compare them with conventional fuel driven cars. The combined embodied energy for Nd- and Dy-metals production which are required in electric motors and battery assembly for 150 million cars, projected to be on the road in the year 2050 is ~ 1500 TWh and the CO2 emissions is found to be > 600 MT. The emissions includes carbon intensity of electrical energy required to run these electric vehicles. The projected emissions due to fossil fuels, gasoline production as well as burning it in combustion engines however is only 412 MT, far less than that due to electric vehicles. The main contributor to emissions from electric vehicles is the battery assembling process which releases ~ 379 MT of CO2-e gases. The emissions from both electric vehicles as well as combustion engine vehicles scale linearly with the number of vehicles, indicating that a breakeven is not possible with the currently available manufacturing technologies. These results clearly show that significant technological developments have to take place in electric vehicles so that they become environmentally better placed compared to combustion engine based cars.