By Victoria Waldersee
BERLIN (Reuters) – The consortium behind a European battery passport project laid out on Monday how companies must prepare to meet increasingly stringent regulations on disclosing batteries’ origins and social and environmental footprints.
Manufacturers in Europe must disclose the carbon footprint of their batteries from 2024 and comply with a CO2 emissions limit from 2027.
Monday’s guidance is the first attempt to interpret what the new demands will mean for electric car makers, industrial battery producers and light transport battery makers.
In a summary seen by Reuters, the German-funded consortium – which is building the technology to trace an individual battery’s social and environmental characteristics – highlighted which information companies must make public, including batteries’ composition, carbon footprint and recycled content.
Still up for debate is the methodology for accurately calculating the carbon footprint and recycled content, and who will have access to what depth of data in the battery passport, consortium representatives told Reuters.
More detailed information about the composition of the battery as well as information on how to dismantle it will be available to what the regulation calls “interested persons”, but how to define this is still undecided, the representatives said.
That decision will be key for companies juggling the demand from regulators for greater transparency with the need to protect valuable intellectual property on battery chemistry as they compete to produce more efficient electric cars and storage systems.
Among the consortium’s members are BMW, Umicore and BASF.
“We haven’t solved all of it yet, but we are showing some of the critical points that it will be important to consider,” consortium programme director Sophie Hermann said.
(Reporting by Victoria Waldersee, Editing by John Stonestreet)
