Battery Swaps Could Reshape EV Metal Demand in British Columbia by 2050

Electric vehicles are often celebrated as a single, monolithic technology: a clean car that quietly replaces its gasoline-powered ancestor. But a new study from researchers at Queen’s University and the University of Waterloo argues that this framing obscures one of the most consequential dynamics of the electric transition—the fact that a vehicle and its battery age on different clocks. By building a province-scale model that treats the car and the battery as distinct components with independent lifespans, the team has produced the most detailed picture yet of how battery replacement will reshape material demand, waste flows, and recycling opportunities in British Columbia through 2050.

The research, published in the Journal of Industrial Ecology, applies a technique known as dynamic material flow analysis, or dMFA, which tracks how stocks of products and the materials embedded in them accumulate, age, and exit the economy over time. Traditional dMFA studies of electric vehicle batteries have typically assumed simplified relationships between vehicle and battery service lives—often treating the battery as dying with the car. The new framework instead integrates a product-component model that endogenously represents battery replacement, meaning that batteries can fail, be swapped, and continue cycling through the fleet independently of the vehicles that host them. The model draws on survival functions, or hazard functions, for both vehicles and batteries, allowing each to retire according to its own statistical profile.

To ground the model in reality, the researchers assembled an unusually granular dataset for British Columbia. Vehicle population figures came from the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia, while new registration data by fuel type came from Statistics Canada. The team also compiled battery electric vehicle fleet data from 2018 to 2024, including registration counts by model year, vehicle driving range, battery capacity in kilowatt-hours, energy efficiency, and cathode chemistry. Future scenarios were built from provincial population projections, evolving electric vehicle market penetration under British Columbia’s Zero-Emission Vehicles Act, and anticipated shifts in battery technology and chemistry over the coming decades.

The headline findings are striking and, in some respects, counterintuitive. Between 2025 and 2050, enhanced battery replacement could reduce the cumulative inflow of new electric vehicles needed to maintain the provincial fleet by 17 to 22 percent. The logic is that when a battery is replaced rather than the entire vehicle being scrapped, cars stay on the road longer, dampening the demand for brand-new vehicles. Yet the same dynamic increases cumulative lithium-ion battery demand by 7.2 to 7.7 percent, because each replaced battery adds a fresh unit of manufacturing demand even as vehicle production falls. Replacement, in other words, trades vehicle throughput for battery throughput.

Perhaps the most consequential result concerns what happens to batteries when they leave vehicles. The study finds that battery replacement increases the remaining useful capacity of cumulative battery outflow by 45 to 51 percent for batteries retaining at least 80 percent state of health. This is a critical threshold in the battery world: packs that still hold four-fifths of their original capacity are generally considered suitable for second-life applications such as stationary energy storage, where they can buffer renewable electricity for years before final recycling. A wave of healthier retired batteries, the authors show, materially expands the feedstock available for reuse, changing both the economics and the logistics of the battery circular economy.

Technology evolution emerges as the other powerful lever. The model indicates that, with advancements in battery technology, extending the modal battery service life by just four years could reduce cumulative material demand by 9.9 to 14.6 percent. Because lithium, nickel, and cobalt supply chains are geographically concentrated and environmentally intensive, even single-digit percentage reductions in demand translate into meaningful relief for mining pressure, processing capacity, and the carbon footprint of battery manufacturing. The result underscores a point increasingly made across industrial ecology: longevity is a materials strategy, not merely a consumer benefit.

Methodologically, the study represents a step forward in how component-level dynamics are handled in material flow models. By coupling hazard functions for vehicles and batteries, the framework captures timing effects that simpler models miss—such as the way an early battery failure in a young vehicle creates a mid-life battery demand pulse, or how improvements in battery durability shift the age distribution of retiring packs. The model also tracks the quality of outflows, not just their volume, estimating how much usable capacity exits the vehicle fleet each year. That quality dimension is what allows the researchers to quantify reuse potential rather than treating all spent batteries as equivalent waste.

The policy implications for British Columbia are immediate. The province has adopted one of the most ambitious zero-emission vehicle mandates in North America, and it operates an extended producer responsibility regime that is being extended to strengthen battery recycling. The authors explicitly position their model as a decision-support tool for the Government of British Columbia as it evaluates and calibrates its climate strategy, particularly the twin goals of accelerating zero-emission vehicle adoption and building robust battery collection and recycling systems. Knowing when, and in what condition, spent batteries will arrive is essential for sizing recycling facilities, designing collection incentives, and planning second-life storage markets.

The broader significance extends well beyond one province. Jurisdictions worldwide are grappling with the coming surge of retired electric vehicle batteries, and most forecasting exercises still rely on coarse assumptions that tie battery death to vehicle death. The British Columbia study demonstrates that this assumption can misstate both the scale and the character of future battery flows—underestimating replacement-driven battery demand, overestimating the urgency of early recycling capacity, and missing the substantial reservoir of reusable capacity in retired packs. As electric vehicle fleets mature in Europe, China, and the United States, similar product-component integrated models could become standard equipment for planners of the battery circular economy.

The study’s data and system model have been made openly available through the Queen’s University Dataverse Collection, alongside the provincial vehicle population and registration datasets on which the analysis rests. That transparency matters, because the transition to electric mobility will be judged not only on tailpipe emissions but on the full life cycle of the materials that make it possible. By revealing that battery replacement simultaneously shrinks vehicle demand, grows battery demand, and enriches the stream of reusable capacity, the research offers policymakers a more honest ledger—and a clearer map of the decisions that will determine whether the electric vehicle era is genuinely circular or simply shifts the burden from the pump to the mine.

Subject of Research: Dynamic material flow analysis of electric vehicle battery replacement in British Columbia, Canada

Article Title: Product-component integrated dynamic material flow analysis of electric vehicle battery replacement in British Columbia, Canada

Article References: Poulos, A., Zhang, Q., Wang, C., & Young, S. B. (2026). Product-component integrated dynamic material flow analysis of electric vehicle battery replacement in British Columbia, Canada. Journal of Industrial Ecology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44498-026-00177-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44498-026-00177-y

Keywords: electric vehicles, lithium-ion batteries, battery replacement, material flow analysis, circular economy, battery recycling, battery reuse, zero-emission vehicles, British Columbia, extended producer responsibility, critical minerals, industrial ecology