Life-Cycle Assessment Considerations for Batteries and Battery Materials

Rechargeable batteries are necessary for the decarbonization of the energy systems, but life-cycle environmental impact assessments have not achieved consensus on the environmental impacts of producing these batteries. Nonetheless, life cycle assessment (LCA) is a powerful tool to inform the development of better-performing batteries with reduced environmental burden. This review explores common practices in lithium-ion battery LCAs and makes recommendations for how future studies can be more interpretable, representative, and impactful. First, LCAs should focus analyses of resource depletion on long-term trends toward more energy and resource-intensive material extraction and processing rather than treating known reserves as a fixed quantity being depleted. Second, future studies should account for extraction and processing operations that deviate from industry best-practices and may be responsible for an outsized share of sector-wide impacts, such as artisanal cobalt mining. Third, LCAs should explore at least 2-3 battery manufacturing facility scales to capture size- and throughput-dependent impacts such as dry room conditioning and solvent recovery. Finally, future LCAs must transition away from kg of battery mass as a functional unit and instead make use of kWh of storage capacity and kWh of lifetime energy throughput.

Automated summary

Rechargeable batteries are crucial for energy system decarbonization, but there is still no consensus on the environmental impacts of producing them. Future studies should focus on long-term trends in resource depletion, non-compliant extraction practices, and various battery manufacturing scales.