Electric Vehicles and Their Batteries: A Life Cycle Perspective on Environmental Impacts (Text Version)

This is a text version of the video for Electric Vehicles and Their Batteries: A Life Cycle Perspective on Environmental Impacts presented on Nov. 22, 2024.

LADY MIAH KANE: Now, I'll pass things over to our moderator, Marcy Rood, Marcy Rood of Argonne National Laboratory. She serves as the Technology Integration Manager for Argonne's work that supports the Clean Cities and Communities partnership. I will turn it over to her to introduce our guest presenter.
MARCY A. ROOD: Thank you. And before we get started, I wanted to mention that today's webinar is a first in a series of webinars that will be held on electric vehicle and charging technology developments offered by the National Laboratories to Clean Cities and Communities, coalitions and their stakeholders.
I have the pleasure to introduce my colleague Jarod Kelly, one of our Argonne researchers, who provides analysis support to the US Department of Energy and the Clean Cities and Communities partnership. Dr. Kelly examines the sustainability of energy and transportation systems as a principle energy systems analyst at Argonne, whose research has considered the environmental implications of battery electric vehicle adoption and the supply chain implications of the production of lithium ion batteries in different regions of the world.
He received his BS in mechanical engineering from the University of Oklahoma, and his advanced degrees in mechanical engineering from the University of Michigan. So, Jarod, take it away.
JAROD KELLY: Thank you very much, Marcy. Let me get my screen share going. Well, thank you very much for joining us for this conversation. And I'm happy to be able to present the work that we've done here at Argonne. It's a big team effort. There are a lot of different folks involved with this work. And so I'm just the one that's able to present on behalf of many other people.
So I'll talk today about electric vehicles and their batteries really from a life cycle perspective, so we're going to cover a few different topics here. First off, I need to thank the Department of Energy for providing the funding that has allowed us to conduct this work that we do here.
So today, I'll be talking about Argonne National Laboratory, what it is, where it's located, and some of the other kinds of work that we do at Argonne. Then I'll talk about what life cycle analysis is, and hope that we can get a basic level of understanding amongst all of us and what we can answer with LCA. And then I'll talk about Argonne's GREET model that we've been developing here for the last 30 years. And then I will get into the trends that we've observed in battery LCA.
So Argonne is a world leading Research Institute in suburban Chicago. We have a significant budget, over a billion dollars annually, and we employ about 3,500 individuals, including nearly 2,000 researchers within our staff. And in addition to that, we have what are called user facilities throughout the lab. These include things like our Advanced Photon source, the Aurora supercomputer, opportunities for individuals and organizations to leverage really exciting and powerful tools at the laboratory to advance their own research.
There are five national research centers led by Argonne, and we have three different locations, including the Chicago suburbs, Argonne campus, the City of Chicago, and also Washington, DC. Now, Argonne is a organization that has six different primary areas. Advanced energy technologies, computing environmental life science, nuclear technologies and national security, photon sciences, physical sciences and engineering and SMTP partnerships, and outreach.
The work that we do is housed in the Advanced Energy Technologies Group, but we really are a cross-cutting element of that. We look at things like future transportation mobility, power generation, energy, materials, and manufacturing. And we use the tools that we have to evaluate the environmental performance of these different sectors.
So the main tool that we're using here is called Life Cycle Analysis. And LCA is an estimate of the environmental impact of a product or process. And we are basing that on the product or processes input energy and materials. It's worth noting that LCA has grown in its importance in terms of understanding how these products or processes can be evaluated holistically to support the sustainability of technologies and policies.
We've seen that LCA thinking has really helped inform corporate and consumer behavior over the years, really giving that full scale understanding of from cradle to grave, really of the environmental impacts of a particular product. And it's really important to identify that as we go through the process of conducting an LCA, we're ensuring that– we're trying to ensure that we don't simply allow a shift in the environmental burdens from one stage to another. So it really requires us to ensure that we're looking at all of these stages.
So to that end, I'll describe what the elements of an LCA are, so that we all come from a same sort of baseline understanding here. So we typically need to define the goal and scope, and define a functional unit. So this can be things like what is the number of miles? What is a per mile sort of burden? If we're talking about driving a car. We can think about that in terms of a bus. How many per passenger mile? We can think about it in terms of moving goods per ton mile. We have to define the system, what's in and what's out?
We conduct and develop our life cycle inventory. This is determining all of the inputs and outputs that are associated with the system, measuring everything that flows across these boundaries. And then we identify and leverage the background data sets for that analysis. Finally, we do the– next we do the life cycle impact assessment. So this is identifying different impact categories of interest things like global warming potential, acidification potential, and so on. And often you'll see here different what we call equivalence. And I can describe that in terms of global warming potential specifically.
We often think of carbon dioxide, but there are a number of other global warming or greenhouse gases that are put onto an equivalence basis with CO2, so things like methane and N2O. Finally, we then interpret the results. This is placing these findings into context and considering a number of different scenarios.
