Electric motorcycles in conjugation with low carbon-intensive electricity sources provides an opportunity to reduce the greenhouse gases environmental burden and fossil fuel consumption from conventional personal transportation, particularly in Asia. In regard of these advantages, their potential setbacks should also be addressed simultaneously. Consequently, this study offers a transparent life cycle inventory for battery electric (BEM) and internal combustion engine motorcycles (ICEM), which is used to conduct a life cycle assessment (LCA) for these two vehicles across a range of impact categories. This assessment finds that BEM charged with Taiwanese electricity have a lower global warming potential (GWP) of 50.7 g CO2 eq/km relative to gasoline-ICEM 64.8 g CO2 eq/km, under a lifetime scenario of 45,000km driven. Nonetheless, transition from ICEM to BEM also have the potential for considerable increments in freshwater eutrophication, mineral resources depletion, and freshwater, marine, and terrestrial ecotoxicity impacts, most of which come from the motorcycle production chain. The largest impact shifting comes for eutrophication which increases from 101 to 372 mg P eq/km, for ICEM and BEM respectively. This LCA results are sensitive to assumptions made for the motorcycles lifetime, use phase energy consumption, and source of electricity. The electricity source has the largest effects on the BEM impacts. It can reduce the GW impact by 52% with a fully renewable grid or increase the GW by 33% assuming hard-coal electricity generation, which is the only case where BEM impacts exceed those of ICEM. To objectively improve the environmental benefits of BEM over ICEM requires commitments around reducing the motorcycle production impacts and embracing greener electricity sources.

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