-In this video, I will talk about the comparative life-cycle assessments, or LCAs, of electric and thermal vehicles. In a context of climate change, of fossil and mineral natural resource depletion, as well as the deterioration of urban air quality, electric vehicles may represent an interesting alternative to thermal vehicles. We have been observing this trend for 10 years with the emergence of new vehicles launched by the manufacturers as well as a series of incentives implemented by the government to foster the purchase of electric vehicles, their use, and the installation of charging stations. In this context, it is legitimate to be curious about the overall environmental balance of electric vehicles compared to thermal vehicles. If an electric vehicle is not polluting during use, upstream, we do have to manufacture the batteries and produce electricity to charge it. The life-cycle assessment is the suitable tool to compare the overall environmental balances of two products with identical functions. I am now going to present the results of a study performed with my coworkers in 2012 for the ADEME, the French environment agency. The goal of the study was to define the area of environmental relevance of electric vehicles compared to thermal vehicles. As in any LFA study, it was divided into four phases: setting the goal and scope of the study, the life-cycle inventory, impact assessment and interpreting the results. It was made in compliance with the ISO standards 14040 and 14044 on the LCA. The rest of this presentation follows the same four phases. I will start with methodology. First, we will define our functional unity, or the service unit that every figure calculated in the LFA study will relate to. In this case, the service unit is the provision of a vehicle for trips under 80 kilometers per day for a design lifetime of 150 000 kilometers. This vehicle can either be an individual vehicle or a light commercial vehicle. In this study, we considered two deadlines, 2012 and 2020. And we only considered the trickle charge. A few other methodological points are tied to the definition of system boundaries. In this study, we considered, according to the LFA process, the steps from raw material extraction to the vehicle end of life including the provision of fuel and electricity. However, we left aside the production of any infrastructures aimed at charging or fuel distribution. Another issue regarding the study is that, because of the lack of maturity of electric vehicles, we do not have enough feedback to have solid and stable data to calculate the LCA. Especially when it comes to the batteries, their density, their lifespan, as well as the vehicle consumption, the use of auxiliaries such as heating which can impact the results, the driving style. All these factors were identified at the start of the study and you will see in the results that we performed uncertainty analyses to deal with these specificities. One last important subject is that this study was submitted to an international panel of LCA experts for critical review in compliance with the ISO standard 14040 on LCA as it is a comparative study aimed for publication. I will now start with the second phase, the life-cycle inventory. We collected primary data, directly from actors from the electric and thermal industries. We especially collected data from manufacturers, battery manufacturers, energeticists and end-of-life actors. The third phase is impact analysis. Based on the inventory of inflows and outflows in the life cycle of electric and thermal vehicles, we calculated several impact indicators. They include the total primary energy consumption, the influence on climate change, mineral and fossil resources depletion, atmospheric acidification, photochemical smog, water eutrophization, and as this study focuses on electric vehicles, we also took into account indicators which are not systemically included in LCAs, but which made sense for this one, such as radioactive waste and emissions, local atmospheric pollution and the noise during use. The first visible result on this slide is that the contribution of electric vehicle production, both batteries and the vehicle, represents a much higher proportion of the total impact on the life cycle than the production of a thermal vehicle compared to its life cycle. For thermal vehicles, it is about 15% and almost 70% for electric vehicles. As a second conclusion, the compared environmental performances of electric and thermal vehicles, changes with the impact under consideration. On this graph which represents the total energy consumption throughout the life cycle, we can see that the consumption of an electric vehicle is pretty similar to that of a thermal vehicle. On the next one, which shows the contribution to the greenhouse effect, there is a clear advantage in favor of electric vehicles which reduce by almost 65% greenhouse gas emissions compared to thermal vehicles. On the third one, which shows the contribution to atmospheric acidification, the environmental performance of electric vehicles is inferior to that of thermal vehicles. We can remember that the results rely strongly on the impact in question. A third conclusion, which is relatively intuitive, is that the environmental balance of an electric vehicle strongly depends on the country where it is being used, in other words on the electric mix which provides its energy. On this slide, we can see an electric vehicle used in France in blue and an electric vehicle used in Germany in red compared to the ochre and brown lines showing thermal vehicles. The vehicle used in France is much more efficient because of the part of nuclear energy in the French mix. It is 75% nuclear energy and 12% hydroelectricity whereas the German mix is 44% coal and 60% fossil fuel. The fourth conclusion has to do with how to do the calculations. I specified in the methodological phase that some data were uncertain because of the immaturity of electric vehicles. So we have not calculated one value for each result, but a range of values. This led to us reformulating our conclusions and producing this kind of graph where we can compare the environmental performance of electric and thermal vehicles based on their lifespan. Here, we can see that, regarding photochemical ozone creation, after 140 000 kilometers, in France or in Germany, this impact is in favor of electric vehicles. This slide gathers the results of the various impact analyses. In blue are the impacts for which electric vehicles are favorable. We can see that atmospheric acidification is the only one where electric cars have an unfavorable balance in France compared to thermal vehicles. Based on these results, we were able to draw up recommendations. The first one is to favor the intensity of use of electric vehicles to amortize the impact of producing the vehicle and the batteries. The second one is to charge an electric vehicle with a highly decarbonated energy produced from renewable sources. The third one deals with battery recycling which reduces the impact on atmospheric acidification. The fourth one is to dedicate specific areas in town to electric mobility, in order to increase the benefits in terms of noise and local pollution. This study shows that with a quantified balance of all the impacts throughout the life cycle of thermal and electric vehicles, we can write consistent public policies.