So one way that we can put this into a better context for folks that are not familiar with LCA is to consider a simple example. So all of us are familiar with cooking noodles, right? So we can take that dry pasta and cook it to get the cooked product that we want to eat. And so if we think about the definitions from the previous slide, we have a goal in scope. The functional unit there is the kilogram of edible pasta.
And then our boundary conditions are what are the direct inputs to cooking that pasta? So what's out of that system is going to be things like the walls, the lights that are in my kitchen, things like that. What we do care about is the energy that's going in to heat the water, the water itself, and the dry pasta noodles. So we go through and we identify, OK, well, how much of the pasta are we putting in? How much water are we putting in? And how much energy are we putting in? So that's going to be, let's say we're using natural gas burner for our stovetop.
So we cook that and we get our product, which is the cooked noodles. And then we can identify what are the total emissions associated with 1 kilogram of those cooked noodles? That's the inventory. That's the going through the inventory part. The assessment of the global warming potential of those ensures that we capture the CO2, the methane, the N2O per serving of cooked pasta.
And then we can interpret these results. So how would these results differ if instead of using natural gas, we used an electricity source? So let's say our stovetop was a different type. So we could think about where does that electricity come from? Is it renewable electricity? Is it coming from coal, from natural gas, from other sources? So that's the kind of thing that we do with LCA, and it allows us to answer a lot of important questions.
Within GREET, within Argonne's GREET model and any LCA tool really, we dig deeply into many different stages that are much beyond that simple example. So if we're thinking about producing a petroleum fuel, for instance, we have crude oil that's being extracted from the Earth and then transported to a refinery where it's then refined and then transported again as that final product fuel, and distributed to the car, where it's going to be input into the gas tank and then combusted.
All those stages have energy inputs to them, and as a consequence of that, there are emissions associated with all of those processes. And what we do is with this, we're capturing the direct emissions, what people often call the tailpipe emission from that combustion. And then we're also capturing everything that's upstream of that. The well to pump is often the conversational sort of piece that we call that that's everything that happens before, we get that into your vehicle, including the well to pump and the pump to well part.
So what we're looking for here is characterizing all of the burdens associated with energy production in this particular example. Argonne has developed the GREET model since 1994, 1995. So it's been 30 years of funding and development from the Department of Energy. And in that time we've developed from a really transportation focused purpose into a much broader sort of technology focus.
So GREET stands for Greenhouse gases, Regulated Emissions and Energy use and Technologies. Those technologies are, like I said, transportation, but also a number of other technologies as well, including things like buildings. We break the model down into essentially two elements, one that we call GREET 1, which is looking at all of the energy and materials that are associated with producing fuels or energy sources, developing the energy that's going to be going into an application. And then another that's called GREET 2, which considers all of the material and energy that goes into developing materials that go into different applications.
And so with this, it allows us to look at a whole life cycle for a product or process to evaluate it on a number of different conditions. The GREET model has over 63,000 users globally. I am showing here the– we've got a number of users in North America, but all around the world you can see– additionally we can see that it's widely used in energy, in industry, and academia, and education, along with a number of government organization, private consulting and so on.
Showing here a few logos of organizations with whom we've partnered in the past and continue to partner with the work that we do. So one of the really important elements of our work is ensuring that we're representing what's most current in the industry and within the markets, and so that requires us to stay connected with these organizations.
And GREET itself can feed into other tools and has fed into other tools. One of those tools developed here at Argonne is called AFLEET. And some of you on the Clean City side might know AFLEET. It might be much more familiar with AFLEET than you are with GREET. This alternative fuel life cycle environmental and economic transport tool is used to help managers analyze their existing fleets and consider the costs and environmental benefits of deploying vehicle technologies, and fuels, and refueling infrastructure, including things like EV charging.
The goal here is to help fleet managers reduce petroleum use, reduce carbon footprint, and even to save on total cost of ownership. And we see that the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law has cited AFLEET as a tool for estimating the environmental impacts of EVSE and other alternative fuel deployments.
Now, AFLEET's suite of tools can be used for vehicles both in the light duty space and the heavy duty space. The original AFLEET tool is a Spreadsheet that calculates simple payback, total cost of ownership, fleets carbon footprint, and more. It covers 18 fuel vehicle technologies and the AFLEET online version is a simplified version of that Spreadsheet tool.
Heavy Duty Emissions Calculator is useful for calculating the benefits of environmental mitigation projects. And the newest fleet tools are focused on electrification, so charging and fueling infrastructure, EV charging TCO, and so on. The latest version of this tool is coming in 2025. And as I noted, it's the background data for the environmental impacts associated with these technologies is derived from GREET, so there's a hand in glove kind of translation between these different tools.
