Comparative life cycle assessment of prospective battery-grade material production in Norway

The manufacturing of battery grade materials is electricity intensive and currently dominated by China. Several European countries are exploring options of venturing into locally produced raw materials for battery manufacturing. In Norway, four battery manufacturing facilities are planned or under construction which increases the need for locally manufactured battery grade materials. This study investigates the potential impacts of producing nickel, cobalt and manganese sulfate in Norway, a country known for its renewable-sourced electricity. A high resolution model is developed for each of the three battery grade materials which considers individual steps of the value chain from mining to the final product. This is vital in the modelling as some processes, especially those pertaining to mining and ore processing occur outside of Norway. Environmental impacts of these battery grade materials are performed with Arda, an in house LCA calculator using ReCiPe2016 as midpoint characterization method. The results show that, producing nickel and cobalt sulfate in Norway yields 3.3kg CO2eq. and 7.7kg CO2eq., respectively, with the highest contribution from ore processing which occurs in Canada. Manganese sulfate produced in Norway with ores mined in Gabon causes a GWP of 1.3 kgCO2eq., mainly due to metal refining impacts. The results are benchmarked with other studies performed across different geographical system boundaries to depict the emission reduction opportunities in producing these battery grade materials in Norway. What is observed is that, production of these sulfates in Norway has significant emission reduction benefits as compared to other studies reported in the scientific literature. To increase the robustness of the analysis, the thesis further develops scenarios to investigate the effect of changes in the electricity mix intensity of different mining and production countries on the overall GWP. Within these scenarios, the Norwegian case still emerges with the lowest GWP. Results of this study indicate that producing battery grade materials in Norway has prospects of reducing the emissions associated with cell materials in lithium-ion batteries. Furthermore, from the scenarios developed, the GWP of cathode precursors can be significantly reduced by using low carbon electricity in both mining and producing countries