The environmental impact of electric vehicles: a comparative LCA-based evaluation framework and its application to the Italian context

Abstract

In the last years a progressive shift from the traditional internal combustion engine vehicles (ICEV) toward electric vehicles (EV) has been observed, which has as primary objective that of favouring a sustainable mobility. Indeed, one of the most important topics tightly linked with this alternative refers to the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions produced along the entire vehicle’s life cycle. The aim of the present work is to develop an emission-model that is able to calculate the CO2 emissions produced along the entire vehicle’s life cycle, so to estimate EV CO2 emission values and compare them with those of ICEV. The emission model, developed leveraging on a thorough literature review on the topic, is then applied to the Italian context, to enable a comparison of the emission results for EVs and ICEVs taking into account the peculiarities of such country. It emerges that overall CO2 emissions associated to EVs are lower than the ones associated to ICEVs. A significant portion of emissions arising from the manufacturing of the battery pack still represents the main gap to be filled with respect to ICEVs. Evaluating both vehicle typologies and based on different assumption in terms of the geographical locations in which the stages of the vehicle life cycle take place, it emerges that EVs show a consistent CO2 emission reduction ranging between -11% to -50% compared to ICEVs over the entire vehicle’s life cycle. The most relevant contribution for such performance is due to the cleaner energy mixes on which some countries can rely on compared to others. Given that the most impactful phase – in terms of CO2 emissions - is represented by the vehicle use, it has been performed a sensitivity analysis on the energy mix used for vehicle’s charging. Results show that coupling of Renewable Energy Sources (RES) and EVs can be a key factor for achieving very low emission values.