Now, when we talk about transportation and the GREET model, we really cover all transportation sectors, inclusive of marine, air, road, and rail. So we look at different greenhouse gas emissions criteria, air pollutants. We look at within the Marine space, both ocean and inland transportation for baseline, diesel, and alternative marine fuels. And the kinds of work that we've done in that space historically have allowed us to extend that work into some more bespoke analyzes, looking at things like electrification of inland ferries and things like that.
There's a lot of ongoing work in the aviation space. It's a fast growing sector with GHG reduction pressures. And we see that there's opportunities in things like development and deployment of sustainable aviation fuels, and GREET includes passenger and freight transportation. On the road, we've talked significantly already about the historical background of GREET in looking at light duty vehicles, but also medium duty and heavy duty across a number of different powertrains. In the rail sector, GREET includes diesel, electric, CNG, and compressed natural gas within the spectrum of coverage there.
Now, GREET includes a number of different propulsion technologies for both light and heavy duty, medium, and heavy duty vehicles. So it's not just spark ignition vehicles. We've got fuel cell vehicles, hybrids, battery electric vehicles, plug-in hybrids across many of these different vehicle classes. And this allows us to really look at the influence of different fuels, different technologies and how those things compare. And we are able to do that on a very detailed apples to apples basis, because the simulation that's behind all of our vehicle modeling comes from other argon based tools, namely the autonomy tool, which is a detailed vehicle simulation model that ensures that the vehicle performance characteristics are maintained across different powertrains.
Now, getting a little bit into the details of how we do things with GREET, how we go about evaluating material, for instance, I have a silly example, looking at flubber. So if we're going to produce flubber, and we want to use that flubber, we have to go through a flubber production process. And that requires on the front end we need flubber ore. That flubber ore is then combined with energy, perhaps natural gas, coal, electricity, and then different materials: sodium hydroxide, calcium carbonate, adamantium, so on, and then water to then go through the process and produce flubber, but also in that process producing different pollutant emissions, such as NOx, Sox, carbon dioxide, and so on.
So this is a really basic view of that example. But this framework informs us so that when we come across a particular material, something like adamantium, we go, oh, we don't have that material. We need to dig deep and see what it takes to produce that material. So we have to go through the process of ensuring that we keep extending our coverage to include these kinds of other materials.
We also know that this flubber isn't just something that we can pick up off the sidewalk. We have to go through an ore mining process. So we go through the flubber ore mining process, which includes inputs of energy, material, and water, and yields the extraction, yields emissions of NOx, Sox, and CO2 in the production of that flubber ore. Also, these activities are going to probably occur in different locations. So we have to consider the supply chain issues. What is the transportation that it takes to get this ore from the mine to the production facility, and then onward into all the way to consumer distribution.
So we think about things like the shipping that's involved, so ships, trucks, rail, and so on. We also know that when we have energy, energy needs to be converted. We need to convert fuels into energy. So to do that we have energy conversion technologies. So things like natural gas turbines, a natural gas kiln, natural gas boiler. They all have different sort of characteristic emissions rate for their pollutants, their criteria air pollutants. So that's important for us to understand how these things are produced.
And then finally, there's an issue related to how we allocate all of the burdens that are associated with this. If we have multiple products and many times producing flubber might also produce another co-product, something like vibranium, for instance. And maybe we've even got byproducts, Na2SO4, for example. So this is a conversation and a research area of how do you allocate these things? Do you allocate based on mass? Do you allocate– if we're talking about an energy process, do you allocate based on the contained energy? Do we allocate based on the value of the products? So these are economic value.
So these are different conversations about allocation that are active discussions within the LCA community. Now, as we get into talking about batteries, it's important to understand that we have a framework for vehicle cycle analysis. And in here, the electric vehicle is an example. But really, any product is a collection of different materials. So a battery is a collection of materials. And in fact a car is a collection of many different components themselves, collections of different materials.
So we have to evaluate all of those different materials and develop them a supply chain associated with them. We build that into something like the battery in the form of it's characteristic. What are its chemistry? What are the processes used to make that battery? What is its bill of materials? What's its total lifetime? What's the location of production? And then we can fold that forward with supply chain impacts moving into the electric vehicle. How is that vehicle used? What are the specifications of that vehicle? Is it a small SUV? Is it a car? Is it a truck? What does that look like? And that can allow us then to evaluate the cradle to grave life cycle impacts.
And then there are considerations. Does this battery have a second life? What is the end of life of the whole product? So all of these things impact EV production use end of life. These things are all really important for us to understand the total impact.
Now, I've mentioned that the battery contains many materials. So in the work that we've done in GREET, we've had to go through and identify all of the different critical materials that are contained within these batteries. And there's also many different critical materials contained within other elements of an electric vehicle. And GREET, as a model, has extensive coverage of these different materials and is continuously trying to improve our understanding of their production, location of production, advancements, and what's going on within those markets.
