What Is a Battery Passport? A Ticket to Lithium-ion Battery Transparency
The Global Battery Alliance’s Battery Passport allows ‘entry’ into the increasingly regulated market of ethical lithium-ion batteries.
As the world strives to create more sustainable ways of manufacturing and transporting goods through the global supply chain, lithium-ion batteries will play an increasingly important role. And while lithium-ion batteries have proved to be an efficient energy source, they still come with environmental and safety challenges, especially when extracting the raw materials that compose the battery’s cells and at the end of their service life when disposing of those materials. To combat these challenges, governments, NGOs, and consumers are demanding more accountability in the lithium-ion battery industry. The European Union and Japan already have regulations for lithium-ion batteries while the US and Canada explore their own options. To enable battery consistency and transparency, the Global Battery Alliance created the Battery Passport program.
The Global Battery Alliance (GBA) was established at the 2017 World Economic Forum to create a sustainable battery value chain by 2030. Encompassing the entire lifecycle of the lithium-ion battery, the GBA is a public-private collaborative platform bringing together over 170 international organizations – NGOs, corporations, industry leaders, academics, and government agencies – to “drive systemic change along the [battery’s] entire value chain.” The goal is to support more green energy production while safeguarding human rights, public health, and environmental stability. Based on extensive research and the performance of several pilot programs involving companies like Tesla, Audi, CATL, and Samsung, the GBA is on track to meet the program’s launch deadline in 2027.
According to Jean-Francois Marchand, Marketing Director at UgoWork, the GBA Battery Passport aims for the following outcomes:
- Provide transparency in practices and the impact of the battery along the value chain to all relevant stakeholders in the battery value chain
- Create a framework for benchmarking batteries along criteria by identifying those that are best and worst in class and providing minimum acceptable standards for a sustainable and responsible battery
- Validate and track progress toward sustainable, responsible, and resource-efficient batteries
As the EU, Japan, and the US roll out lithium-ion regulations and other countries follow suit, having a set of manufacturing, usage, and disposal standards and the transparency to view that information will be critical to lithium-ion battery industry.
At its most basic level, the passport is a digital twin of a physical battery with access to the battery’s information through a QR code. Among the items tracked, the passport notes where the battery’s minerals (lithium, cobalt, nickel, and manganese) were mined and if that mine passes human rights and environmental checks. Then it tracks the battery’s performance during use, details like power capacity and length of lifespan. Finally, the passport logs how the battery is broken down for recycling and disposal when it no longer works. With the EU requiring lithium-ion batteries to contain 90 percent recycled minerals (cobalt, copper, lead, and nickel) and 50 percent recycled lithium by 2027, passport tracking is crucial to lithium-ion battery production.
While the GBA’s passport program has the admirable goal of human and environmental protections, the program will also help the manufacturing and supply chain end users as they transition from less sustainable energy sources into the lithium-ion future. The passport provides the user peace of mind that the batteries they’re investing in not only pass a known set of performance criteria, but are ESG compliant. The passport will also provide a plethora of user data to managers and engineers on how that battery performs along with pertinent safety assessments. Battery Passport certifications will give the user confidence that their batteries were produced ethically, run efficiently and safely, and get recycled into new batteries at the end of their lifespan.
To fund the program, battery producers will pay certification fees to sustain the reporting and tracking of the Battery Passport program. The fees will be tiered based on the level of certification the battery meets. The GBA will have different certification levels – from meets minimum standards to exceeds standards – and allow manufacturers to upgrade their certifications as their information gathering, production processes, and products improve. These fees have not yet been established, but will be provided as the program rolls out over the next few years.
As lithium-ion regulations evolve in the EU, the US, Japan, and elsewhere, now is the time for organizations in lithium-ion battery industry to get involved in the Battery Passport program to ensure that all batteries conform to the highest standards of performance while also protecting an increasingly fragile planet.
To learn more, visit globalbattery.org/battery-passport/
For more information about the Advanced Energy Council: mhi.org/aec
For further articles from the Advanced Energy Council:
ROI of Energy Sources: Automation
Advanced Energy Solutions Deliver ROI
Achieving ROI with Advanced Power Sources
Advanced Power ROI: Efficiency
