Towards more flexibility and transparency in life cycle inventories for Lithium-ion batteries

Electric vehicles are gaining increasing room in the global market, since they are seen amongst the most promising solutions to cope with the growing concerns related to climate change and environmental pollution. The successful evolution of the transportation sector towards electro-mobility depends on the battery chemistry and technology, and its environmental impacts. However, the poor availability of data at the commercial production scale and the diversity in modelling choices make evaluating the environmental impacts of Lithium-ion batteries (LIB) difficult and uncertain. We aim at contributing to the creation of flexible and transparent life cycle inventories (LCI) of LIB for background databases by means of a consequently modular approach that will be applicable in the future as common framework to model new generations of LIB. In the present paper, we focus on (i) compiling modular LCI datasets of current and near-future market LIB chemistries, namely NMC111, NMC811 and NCA, by using the most recent data from existing sources, and (ii) exemplarily assessing the environmental impacts of the three modelled chemistries. This assessment takes into consideration a wide range of impact categories, with a focus on climate change and the comparison with the available literature in the sector. The whole is complemented with several sensitivity analyses, which show the relevance of transparency when making choices in compiling the LCI.