Environmental assessment of electrification of road transport in Norway: Scenarios and impacts

• Life-cycle assessment of business-as-usual Norwegian road transport suggests a 10% increase in greenhouse gases by 2020.
• Lower than expected GHG benefits with EV deployment in life cycle perspective.
• Zero tail pipe emissions from EVs provide local environmental benefits.

The study develops scenarios regarding the introduction of electric vehicles to the passenger vehicle fleet of Norway to reach the 2020 Norwegian greenhouse gas reduction target and a more extreme target to limit global temperature increase to two degrees. A process-based life cycle assessment approach is integrated with a temporally variable inventory model to evaluate the environmental impacts of these scenarios. We find that greenhouse gases in the reference scenario increase by 10% in 2020 in comparison to 2012; while for the more intensive improvements in conventional vehicles, this increase is reduced to 2%. For electric vehicles deployment scenarios, although the fleet share will reduce the tailpipe greenhouse gas emissions by 8–26%, with the upper end representing the two-degree reduction target, emissions reductions over the entire life cycle are only 3–15%. Electric vehicles also reduce emissions of NOx, SO2 and particulates reducing acidification, smog formation and particulate formation impacts, however, with addition of large numbers of electric vehicles significant trade-offs in toxicity impacts are found.