This is a basic diagram of a battery cell. So you've got cathode and anode, and different opportunities. We can have different kinds of cathode chemistries. Those cathode chemistries are important for us to understand, so that we can identify if we need information about lithium, or nickel, or aluminum, or cobalt, or phosphorus, or iron. So these different cathode chemistries are important for us to understand.
Additionally, there are very additional important elements of the battery that we need to model, such as the graphite, which I'll talk a little bit about later. And then there's also a number of different assembly and production processes. So each stage of combining these different materials, we have to evaluate and ensure that we understand the associated energy and material inputs.
Now, this is sort of a layout of the LCA coverage that we have within GREET for batteries. So if we talk about the cathode active materials focusing up here, we know that we can get that material from a Brine or an ore so we can consider that. And then you're going to convert those things into a carbonate, a lithium carbonate or lithium hydroxide. And that's going to require utilization of additional chemicals, soda ash, lime, hydrochloric acid, and so on.
And then that's going to. These lithium chemicals are going to be combined with other precursors. Let's say manganese sulfate, cobalt sulfate, nickel sulfate to create a lithium NMC battery, and that's typically what we call the lithium, nickel manganese cobalt oxide battery that we see in the market. There's also the anode, which is comprised of graphite, so that can be from a number of different pathways. And then we've got binders that are associated with this. And then electrolytes for shuttling the ions within the lithium ion battery.
We have the BMS, the battery management system, which is a really, really important part of the battery to ensure that it operates correctly. And then we also have all these different support materials, things like aluminum, steel, copper, thermal insulation and plastics that we have to bring together into an assembly. Of course, the battery is used. And then at the end of life there's the opportunity for recycling, reuse, disposal.
And in the space of recycling, Argonne benefits greatly from the work that's been conducted in the resale center and the EverBank model, where they've looked at different approaches to recycling these batteries, including pyrometallurgical, hydrometallurgical, and direct physical approaches. And we use that information and fold it back into our modeling within GREET so that we can then investigate the impacts of this kind of battery recycling on a vehicle's total life cycle.
Now, I talked a little bit about lithium already, but I'll go a little bit further here for those that are not familiar. We had the opportunity to work very closely with an organization called SQM based out of Chile. And in that analysis, we conducted for them, we looked at producing lithium from two different sources, namely the Salar de Atacama in Chile, which is a brine-based asset in which you pump the brine from the salar below the Earth to a pond that is a drying pond.
And then through a number of different pumping stages, you pump it and dry it, and pump it and dry it, and eventually you concentrate it to 6% lithium. And you then will collect it and go by truck transport to a production facility where you will produce lithium carbonate, and then potentially lithium hydroxide. After that you then go through a number of different transportation processes, again, to get it to the point where it will be combined with other precursors: nickel, cobalt, manganese to produce the cathode that would be part of a battery that it's part of the cell, the battery cell that goes into the module, that goes into the pack, that goes into the EV. So that's one chain. That's that blue chain, to the red, to the purple.
But we also looked at mining lithium from spodumene ore in Western Australia. And in this process, you're digging that or out of the ground. And from there you're concentrating that spodumene. And then in this particular instance, they were taking that spodumene concentrate and going by truck and then by ocean, eventually ocean transport to get this from Western Australia to be processed into lithium carbonate or lithium hydroxide in China.
And typically the most typical route there is using the conversion into lithium hydroxide from that, but you can do it into lithium carbonate. And then, of course, you have additional transport stages moving to cathode, to cell, to module, to pack, and so on. So we were able to evaluate these two different very different pathways, frankly in resource extraction. And compare how that affects the total life cycle of the vehicle that's the result of this. And for that, we used the GREET model to evaluate and build all the supply chain flows that we saw here.
And so we've seen this with lithium. But we also have the ability to look at this for a number of other resources as well, things like nickel, and so on. So in the particular work that we did here with SQM and there are a couple of different citations here. One of these is this SQM scanned paper, but we have other papers where we looked at what happens if you produce this material in a different part of the world? What does that mean in terms of the battery itself? How big of a variance is there in that production burden?
And we've seen that production in different parts of the world can lead to significant variations in the anticipated greenhouse gas emissions and other pollutant emissions associated with these batteries. The current baseline of producing these vehicles, these vehicle batteries, mostly in China, is showing that there is a burden that could stand to be reduced by relocation to other parts of the world that use different forms of electricity, different forms of Energy, and different processes. So there's opportunity there for improvements within the battery production process.
We've also looked deeply at lithium in the United States. And we've looked at conducting these evaluations with a very consistent and appropriate methodology to ensure that these results are comparable and reliable. So here, we did material identification of different locations of potential lithium production in the United States. So these includes places like smackover play in Kansas, things like the Tonopah lithium claims in Nevada, and so on, and so forth as described here.
And we used technical reports along with our understanding of process modeling and the process modeling that was described, combined that with our GREET analysis to develop an estimate of the greenhouse gas emissions associated with these resources if they made it to production scale based on the technical reports available at the time by these organizations.
