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Impact of Recycling on Cradle-to-Gate Energy Consumption and Greenhouse Gas Emissions of Automotive Lithium-Ion Batteries
Abstract
This paper addresses the environmental burdens (energy consumption and air emissions, including greenhouse gases, GHGs) of the material production, assembly, and recycling of automotive lithium-ion batteries in hybrid electric, plug-in hybrid electric, and battery electric vehicles (BEV) that use LiMn2O4 cathode material. In this analysis, we calculated the energy consumed and air emissions generated when recovering LiMn2O4, aluminum, and copper in three recycling processes (hydrometallurgical, intermediate physical, and direct physical recycling) and examined the effect(s) of closed-loop recycling on environmental impacts of battery production. We aimed to develop a U.S.-specific analysis of lithium-ion battery production and in particular sought to resolve literature discrepancies concerning energy consumed during battery assembly. Our analysis takes a process-level (versus a top-down) approach. For a battery used in a BEV, we estimated cradle-to-gate energy and GHG emissions of 75 MJ/kg battery and 5.1 kg CO2e/kg battery, respectively. Battery assembly consumes only 6% of this total energy. These results are significantly less than reported in studies that take a top-down approach. We further estimate that direct physical recycling of LiMn2O4, aluminum, and copper in a closed-loop scenario can reduce energy consumption during material production by up to 48%.
Details of the lithium-ion battery design for this analysis, a brief review of the battery life cycle analysis literature, key material and energy flow data, a description of the recycling technologies examined herein, the development of the battery assembly energy, and selected results. This material is available free of charge via the Internet at http://pubs.acs.org.
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History
- Published In Issue November 20, 2012
- Article ASAPOctober 30, 2012
- Just Accepted ManuscriptOctober 17, 2012
- Received: June 15, 2012
Accepted: October 17, 2012
Revised: October 08, 2012
ACS
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