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Many countries see biofuels as a replacement to fossil fuels to mitigate climate change. Nevertheless, some concerns remain about the overall benefits of biofuels policies. More comprehensive tools seem required to evaluate indirect effects of biofuel policies. This article proposes a method to evaluate large‐scale biofuel policies that is based on life cycle assessment (LCA), environmental extensions of input‐output (I‐O) tables, and a general equilibrium model. The method enables the assessment of indirect environmental effects of biofuels policies, including land‐use changes (LUCs), in the context of economic and demographic growth. The method is illustrated with a case study involving two scenarios. The first one describes the evolution of the world economy from 2006 to 2020 under business as usual (BAU) conditions (including demographic and dietary preferences changes), and the second integrates biofuel policies in the United States and the European Union (EU). Results show that the biofuel scenario, originally designed to mitigate climate change, results in more greenhouse gas emissions when compared to the BAU scenario. This is mainly due to emissions associated with global LUCs. The case study shows that the method enables a broader consideration for environmental effects of biofuel policies than usual LCA: Global economic variations calculated by a general equilibrium economic model and LUC emissions can be evaluated. More work is needed, however, to include new biofuel production technologies and reduce the uncertainty of the method. This is the peer reviewed version of an article, which has been published in final form at [https://doi.org/10.1111/jiec.12640]. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving.

Conservation of mass and energy are essential to physical accounting, just as price and market balances are essential to economic accounting. These principles guide data collection and inventory compilation in industrial ecology. The resulting balanced surveys, however, can rarely be used directly for life cycle assessment (LCA) or environmentally extended input‐output (EEIO) analysis; some modeling is necessary to recast coproductions by multifunctional activities as monofunctional unit processes (a.k.a. Leontief production functions or technical “recipes”). This modeling is done with allocations in LCA and constructs in input‐output. In this article, we ask how these models respect or perturb the balances of the original inventory. Which allocations or constructs, applied to what type of data set, have the potential to simultaneously respect its multiple physical, financial, and market balances? Our analysis builds upon the recent harmonization of allocations and constructs and the ongoing development of multilayered supply and use inventory tables. We derive the necessary and sufficient conditions for balanced models, investigate the role of data aggregation, and clarify these models' relation to system expansion. We find that none of the modeling families in LCA and EEIO are balanced in general, but special data characteristics can allow for the respect of multiple balances. An analysis of these special cases allows for clear guidance for data compilation and methods integration. This is the peer reviewed version of an article, which has been published in final form at [https://doi.org/10.1111/jiec.12273]. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving

Electric vehicles have no tailpipe emissions, but the production of their batteries leads to environmental burdens. In order to avoid problem-shifting, a life cycle perspective should be applied in the environmental assessment of traction batteries. The goal of this study is to provide a transparent inventory for a lithium-ion nickel-cobalt-manganese traction battery based on primary data and to report its cradle-to-gate impacts. The study was carried out as a process-based attributional life cycle assessment. The environmental impacts were analyzed using midpoint indicators. The global warming potential of the 26.6 kilowatt-hour (kWh), 253 kg battery pack was found to be 4.6 tonnes carbon dioxide equivalents. Regardless of impact category, the production impacts of the battery are caused mainly by the production chains of battery cell manufacture, the positive electrode paste, and the negative current collector. The robustness of the study was tested through sensitivity analysis, and results were compared with preceding studies. Sensitivity analysis indicates that the most effective approach to reduce climate change emissions would be to produce the battery cells with electricity from a cleaner energy mix. On a per-kWh basis, cradle-to-gate greenhouse gas emissions of the battery are within the range of those reported in preceding studies. Contribution and structural path analysis allowed for identification of the most impact-intensive processes and value chains. This article provides an inventory based mainly on primary data, which can easily be adapted to subsequent EV studies, and offers improved understanding of environmental burdens pertaining to lithium ion traction batteries.