LCA of a Battery Electric Vehicle using Renewable Electricity in the Entire Supply Chain

From 1990 to 2018, the share of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions caused by passenger vehicles in the EU increased from about 9% to 14%. Thus, urgent action is required to reduce the GHG emissions of passenger vehicles. Battery electric vehicles (BEV) are a promising option to reduce GHG emissions for passenger vehicles. In this paper, we analyze the GHG emissions and the electricity demand for a BEV over the entire life cycle. We consider the production, utilization and disposal in the current energy system and in a renewable energy system. In both cases, wind electricity is considered for the utilization phase. In the renewable energy system, renewable electricity is applied in the entire supply chain. This also includes the production of materials from hydrogen produced in an electrolysis. The hydrogen is for example used as reducing agent in steel production as well as converted with CO2 to chemicals and fuels. We integrate the renewable production processes in a database together with the LCA database ecoinvent 3.7. Through the transition from the current energy system to the renewable energy system, the GHG emissions over the entire life cycle decrease from 60 to 5 g CO2-eq/km. The total electricity demand increases from 0.2 to 0.41 kWh/km. The majority of electricity is required in the production phase.