Battery chemistry mix predominantly explains disparities in critical material use for electric passenger vehicles

Abstract

Electric Vehicles (EVs) are vital for decarbonization but intensify critical material demand. Existing studies often fall short in precise assessments of material demand and its reduction potential due to overlooking real-world EV characteristics and their inherent spatial, segmental, and technological heterogeneity. To fill this gap, this study adopts a bottom-up multi-dataset fusion approach, providing high-resolution characterizations of segment mix, battery capacity, and battery chemistry mix across five passenger vehicle segments covering China’s 31 provinces and 29 EU countries. Results indicate significant shifts of per-EV use of lithium, cobalt, and nickel between 2019 and 2023: −6%, −68%, −41% in China, and +15%, –25%, +29% in the EU, respectively. Battery chemistry mix emerges as a dominant factor, reducing cobalt use by 7.2 kg per vehicle in China and 3.6 kg in the EU, more than offsetting the increases attributable to the other characteristics, and explaining 38%–86% of the material use gaps between the two regions. The findings highlight critical pathways for reducing critical material demand through strategic technological choices and policy design.

Metadata

Item Type:	Article
Authors/Creators:	Mai, L. Hao, H. https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7542-4746 Liu, M. Sun, X. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1772-8623 Meng, F. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9014-1231 Geng, Y. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2284-1375 Wadud, Z. Tate, J.E. Dong, Z. Li, H. Geng, J. Dou, H. Deng, Y. Bai, F. Liu, Z. Zhao, F.
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information:	© The Author(s) 2026. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
Keywords:	Energy science and technology; Engineering
Dates:	Submitted: 1 January 2026 Accepted: 29 April 2026 Published (online): 18 May 2026 Published: 18 May 2026
Institution:	The University of Sheffield
Academic Units:	The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Engineering (Sheffield) > School of Chemical, Materials and Biological Engineering
Date Deposited:	25 Jun 2026 10:17
Last Modified:	25 Jun 2026 10:17
Status:	Published online
Publisher:	Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Refereed:	Yes
Identification Number:	10.1038/s43246-026-01181-2
Sustainable Development Goals:
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID):	oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:242507

CORE (COnnecting REpositories)

Battery chemistry mix predominantly explains disparities in critical material use for electric passenger vehicles

Abstract

Metadata

Download

Published Version

Export

Statistics