Environmental assessment of a new generation battery:

As the electrification of our economy and the corresponding increase in demand for battery storage systems are mostly driven by environmental concerns, information about the potential environmental impacts of the different battery systems is required. However, this kind of information is scarce for emerging post-lithium systems such as the magnesium-sulfur (MgS) battery. Therefore, we use life cycle assessment following a cradle-to-gate perspective to quantify the cumulative energy demand and potential environmental impacts per Wh of the storage capacity of a hypothetical MgS battery. Furthermore, we also estimate global warming potential, fossil depletion potential, ozone depletion potential and metal depletion potential, associated with the MgS battery production. The battery is modelled based on an existing prototype MgS pouch cell and hypothetically optimized according to the current state of the art in lithium-ion batteries (LIB), exploring future improvement potentials. It turns out that the initial (non-optimized) prototype cell cannot compete with current LIB in terms of energy density or environmental performance, mainly due to the high share of non-active components, decreasing its performance substantially. Therefore, if the assumed evolutions of the MgS cell composition are achieved to overcome current design hurdles and reach a comparable lifespan, efficiency, cost and safety levels to that of existing LIB; then the MgS battery has significant potential to outperform both existing LIB and lithium-sulfur batteries.