A European passport to produce green electric batteries
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It will arrive in 2026 and electric batteries will have to say a lot. A digital twin, or passport, with all the information: the construction, durability, origin of materials and components and later also the guarantee that it was not made using child labor. The project is from the Global Battery Alliance (GBA), which presented it as early as 2021, and which has now been launched on an experimental basis to become part of European regulation in three years.
GBA is the world’s largest organization of companies related to this sector, hence the importance of his Battery Passport. A standard therefore, and also a seal of quality, which on paper should guarantee the rapid arrival of more sustainable batteries, because with a high degree of recyclability, based on standardised, comparable and verifiable data. All based on reliable and verified rules and data collection established by stakeholders from industry, academia, non-governmental organizations and governments.
The names involved in the organization are of weight. Among others there is Audi, Basf, BMW, Calb, Catl, Enel, Eurasian Resources Group, Glencore, LG Energy Solution, Microsoft, Umicore, Stellantis, Tesla, Volkswagen, Volvo, as well as non-governmental organizations such as IndustriALL Global Union, Pact, Transport & Environment, Unep, Uunicef, with the support of government institutions such as the German Ministry of Economic Affairs and the Canadian Ministry of Natural Resources.
However, some important companies are missing, from the Japanese Panasonic to the Koreans Sk and Samsung, up to the Chinese Byd, which together with Calb and Catl is among the major companies in lithium batteries born in Beijing and its surroundings.
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“These first tests are the result of many months of work between automotive manufacturers, mining companies, technology companies, NGOs, government bodies and other international organizations,” he explained Inga Petersen, executive director of the Global Battery Alliance. “An important step to give investors, end consumers and other stakeholders more confidence in the responsible and sustainable production of electric vehicle batteries and in the commitment to recycling and circularity.”
At the basis of the energy transition, batteries consume materials and resources with inevitable social and environmental impacts, especially as regards the rare materials they use. The world is looking for replacements for the cobalt, nickel And lithium. But the road is still relatively long and in the meantime the greenhouse gas emissions during the procurement of materials, processing and production of batteries, as well as problems related to child labor and human rights violations.
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The International Energy Agency (IEA) in 2021 had reported that with the current trend linked to the electrification of mobility, the demand for lithium could multiply by forty times by 2040, while those of cobalt and nickel by twenty. By the way these are deposits concentrated in a few countries and above all in the hands of a few companies, with all the geopolitical risks that this entails. In 2019, the Democratic Republic of Congo and the China they produced 70% and 60% cobalt and rare earths, respectively. And refining is dominated by China.
“This geographical concentration, the delays in the implementation of new mining productions but also the decline in the quality of the resources in some regions and the environmental and social impacts of mininggenerates concern,” he said at the time Fatih Birol, director of the IEA. “These risks are real, but they can be overcome. Everything will depend on the response of politics and businesses”.
An answer that in part therefore seems to have arrived, although one transparency standards alone probably not enough. From 2026, however, it should at least discourage, in a market of primary importance such as the European one, the arrival of products judged to be non-compliant. A sort of access barrier.
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A similar move was also made in mining last year with the Minerals Security Partnership. The aim is to ensure that strategically important minerals are produced, processed and recycled in a more sustainable way precisely starting from the observation that they are essential for the production of clean energy and many other technologies. Among the countries and institutions that have signed the pact we find United States, Australia, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Sweden, United Kingdom and the European Union.
Regarding the battery passport, the situation is more nuanced since the Global Battery Alliance includes companies that also come from China. Before entering into force in the EU in three years, the initiative will continue work on the architecture of the passport, including the development of a comprehensive and simplified indicator framework, rules and mechanisms for performance scoring, data management, assurance and verification.
“It is the first stakeholder-developed passport that covers the entire battery value chain,” he stressed Benedict Sobotka, co-chair of Global Battery Alliance and managing director of Eurasian Resources Group, founding member of GBA. “Our focus will now be on benchmarking the data and making the quality seals based on performance and sustainabilityguiding purchasing decisions and triggering an improvement in the entire sector”. Once this phase is completed, we will then be able to compare the batteries with each other by identifying the best and worst in terms of performance, impact and compliance with construction rules.
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