So well, we have a recent publication from that. And we can see here that there are some pretty significant variations amongst these different lithium opportunities. So it really is a tool that allows us and can allow organizations to look deeply at how their resource extraction impacts the burden of production. And it's worth noting here that we've broken this down by the inputs of different kinds of Energy, the different kinds of materials.
And some of these things have more leeway than others in terms of our ability to effect change in them. So things like electricity can be sourced very differently. So you can imagine that electricity sourced from coal is going to have a different greenhouse gas emissions impact than electricity sourced from natural gas, than that sourced from onshore wind, for instance.
So we can think about that as opportunities to investigate and interrogate these different greenhouse gas emissions. Of course, when we're looking at this, greenhouse gas emissions aren't the only thing that we care about. We also care about emissions of Sox, NOx, especially as we get into more– if things get towards low population centers, we're going to care about some of those more, ensuring that they don't affect human populations as much.
One of the things that we've jumped into in the last year has been a detailed look at graphite production. So this is identified as a critical material. And we have existing analyzes of this within GREET, and what I'm showing here is some preliminary analysis that is not yet within our modeling, but shows a pathway for which we have analyzed, have begun analyzing GREET anode production via an Atchison powder route production.
And so you can see we have to go through a number of different process modeling stages and understanding of what are all the inputs? What are all the outputs? What is the flow of these things across those different boundaries? And how then can we interrogate the opportunities for changing, reducing the impacts that we observe? So are there opportunities to reduce or change the kinds of materials that are being input as reactants? Are there opportunities to change the quantity or type of energy that's being input. Such that there can be a reduction in some of these impacts?
And then also, are there other parameters, such as lifetime assumptions yields that are available to be interrogated for investigation at least to say, hey, this is where we see major opportunities? And that in particular, is one of the most important things that we think that LCA is good for.
Our process level analysis allows us to go in and look at a very deep level at, for instance, this example here is showing magnesium production. And what we see from this is hotspot identification. What is the burden of producing magnesium from this sort of traditional approach? And we find that the cover gas is really, really influential in terms of the total burden.
And that's specifically because it uses what's called SF6 as a cover gas, which has a very high greenhouse gas forcing. So if that can be substituted out in favor of a different cover gas, potentially something like HFC 134-a or SO2 that has the potential to drastically reduce or even eliminate greenhouse gases from that stage.
Now, has to be technically feasible. It has to maintain the function of the SF6. It has to ensure that the product is still viable for consumption. So those are things that we're not the technical experts there, so we rely on the inputs of others at Argonne and elsewhere who are specialists in the kinds of technical research, the scientific research of material production. Or in the case of batteries, we have significant number of battery scientists that are doing amazing and incredible work in the development and advancement of batteries and battery chemistries.
I mentioned a little bit about the battery supply chain work that we've done already, but this is one example from some work that we published in 2022, looking at these different global supply chains. And this would look different if we were to present this today because we've had– combinations of nickel, manganese, and cobalt stoichiometrically from what we call 111, which is an equal weighting of the three, all the way to NMC 811, which is eight parts nickel, to one part manganese, to one part cobalt.
So using that we can see that producing these batteries in the US or Europe yields significant greenhouse gas reductions relative to the more conventional production in China. I'd also like to highlight that we have what we've developed in the last two years here, a battery module specifically.
So we've had all of this information related to batteries contained in GREET for a long time, but we've not always had it placed forward for users to engage with in an intuitive kind of way. And so in the last two years, as I mentioned, we've really worked with industry and university stakeholders, received feedback, and developed a tool that can support rapid battery LCA studies and parametric analysis of a number of different parameters that allow us to have some deep insights into the main drivers and opportunities when it comes to things like the greenhouse gas emissions associated with these different batteries.
And this is just an example, battery of preliminary work looking at NMC 811. And we can see the different metrics being things like total energy, greenhouse gas emissions, SOx emissions, NOx emissions, particulate matter, and water consumption on a per kilowatt hour basis.
And so this is the kind of thing where we can use that and we can observe, OK, what are the main drivers in total energy versus greenhouse gas emissions? We can see that those are all related on a pretty direct one to one ratio. Whereas things like socks, we can see that that's being driven by something that is not in a one to one ratio. We know that, in fact, that's mostly related to nickel sulfate production. And so these are the kinds of things that we are able to use to, again, allow some of that hotspot analysis.
So I've talked a bit about batteries, specifically, about the kinds of research that supports the work that we do, and also about how that gets folded into vehicles. So now I'm going to talk a bit about the work that we've done related to that sort of rolling this up, using a cradle to grave analysis of light duty vehicles. And this was work that was jointly conducted by Argonne National Laboratory, NREL, other folks at DOE, EPRI, and then many different industry partners.
