Environmental and economic evaluation of innovative battery technologies

A circular economy requires cross-sector cooperation and optimization in order to extend product lifetimes and reduce environmental impact generated during the production, lifetime and disposal. This complexity calls for holistic approaches that take into account the entire value chain, as well as the long term effects, to correctly identify opportunities for improvement and to evaluate different options. The European Horizon 2020 project Si-DRIVE (Silicon Alloying Anodes for High Energy Density Batteries comprising Lithium Rich Cathodes and Safe Ionic Liquid-based Electrolytes for Enhanced High VoltagE Performance) will develop and evaluate innovative battery technologies. Within Si-DRIVE, the responsibility will be to perform environmental impact and sustainability assessment of the full life cycle of these innovative battery technologies. Initially, the thesis should focus on assessing the sustainability of the materials that are commonly used during production in order to evaluate the impact of substituting critical materials, such as Cobalt, with non-critical dopants. When more information on the novel production processes becomes available throughout the project, the focus of the research should shift to performing continual sustainability assessments along the development of green production strategies. As existing databases do not contain the data for the production of the innovative cathodic materials studied in the project, collaborations shall be established with other project partners to collect this information. Finally, the thesis should expand existing LCA methodologies to account for future upscaling from lab scale to continuous production environments. The final output would be to evaluate the environmental impact of repair, repurposing and recycling for different battery end-of-life scenarios. Next to environmental impact evaluation, the output of the thesis shall also contribute to life cycle cost evaluation and business model analysis in order to ensure the commercial viability of the Si-DRIVE technologies.