In late 2024, Swedish automaker Volvo released its new luxury electric SUV, but this time it came with a twist. In addition to the bells and whistles that are now standard among electric vehicles, the Volvo EX90 carries a “battery passport” – a unique digital identifier listing the provenance, chemical makeup and environmental footprint of the battery inside.
The first-of-its-kind technology may afford Volvo a competitive edge in the European market. Under a new amendment to the European Union’s Batteries Regulation, a battery passport – which can be thought of as a kind of sustainability certificate – must be embedded in every electric car sold in the European Union by the end of February 2027.
Think of the passport as a cake, with each ingredient identified and sourced, along with its environmental cost, explained Douglas Johnson-Poensgen, chief executive of Circulor, the U.K. firm that created the technology.
The passport is about accountability. It’s the only way to reduce the carbon footprint of a battery.
– Tim Burrows, producer, Electric Vehicle Society
Through a blockchain management system, the use of a battery is tracked in granular detail for as long as 15 years, thereby measuring the degree of degradation of a battery. This is important information. While a “dead” EV battery is no longer powerful enough for a car, it still retains 70% or more of its charge, enough to use as backup storage for other purposes, such as renewable energy.
The passport is seen as key to encouraging continued use of a battery or the minerals inside it, beyond its lifespan in an EV. Accelerating the circularity of batteries will go a long way to minimizing an EV’s environmental impact and, in instances where minerals are extracted from the spent battery, save costs.
Volvo announced that by 2027, every company model will be equipped with a passport and that more information will continue to be added. Volvo will not be the outlier for long. The Chinese government is launching its own model to comply with European regulations, and Japanese auto companies such as Nissan and Honda have vowed to do the same by the EU deadline. The Chinese version will follow the battery supply chain in China and will also store data on the carbon footprint, circularity and ESG rating for each battery.
At its essence, says Tim Burrows with the Electric Vehicle Society, “The passport is about accountability. It’s the only way to reduce the carbon footprint of a battery.”
Within a relatively short period, a digital sustainability tracker has moved from idea to fruition and appears to be the next step in the evolution of the electric car.
The carbon cost of battery production
Battery packs are stubbornly carbon-intensive to manufacture. They account for up to 60% of an electric vehicle’s CO2 emissions during production, in part because a large share of the raw materials are mined and processed in China and shipped long distances.
Range anxiety is frequently cited by potential buyers as a primary concern when deciding between the purchase of an internal-combustion or a battery-powered car. Automakers have responded by manufacturing vehicles with longer ranges.
But there is a cost to this approach, which the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) argues outweighs the benefits. Extending the distance that can be travelled on a single charge requires bigger batteries, which increases energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions over a vehicle’s lifetime. The retail price of the vehicle also rises, as does the operational expense.
The upshot is that the environmental and social impacts related to the manufacturing and disposal of a battery are under increasing scrutiny by policymakers, industries and consumers as demand for the critical minerals that go into batteries – lithium, cobalt, manganese and nickel – increases.
Currently, China dominates the supply of battery materials. According to the International Energy Agency, China produces 65% of the world’s lithium used for processing and refining.
Why do we need battery passports?
For a host of reasons, largely environmental and geopolitical, the need to advance battery recycling and reuse has become more urgent. The main objective of creating a battery passport, says Andrew McKinnon – policy director at Accelerate, an alliance of industry stakeholders in the zero-emission-vehicle supply chain – is to do just that.
The EU’s battery regulations specify recovery targets for lithium, cobalt, copper and nickel for recycling. Rising targets for the amount of recycled content in every battery further encourages mineral extraction from finished batteries for reuse.
As a bracing warning sign of how important it is to develop domestic capacity to repurpose and recycle, the ICCT reports that, globally, an estimated 1.2 million batteries from light- and heavy-duty EVs and plug-in hybrids will reach the end of their life cycles by 2030.
The stricter battery regulations are also intended to stymie dependence on China for materials and boost domestic sources instead.
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The United States is also considering introducing battery passports to strengthen onshoring efforts. EV manufacturers in the United States must purchase batteries made in North America to receive vehicle subsidies. A battery passport, which is vetted through a third-party audit, can prove the source of a battery’s content and clearly demonstrate eligibility for grants.
While it is unclear how much longer the U.S. subsidies will last under an EV-combative President Donald Trump, the directive to “buy American” appears entrenched in the current administration’s agenda, suggesting that the need to verify the chain of custody behind battery production will remain.
Barriers and drawbacks to creating a passport system for batteries
For regulators, auto repair shops and recyclers, the passport will provide test reports, detailed information about cell chemistry, and diagrams that show how to safely disassemble the battery pack.
But creating a battery passport and bringing it to market will not be a smooth drive, cautions the Electric Vehicle Society’s Burrows, who points out that there is no common terminology or practice among the many locales where minerals are mined and cars are manufactured and assembled. The passport “could be very expensive to produce,” he says. “Who bears the cost?”
Furthermore, the composition and chemistry of batteries change rapidly. By the time the passport is ready to be released, the battery may have a different chemical composition. “This becomes a question of whether the value of a passport is proportionate to the expense – the cost of chasing technology alone would be prohibitive,” Burrows says. (In an interview with Politico, Ellen Carey, chief external affairs officer with Circulor, said the passport developed for Volvo will add about US$10 per car.)
Although a strong proponent of battery passports, McKinnon, too, has some concerns. “I don’t know how far back they’re going to try to source the provenance of metals and minerals,” he says. “The supply chains are very complex. How will you get information from companies when we’ve never asked for this before?”
Canada has yet to codify battery traceability requirements, although the trend is in that direction, and Natural Resources Canada supports the Global Battery Alliance’s digital tracking system.
Electric Mobility Canada, a national industry association that advocates for sustainable electric mobility, has been in discussions with the federal government, says Daniel Breton, president and CEO. “We’ve been working with government to align with the EU on passport regulations. Our biggest challenge has been with the auto industry. The industry says that a voluntary approach [to reporting] is enough. But we believe there should be a mandatory program. I’d like to see all batteries recycled.”