And we looked at vehicles across a number of different powertrains. We looked at vehicles both currently and in the future. And we considered specifically small SUVs and midsize cars, but I'm only going to be showing here small SUVs.
And then the other important thing is that we consider not only sort of conventional fueling pathways, but also advanced decarbonized fueling opportunities. So a number of different potential pathways there. So this particular figure is showing the current technology, greenhouse gas emissions associated with the small SUV production for a gasoline ICE vehicle, a diesel ICE vehicle, carbon compressed natural gas vehicle, an E85 vehicle, gasoline hybrid, a plug-in hybrid with a 50 mile range, a fuel cell vehicle with both a 300 and 400 mile range.
And the reason that we were interested in that particular range issue for fuel cell vehicles was because the range will slightly influenced the construction of the hydrogen tank. The hydrogen tank is comprised of a significant amount of carbon fiber, which has historically had a large greenhouse gas burden, and so we wanted to investigate the impact of that particular component. And then we also looked at battery electric vehicles of 200, 300, and 400 mile range.
So looking at those, we can see what that production burden looks like today, but also we look at what that could be in the future for these different vehicles. And what this represents mostly is improvements in vehicle technologies. So reducing the size of the vehicle, reducing the size of components, and importantly advances in the battery itself, that battery technology. So the future is about a 2030 to 2035 kind of time frame.
This is a necessary but sort of insufficient look at this kind of work. This is just making the vehicle. This is just that vehicle cycle, just producing the vehicle. So we need to also look at using the vehicle. So we do that by looking at what's the current picture? What do things look like today. So this black sort of disk here that you see for all these different powertrains is the current greenhouse gas emissions on a per mile basis for a small SUV operating on gasoline in an internal combustion engine vehicle, diesel, CNG, E85.
Then we have a gasoline hybrid, a plug-in hybrid with a 50 mile range, the two different fuel cell vehicles, and then the three different battery electric vehicles. And so we have to then take the fuel economy of these different vehicles, bring those together so that we can look at the total burden. So this is the current technology conditions. So the way things are essentially today, but this is really looking at a 2020 vehicle.
Then looking at future technology. So this is assuming an improvement in vehicle powertrains. So this is leveraging baseline fuels. So we're still here operating on gasoline, diesel, gasoline, conventional electricity. And we can see here that the fuel economy improvements powertrain improvements can get you a long way. There's a real benefit to advancing and continuing to advance each of these different vehicle technologies. It's necessary. But we also can identify that we're not at 0. We're not close to that yet.
So one of the things that we should consider then is we did have to build the vehicle. So what does zero even look like? What does zero– what's the closest that we can get to that zero, if we had a zero carbon fuel, that or energy source that we were operating on. Well, this is what we call the production burden. And so that's taking all of the burden associated with making that vehicle and dividing it by the total assumed lifetime miles driven for that vehicle.
So we show those here for these different vehicles, and we can see that there's some variation. We can see that the BEVs have higher greenhouse gas emissions of production than the gasoline vehicle, for instance. But what we really are interested in with this study is how do we see the opportunity for reducing greenhouse gas emissions across these different powertrains?
And we see here the utilization of a pyrolysis gasoline, some different E fuels approaches for producing gasoline, and then all these different potential pathways for producing different biofuels, for going through corn stover here. Different combinations of advanced liquid fuels and electricity for reducing carbon footprints. And finally moving into the hydrogen space, opportunities for producing hydrogen in low carbon approaches.
And then looking here at the electric vehicles, with this is an advanced combined natural gas, advanced combined cycle that's utilizing a carbon capture and sequestration. So we can see significant reductions there, and even further reductions if we consider wind and solar, where we don't account for the infrastructure associated with those wind and solar. If we do include that will increase that arrow just a little bit so that– or shorten the arrow, I suppose, a little bit.
Now, this is the kinds of work that we can do at Argonne, the kind of work that we have done at Argonne as it relates to transportation, as it relates to batteries. And so I show this here in the context of a talk that is ostensibly about batteries, because these batteries get utilized somewhere and we utilize them in these different vehicles. So it allows us to show that breadth of coverage that we have. And it's necessary for us to use all of this back end development and calculation so that we can provide analysis that is as robust as possible across supply chains.
And when I say across supply chains, what I mean is that we could do this kind of analysis now and then go parametrically across all of the different resources that I've talked about lithium, nickel, cobalt, aluminum, steel, even. And start looking at how that changes as we vary all of these. So that's what I've prepared for my presentation today, and I'm looking forward to having a conversation with the different participants here. Thank you very much.
SANDRA LOI: Thank you, Jarod. It looks like we have got two questions here in the chat. Actually, we had three, but what was answered. So, Peggy. So, Jarod, this is all clear and helpful. I love the pasta analogy. Let's see. Do you have infographics or more succinct info to share with the general public? I'm a Coalition Director for Vermont Clean Cities and Communities, and we have end users ask a lot about the benefits and impacts of batteries when comparing ICE to EVs.
