Costs and carbon footprint analysis of dry manufacturing battery LiFePO4-based cathodes

Here, we report that dry battery electrode (DBE) manufacturing can potentially reduce costs and the global warming potential (GWP) on a cell and electrode production level. DBE manufacturing is expected to represent a crucial innovation on the route to manufacturing sustainable and cost-effective lithium-ion batteries (LIBs). Despite the emphasized importance in previous research, viable data concerning costs and GWP from a production and materials standpoint are lacking. This work offers in-depth insights into the potential of DBE manufacturing by extending the open-source CellEst 3.0 model with primary data from the laboratory and industry. We compare the costs and GWP of prismatic cells containing lithium iron phosphate (LFP) cathodes prepared with four different procedures. The optimization of DBE enables total cell costs of US$51.0 kWh −1 and a GWP of 84.5 kg CO 2 equiv kWh −1 , resembling a decrease of 9.3% and 3.1% compared to the water-based reference cell.