Batteries help reduce emissions, but how do we reduce their emissions?
The first order of business for the energy transition is electrifying applications like vehicles and heating and making sure that the electricity that powers them is made using renewables. But once the dominant slices of the emissions pie have shrunk, other categories with less potential to reduce emissions become important.
能源转型的首要任务是实现车辆和供暖等应用领域的电气化，并确保为其供电的电力来自可再生能源。然而，一旦排放总量中占比最大的部分减少，其他减排潜力较小的类别就会变得重要起来。
A new study led by Haiwei Zhou at the University of Melbourne focused on the emissions associated with making lithium-ion batteries, which many parts of the energy transition rely on. Those emissions aren’t zero, so as we use more and more batteries, that number will grow. Right now, the researchers estimate that these emissions only account for 0.18 percent of annual greenhouse gas releases, but they could increase by a factor of 10 or more by 2050.
墨尔本大学的周海威（音译）领导的一项新研究关注了锂离子电池制造过程中的排放问题，能源转型的许多环节都依赖于这种电池。这些排放并非零，因此随着我们使用越来越多的电池，这一数字将会增长。研究人员估计，目前这些排放仅占年度温室气体排放量的 0.18%，但到 2050 年，这一比例可能会增加 10 倍甚至更多。
Avoiding production: There are a number of ways to reduce the emissions required to make a battery. Some elements used in various lithium-ion battery chemistries are more energy-intensive to mine and refine than others. The battery manufacturing process involves many steps that could be made more energy-efficient. And then there’s recycling, which can put battery materials back into the loop while requiring much less energy than mining.
避免生产：有多种方法可以减少制造电池所需的排放。在各种锂离子电池化学成分中，某些元素在开采和提炼过程中的能源消耗比其他元素更高。电池制造过程涉及许多步骤，这些步骤本可以提高能源效率。此外还有回收利用，它能将电池材料重新投入循环，且所需能源远低于开采。
But the researchers wanted to compare options on the demand side of the equation. Rather than shaving the per-battery carbon footprint, this means reducing the number of batteries we need to make, avoiding their emissions entirely. The team used projections of emissions throughout the life cycle of batteries used for electric vehicles (EVs) and energy storage through 2050.
但研究人员希望比较需求侧的方案。与其削减单个电池的碳足迹，这意味着减少我们需要制造的电池数量，从而完全避免其排放。研究团队利用了到 2050 年电动汽车（EV）和储能电池整个生命周期的排放预测。
In total, efforts to clean up battery production could reduce the carbon footprint of a given battery by 34 percent by 2050, they found. Between 2024 and 2050, that would avoid somewhere between 3.5 and 4.7 billion tons of CO2.
他们发现，总体而言，通过清洁电池生产的努力，到 2050 年可以将单个电池的碳足迹减少 34%。在 2024 年至 2050 年间，这将避免 35 亿至 47 亿吨的二氧化碳排放。
Using batteries efficiently: Reducing demand isn’t a “just say no to batteries” story. There are simple strategies that limit the number of batteries you need to make. Ensuring that EV batteries last as long as the average vehicle reduces the need for replacements, cutting battery demand by 29 percent in this analysis. And limiting the ongoing growth in average EV battery capacity—driven by preferences for longer range and larger vehicles—could reduce demand by another 23 percent compared to the current trend.
高效使用电池：减少需求并不是要“对电池说不”。有一些简单的策略可以限制你需要制造的电池数量。确保电动汽车电池的使用寿命与车辆平均寿命相当，可以减少更换需求，在本分析中，这使电池需求降低了 29%。此外，限制电动汽车平均电池容量的持续增长（目前受对更长续航和更大车辆的偏好驱动），与当前趋势相比，可进一步减少 23% 的需求。
Additionally, adoption of services like ride-sharing could reduce demand by almost 10 percent, while repurposing end-of-life vehicle batteries for energy storage could contribute another 8 percent. Together, all of this would eliminate 6–7.2 billion tons of CO2 between 2024 and 2050—a fair bit more than the supply chain improvements.
此外，采用拼车等服务可以减少近 10% 的需求，而将报废的汽车电池重新用于储能则可以再贡献 8% 的减排量。总而言之，所有这些措施将在 2024 年至 2050 年间消除 60 亿至 72 亿吨的二氧化碳排放，这比供应链改进带来的减排效果要显著得多。
Battery production is a small slice of the emissions pie, but getting to net-zero emissions means tackling many small sources as well as the biggest ones. There is a lot we can do to produce cleaner electricity and to reduce the environmental footprint of batteries. But the battery you don’t make has zero footprint, so the benefits of any reduction in demand add up fast.
电池生产在排放总量中只占很小一部分，但要实现净零排放，意味着既要解决最大的排放源，也要解决许多小的排放源。我们在生产更清洁的电力和减少电池的环境足迹方面大有可为。但你没有制造出来的电池其足迹为零，因此任何需求减少所带来的效益都会迅速累积。