2021/04/29 by Satish Vitta, Vitta, Satish
Engineering · #Advanced Battery Technologies Research #Electric Vehicles and Infrastructure #Electric and Hybrid Vehicle Technologies #FOS: Physical sciences #Materials Science (cond-mat.mtrl-sci)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2104.14287
openalex publication_date 2021/04/29 · openalex created_date 2022/07/25 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
A comprehensive analysis of energy requirements and emissions associated with\nelectric vehicles, ranging from mining and making the rare-earth magnets\nrequired in electric motor to assembling the Li-ion battery, including charging\nand regular running of the electric vehicles has been performed. A simple,\nanalytical procedure is used to determine the embodied energy and emissions.\nThe objective is to assess the potential of electric cars to reduce green house\ngases emission to limit global warming to < 1.5 degrees C by the Year 2050 as\nper IPCC recommendations and also to compare them with conventional fuel driven\ncars. The combined embodied energy for Nd- and Dy-metals production which are\nrequired in electric motors and battery assembly for 150 million cars,\nprojected to be on the road in the year 2050 is ~ 1500 TWh and the CO2\nemissions is found to be > 600 MT. The emissions includes carbon intensity of\nelectrical energy required to run these electric vehicles. The projected\nemissions due to fossil fuels, gasoline production as well as burning it in\ncombustion engines however is only 412 MT, far less than that due to electric\nvehicles. The main contributor to emissions from electric vehicles is the\nbattery assembling process which releases ~ 379 MT of CO2-e gases. The\nemissions from both electric vehicles as well as combustion engine vehicles\nscale linearly with the number of vehicles, indicating that a breakeven is not\npossible with the currently available manufacturing technologies. These results\nclearly show that significant technological developments have to take place in\nelectric vehicles so that they become environmentally better placed compared to\ncombustion engine based cars.\n