Unless you have paid for the article and read it, we are only discussing an abstract. That isn't enough information to bring to a discussion, as we have absolutely no figures, initial assumptions, or methadologies to explore.
There's nothing wrong with back-of-the-envelope maths. It's not refutable that lithium battery packs take a lot of energy to manufacture (as well as all of the control electronics, which is also a very energy-intensive manufacturing process). Just the lithium cells take around 60kWh to manufacture per 1kWh of pack capacity. Where do you think the ~5.1MWh required to make your Tesla battery pack comes from?
Even if you had 100% renewable power to charge your car, it would take 24,000 miles just to pay back the manufacturing energy of the cells alone. Then you can start paying back the energy cost of the rest of the EV components, which are still considerable. Only after that, can you start saving the planet with your EV.
There is already dozens of studies about kgCO2e/kwh for batteries, thanks for linking to a studies where it is shown that electricity use is actually lower than older studies and in line with the most recent, and all the most recent studies agreed is that the kgCO2e/kwh is decreasing fast with industrialisation making EV better than fossil cars in about 16000 km.
There's nothing wrong with back-of-the-envelope maths. It's not refutable that lithium battery packs take a lot of energy to manufacture (as well as all of the control electronics, which is also a very energy-intensive manufacturing process). Just the lithium cells take around 60kWh to manufacture per 1kWh of pack capacity. Where do you think the ~5.1MWh required to make your Tesla battery pack comes from?
Even if you had 100% renewable power to charge your car, it would take 24,000 miles just to pay back the manufacturing energy of the cells alone. Then you can start paying back the energy cost of the rest of the EV components, which are still considerable. Only after that, can you start saving the planet with your EV.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2515-7620/ab5e1e