Pre-study regarding a nexus for life cycle assessment of electromobility

Research Project, 2019

Electromobility can help solving several environmental problems, foremost global warming, if the propelling electricity is produced with low carbon dioxide emissions. Alongside follows a risk that new environmental and resource problems arise, such as increased use of scarce metals. Life cycle assessment (LCA) can map such problem shifting by linking the environmental aspects of electrification to its many possible technical components such as recycling, reuse, scale of production and design choices, e.g. for batteries and electric motors. Together they form a nexus – an agglomerate of partly intersecting research areas (Figure 1). The pre-study will describe this nexus, identify key unresolved questions and formulate a long-term research project. The researchers belong to Environmental Systems Analysis at Chalmers and they intend to synthesize broad experience of LCA on electromobility from several projects. The pre-study has industry support: Scania, Volvo Cars and PowerCell (SME).