JAROD KELLY: Yeah, thanks for that. We have significantly reduced order graphics that we've produced for some of this work. This is I understand that I've gone through a lot and most people don't need this degree of technical information. So I have a couple very simple slides that show just here's an ICE vehicle, here's a BEV, here's what that BEV looks like on a specific grid or a specific kind of electricity. Here's the vehicle portion. Here's the– it's a simple bar graph that I think most people can understand looking at. Here's the energy, here's the making the vehicle, here's how much it takes to make the battery.
So I think that I do have some of those kinds of things. And the pasta example is one I can't take too much credit for that particular slide was developed by the communications team here at Argonne. So they did a great job and I've been using it ever since.
SANDRA LOI: Yeah. I'll second Peggy's comment about the pasta analogy. I like that as well. That was a nice addition. Let's see. Let's see. Maybe more of a comment. If you're going to consider wind and solar, then those need to be added to the GREET model to calculate the amount of gases produced in their life cycle as well.
JAROD KELLY: Yeah, we have that.
SANDRA LOI: We can ignore– yep. OK. OK.
JAROD KELLY: Yeah. We have infrastructure burdens. Meaning they it's not zero, but it's still well outperforms anything else on the grid like natural gas and things like that. It's significantly lower when we account for the burden of producing the solar panels and the solar, all the infrastructure for that, and the wind turbines and the so we have those elements and we have the ability to turn that on and off the infrastructure, not only for those building out those but also the infrastructure associated with building and maintaining coal plants, and nuclear plants, and natural gas facilities and the like. So yeah. Thank you.
SANDRA LOI: All right. Thank you. Another question here. Has there been any consideration to the impact of the vehicle were to be lost in a fire total failure, i.e. battery outputting hydrofluoric acid or carbon monoxide during a battery fire? I know the percentage of battery fires are very low, but they do happen.
JAROD KELLY: No, so we haven't modeled that specifically on this. I understand the point. And it is like you say, it's a low likelihood event. It would amortize the burdens of let's say, greenhouse gas emissions for the burden of production would be significantly shortened.
So you wouldn't have to the per mile burden of a vehicle that is involved in a situation where it catches fire is going to not only have the increased burden of production, but on a per mile basis, it's total burden would still be the same, but on a per mile basis. Then you would account for the burning of all of the vehicle and all that kind of thing. But we also don't account for the other conventional vehicles that get caught in fires and burn their seats, and burn the gasoline, that's just existing in their fuel tank and things like that. So we have not conducted that kind of analysis yet. Thank you.
SANDRA LOI: Wonderful. Thank you. Just want to steer everyone to the chat. Marcy Rood, thank you, included several links to the studies that Jared cited included in his presentation, so feel free to grab those, and keep those handy. Just had another question come in. And feel free to keep the questions coming. We'll go to the top of the hour here. When you shut the slide accounting for future technology, I was surprised that ICE vehicle emissions were not that different from any of the EVs. Am I understanding this outcome correctly?
JAROD KELLY: Yeah. Let me– let me go here. So I assume this is the figure that you're talking about. And so let me put a few more caveats on this. So this is– if I'm understanding the question correctly. Let me get a chance. Yeah. So this is future technology for vehicle operations is this. So this is Lauren. Is it the down arrows that you're talking about or is it the–
SANDRA LOI: Yeah.
JAROD KELLY: OK. Let me explain.
SANDRA LOI: So just a breakdown and, thanks.

JAROD KELLY: Perfectly happy to talk about this. So one of the things I didn't go into was all of the caveats that are around these different assumptions on different potential vehicle fueling pathways in the future. So each of these was identified by the team within US Drive, which is a combination of DOE, energy companies, a bunch of different OEMs, other national labs, different fueling pathways where it was identified as, OK, this could represent up to at least 10% of the market.
So we didn't look at every single potential pathway, but we did look at those that could represent a meaningful contribution to the total spectrum of the vehicle. So if we think about it on a single vehicle purpose, just one vehicle that's able to get pyrolysis fuel and operate, that's a really nice way to consider this.
Now, paralysis gasoline is a highly– you're sequestering carbon in the growth of your feedstock. In this case, the feedstock is byproduct timber waste, and that's being converted into this gasoline, and that is then converted to energy driven miles by these vehicles. The e-fuels are very prospective. That's thinking about conversion of CO2, and hydrogen, and pulling those things together with renewable or nuclear energy, such that you can then produce a fuel that can be combusted.
So this isn't saying that all of this is gasoline that we would obtain in the conventional way. Obtaining conventional way would look like this. So this would be conventional product. This is the production of the quote-unquote advanced fueling pathways, and deeply decarbonized fueling pathways. The real takeaway here is that to be able to decarbonize transportation, it is necessary, but not sufficient to work on powertrain improvements. You have to decarbonize the source of energy itself too. So there has to be opportunities to look at that.
