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The Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Testing and Research (Empa) presented on the first day of BATTERIES 2009 its results for Life Cycle Assessment of electric vehicles. Main message of the LCA approach has shown that the overall environmental impact of an EV is less harmful in terms of CO₂ equivalent emissions, than a standard ICE car.

The presentation “Life Cycle Assessment of Lithium Ion batteries and Implications on Future e-mobility applications” by Marcel Gauch from the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Testing and Research (Empa) compared the environmental impact of an electric vehicle to that of a standard car with an internal combustion engine (ICE) using Life Cycle Assessement (LCA). The method takes into account the CO₂ equivalent emissions from the entire life of a product starting with the production and ending with the recycling. The results from Empa revealed that the manufacturing process of an EV itself produces more harmful emissions because of the battery production process. However, considering the whole life of the electric car, then an EV is less harmful than a ICE car.

LCA results - comparison standard ICE car to an EV

The Empa study is one of the first that applied this method to compare a standard car with an ICE drive train to an electric vehicle that includes the electric drive train and the batteries. The surprising results from the analysis demonstrate that the production of an electric drive train without the battery causes slightly less damage than an ICE drive train but the vehicle production of an EV including the batteries causes significantly more damage than a conventional ICE car. Assuming the same car body, the obvious reason for the drawback is the battery, as it requires a complicated production process with additional CO₂ equivalent emissions.

However, the important point of the LCA is its holistic approach which takes into account the hole life cycle of a vehicle including use and recycling. The Empa analysis reveals that: “Due to the higher efficiency in the operation there is a significant advantage for the BEV (battery electric vehicle) over the whole lifecycle, even if operated with electricity including a relatively high fossil energy fraction”, says Marcel Gauch, Project Manager, Empa. “The transition from ICE cars to BEVs looks favorable from an environmental perspective although the impact from BEV production is significantly higher than from ICE car production”, he adds.

The final conclusion that he draws from the LCA is that very efficient ICE cars might be competitive with BEVs but only if the BEV is operated with electricity from pure coal power plants. However, an EV operated with low fossil energy containing electricity will always perform better than the best possible ICE car.

Life Cycle Assessment - a holistic approach

The Life Cycle Assessment method is also known as 'life cycle analysis', 'ecobalance', or 'cradle-to-grave analysis' and describes the investigation and valuation of the environmental impacts of a product or service caused or necessitated by its existence. This means that the assessment of raw material production, manufacture, distribution, use and disposal including all intervening transportation steps necessary are taken into account. The sum of all those steps or phases constitutes the life cycle of the product that needs to be considered in order to have a fair and holistic assessment.