By Colin McKerracher
A Closer Look at Lifecycle Emissions
My BloombergNEF colleague Corey Cantor just published a detailed report on the lifecycle emissions of electric vehicles, looking at everything from average battery pack sizes by region, battery manufacturing emissions, current and projected electricity-generation emissions, day- and night-time charging trends, and more.
Corey comes to the same conclusion that virtually all other independent studies have: EVs have lower lifecycle emissions than their internal combustion counterparts.
EV Lifecycle Emissions Can Be Over 70% Lower Than Gasoline and Diesel Vehicles
Total CO2 emissions of medium-sized ICE and battery-electric vehicles produced in 2023 and used for 250,000 kilometers. This doesn’t mean no emissions. Both the manufacturing of batteries and the usage of vehicles add significant emissions over their lifecycles. But even in places like China, where coal still plays a large role in power generation, EVs have lower emissions overall. The reduction is around 27% there, compared to 71% lower in a market like the UK, where coal has been mostly pushed out of the generation mix.
Another way to think about this is in terms of payback time for the emissions incurred from manufacturing the battery. In a market like the US, an EV becomes a cleaner option after about 25,000 miles of driving, which is about 2.2 years for the average US vehicle.
The power sector is changing rapidly, with more clean generation capacity being added to the grid. This means that by 2030, the breakeven point will have moved up significantly in all regions. An EV made in the US in 2030 will be lower-emitting after a year of driving, while in China, it will be after just over four years, based on current trends. Battery recycling eventually will push EV emissions down even further, as will localizing battery production closer to demand centers.
All this adds up to an important point when it comes to gaming out long-term national emissions-reduction plans: Whereas the emissions profile of an internal combustion vehicle is locked in when it rolls off the line, EVs can keep getting cleaner over time. Given how long vehicles last, concurrent decarbonization of the power sector and electrification of the transport sector are among the only ways to keep emissions on track for any of the targets governments have set for the coming decades.
Every few years, a new study pops up that makes a counter claim on this topic, stating that EVs actually have higher emissions, but these claims rarely stand up to scrutiny. They typically rely on outdated information about how fast the power sector is changing, old battery manufacturing data, or artificially low total vehicle mileage assumptions. Academic studies also sometimes match EVs with what’s referred to as the marginal generation source (often coal), which makes them look worse, but there’s good reason to be skeptical of this approach.
Some studies also compare different classes of vehicles to make things look worse for EVs, comparing a pickup truck to a subcompact, for example. Smaller cars are definitely better than larger ones, from an emissions point of view, but the car buyer who walks onto the dealer lot to buy a Ford F-150 was never going to be talked into a Honda Civic.
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