And the other thing that is nice here, you see, it's not just one solution, it's not just one thing that could help. So that's a great question on your part, Lauren, I appreciate that.
SANDRA LOI: Perfect. Thank you. I had another question come in. I work in the marine industry doing electrification of boats, and I'm wondering if these models would be adaptable into our industry to show total life cycle impact of going electric and boats.
JAROD KELLY: Yeah. Thank you for the question, Robert. That's really interesting that you asked that. We're actually in the process of submitting a paper on marine electrification. And so we have been looking at this. Not only the fuel cycle but also the production side.
One of the things that's a big challenge there that's harder for us to capture is some of that onshore concern related to how fast do these things need to charge? How much does that– how many megawatts does that mean need to be on shore to support this? So yes, these models can be adapted for that. And we have actively been working towards that adaptation. We don't make those available in our public modeling. But as I noted, we have a paper that is being submitted soon here, and will hopefully be available for public consumption in the near future.
SANDRA LOI: Great. Thank you so much. And that's wonderful to hear. Look forward to reading more about this through that paper. I'm not seeing any other questions. We have about four minutes. I did want to reiterate, as Marcy said at the beginning, this is Sandra Lee from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. This webinar is part of a series that we're planning on focus on electric vehicles and infrastructure. And so more to come.
And I wanted to put it out there to the group, if you wanted to type into chat, what other topics within the space would you be interested in learning about? We'd love to capture some of those so that we can help develop. That will help develop and form the agenda in this series moving forward. So if you want to go ahead and type, if you have things that you're specifically are interested in, please type it into the chat and we'll use those to plan future webinars.
So not seeing anything else. Jarod, I'm wondering, is there further– what further research is needed? Or what's on the horizon for the calendar year in LCA of batteries or vehicles? Can you talk a little bit more about that?
JAROD KELLY: I'm really sorry. I heard what further and then I heard– and then everything cut out. I'm not sure.
SANDRA LOI: Oh, I'm so sorry.
JAROD KELLY: No. No problem. Could you repeat the question?
SANDRA LOI: Hiccup on my end. Just if you could talk about what further research is needed or what's on the horizon in and LCA batteries for vehicles.
JAROD KELLY: Yeah, absolutely. So there's a lot of advancement in battery. There's the different cathode chemistries that are advancing the different opportunities within the battery space are significant. One of the things that we continue to try to understand better is the opportunities within things like solid state batteries. So what that gives you the potential opportunity for is increased energy and energy density and specific energy.
So these batteries themselves can be smaller. And there's some evidence that suggests that they might be able to be charged faster. And if that's the case, then you get closer to the model that people are more accustomed to. And so that's one thing that we're excited about the possibility of being able to get more information on so that we can model better.
There's also we're talking all the time here about lithium ion batteries, but there's also other battery chemistries that are available, things like sodium ion batteries. There's just a lot of different exciting things that are going on in that space, both here at Argonne, and other national labs, and other parts of the research community. So the batteries that exist today, I would presume are not necessarily going to be the batteries that we're going to be talking about in 15 years. So how do we understand those better?
And then when it comes to understanding the things that go into those batteries, where are those materials coming from? How are they being produced? Are there opportunities for bringing those things into the United States? How does that affect the local communities, local environments? Are there opportunities for pollutant impact reduction through utilizing the resources here in the United States?
Not necessarily the raw material extraction. We don't necessarily have all of these materials in the US, but can there be refining that's occurring in the US? Can there be partnerships that seek to reduce some of those pollutants and big issues of concern that we've discussed here today?
SANDRA LOI: Wonderful. Looks like we're at time. Just one more, maybe one. This one last question to wrap things up. Given production burden, how many miles would have to be driven on an EV before it's compensated for production burden?
JAROD KELLY: Two years of typical travel you'll be at break even. I don't have the link for it. I'm sorry. I had the opportunity to work with, I'm blanking on his name. It's through the proceedings of the National Academies of Science, where a gentleman developed a really nice web tool using the GREET model that allows you to compare break even for our car, SUV, and truck when replacing an ICEV or an HEV.
Andy, so the question is a great one. And it's less than two years typically, so regardless of powertrain it's specific to the different powertrains, but it's about two years before you– when you get that benefit. So one of the things that I can do if there's going to be a follow up on this, is I can try to get the link to that web tool and share that with you, because it is a really– it is nicely done and pretty user friendly.
SANDRA LOI: Wonderful. Well, we will try to share that afterwards when we send everybody the link to the recording so they can get access to that. So yeah, if you have that Jarod, that would be great to share. So I just wanted to thank you so much. Thank you everyone for participating today. Sorry. Great to have everyone. Great to see a great turnout. And appreciate all the questions. And I'll pass it back to Lady Miah to close us out.
LADY MIAH KANE: All right. Thank you so much, everyone. Have a great day and we'll see you next time.