Supply Chain Linked Sustainability Assessment of Electric Vehicles: The Case for Qatar

Abstract

Electric vehicles are important technologies to reduce adverse environmental impacts stemming from transportation. In this paper, we investigated the environmental, social, and economic impacts of electric vehicles in Qatar, where the electricity generation is currently 100% natural gas. As electric vehicles is expected replace the internal combustion engine vehicles and each vehicle type has different supply chain for the fuel, the sustainability impacts in the upstream of fuel supply-chain can be significantly different. Hence, a supply-chain based approach is developed to capture impact shift from petroleum sector to electricity generation sector in the supply chain of electricity and petroleum. Results revealed that electric vehicles can save up to 28% of life cycle cost, 71% of Greenhouse gas emissions, 51% of photochemical oxidant formation, and 63% of human health impacts.