Environmental life cycle assessment of emerging solid-state batteries: A review

Energy storage systems are main drivers in various fields, especially in the context of energy and mobility transition. Battery technologies are one of those options offering good technical performance in multiple stationary and mobile applications. New batteries having potentially high energy density and higher safety with lower cost are in particular ideal candidates for mobility applications. At present especially, lithium-ion batteries are used, but they are facing challenges regarding sustainability and safety issues, which can be quantitatively analyzed with Life Cycle Assessments (LCA). New developments regarding various solid-state batteries (SSBs) are very promising to tackle these challenges, but only very few studies are available on the environmental assessment of SSBs. Prospective LCA methodology is used here to analyze the environmental hotspots over the different life cycle phases for emerging SSBs. This also helps in decisions making at an early stage of development. This review critically analyzes available LCA studies on SSBs focusing on the inventory data, scope of the assessment as well as the life cycle impact assessment results. An effort has been made to compare the different LCA studies considering global warming potential indicator. As a results, the analysis highlights difficulties in comparability due to inconsistencies associated with the data sources, goal and scope, system boundaries and the method of impact assessment etc. To facilitate a consistent comparison, a unification methodology has been proposed to compare different LCAs of SSBs. Overall, the proposed methodology will help to fill the knowledge gap between different existing LCA studies on emerging solid-state battery technologies and provides recommendations for future assessments

Conversion of vine shoots into bioethanol and chemicals: Prospective LCA of biorefinery concept

Vine shoots are the viticulture residues generated in high quantities after the grapevine pruning. They are lignocellulosic material poorly exploited as feedstock. These wastes are often dumped in the agriculture fields or burnt. Due to their availability and relatively low price, vine shoots are considered as potential feedstock for biochemical conversion into value-added products. In this work, two biorefinery scenarios using vine shoots as feedstock to co-produce chemicals are assessed from an environmental point of view: production of lactic acid, and co-production of lactic acid and furfural. A CHP area was considered to be annexed to the plants to produce heat and electricity for internal use. The Aspen Plus and SimaPro commercial software were used to perform the LCA of the selected scenarios. The assessed scenarios demonstrate significant reductions in climate change, fossil fuel depletion, freshwater ecotoxicity and eutrophication and human toxicity impacts compared to their counterfactual systems

Ethanol from Indian agro-industrial lignocellulosic biomass—a life cycle evaluation of energy, greenhouse gases, land and water

Purpose: India is one of the fastest growing economies in the world. Energy is a critical input for socio-economic development, and its strategy aims at efficiency and security. To provide access to environmentally friendly energy resources, the national biofuel policy targets cellulosic feedstocks which necessitates analysing feedstocks using holistic approaches. This paper studies the life cycle impact of ethanol production from cellulosic agricultural feedstocks. Methods: The difficulty of finding appropriate life cycle inventory data for the analysed biofuels in the Indian context is overcome by combining data from diverse sources such as journal articles, government reports and personal contact with farmers. Variation in these numbers across studies is captured by means of error bars. These data are used to calculate environmental sustainability metrics such as energy return on investment, life cycle greenhouse gas emissions and life cycle water use for each fuel. Biomass sources considered in this work include cellulose from wheat stalk, rice husk, sorghum stalk, sugarcane bagasse and cotton stalk. These results are compared with ethanol from molasses and sugarcane juice, which are the conventional approaches. Results and Discussion: Results of the analysis indicate that sorghum stalk is most attractive due to its high energy return on investment, low greenhouse gas emissions, and low water and land use. Ethanol from rice husk has relatively high water use and greenhouse gas emissions, but these are within the margin of variability of other fuels. Despite the attractiveness of sorghum stalk from the current analysis, it is not likely that this will become a major feedstock for cellulosic ethanol in India. This is because farmers value sorghum as an animal feed and may not be willing to convert it into ethanol. Conclusions: This is the first life cycle study of Indian cellulosic biofuel pathways. The inventory data collected in this work is a novel contribution that should be useful for other studies. Findings from the analysis can help guide the decision-making process in the biofuel sector for India

Ethanol from Indian agro-industrial lignocellulosic biomass: an emergy evaluation

This study assesses the environmental performance of biomass feedstocks, rice husk, wheat stalk, cotton stalk, sorghum stalk, and sugarcane bagasse, for ethanol production in India. The analysis calculates emergy indicators and demonstrates the dilemma in selection of biomass feedstocks for meeting the ethanol blending target decided by the biofuel policy of the Government of India. It considers spatial variability, and computes the production potential of each lignocellulosic feedstock considered in the study. Achieving high return on energy invested, high renewability, and large production rates simultaneously seems difficult for the considered feedstocks. Among these cellulosic feedstocks, rice husk shows highest renewability and ethanol production potential. Although sorghum stalk has a high return on investment, it has lowest renewability among the feedstocks considered in the study. Rice husk and cotton stalk should be targeted first to fulfil the blending demand of gasoline as they show highest renewability and quality corrected emergy return on investment, along with a high production potential. Emergy analysis of cellulosic biofuels can provide a holistic platform for decision makers for designing the biofuel policy and selection of feedstock in the Indian context