There cannot be a contest over who builds the better battery passport.
That is Luise Müller-Hofstede's position, and it is worth noticing who is holding it. She is business development director at Circulor, a company working in exactly the area the passport will demand, making it easier to establish where materials have come from. She also sits on the Catena-X board. Her line on the schemes themselves is flat: "It's not like who's doing the better battery passport."
The reason is that a passport only works if everybody uses the same one.
What actually landed in April
The milestone both guests reach for first is a document rather than a system.
The content guidance from the BMWK-funded battery passport project was published on 17 April and is open to the public. Müller-Hofstede describes it as guidance in the literal sense. The project read the EU battery regulation, extracted the data points it implies, and set out how companies can start preparing for a passport. Ilka von Dalwigk, policy manager at the European Battery Alliance and EIT InnoEnergy, who joins her in the conversation, sits on that project's advisory council.
A day before this was recorded, the Global Battery Alliance published a request for proposal for the second phase of its battery passport work. That follows pilots which launched the previous year and were presented at the World Economic Forum earlier in the year.
Müller-Hofstede has been inside several of these at once: the GBA pilots, the German project, the standardisation strand running out of Catena-X, and Circulor's own customer work preparing companies for what is coming.
Her account of the sequence is the useful part. People were talking about a battery passport three years ago. Last year the first groups formed and agreed to trial and pilot together. Then came three or four months of going back over what had been learned and working out what the next step looks like, which is roughly where things stood.
Von Dalwigk adds the wider frame. A European project called CIRPASS is looking past batteries at digital product passports generally, with conversations running into textiles and electronics, which puts the battery in the position of front runner for everything that follows.
One scheme, or everyone cooks their own soup
Different groups took different approaches at the start, and both guests think that was fine. The work now is bridging them.
Müller-Hofstede's framing is consensus: take the best from each group, agree the standards inside one scheme, and accept that the end state is a single passport everybody signs up to. If everyone cooks their own soup, she says, you cannot pour it all together afterwards.
Von Dalwigk's word for the same problem is interoperability. Plenty of systems already measure plenty of things, so nothing needs inventing again. It needs packaging into one product with a common language, something you can feed information into and pull information back out of.
The constraint that makes this urgent is adoption rather than design. You can have the smartest standards in the world and the best interpretation of a regulation, Müller-Hofstede says, but without critical mass in the industry starting to use it, "all of this will only be on paper".
The panic, and the argument against it
None of this feels like help to the companies being asked for the data.
Müller-Hofstede is direct about the mood among cell manufacturers, OEMs and their suppliers, and describes something close to panic mode: a lot of questions arriving at once, the prospect of being excluded from the market, fees to pay.
The counter-argument is not reassurance. It is arithmetic.
Several regulatory proposals already oblige companies to report where their raw materials come from, and the battery regulation is not the only mechanism asking for CO2 data. CBAM is the other one named. Von Dalwigk's point is that if a single instrument captures the information once and can report into several requirements, the company does work it was obliged to do anyway, once instead of repeatedly. Built properly from the start, the administrative burden falls rather than rises.
Whether that happens depends on alignment between the reporting schemes, which is the part still being negotiated. Both guests are clear that the passport has to be useful to the industry and not simply a compliance exercise: report once, then reuse it for auditing elsewhere.
Visibility is a risk argument before it is a sustainability one
The case Müller-Hofstede makes for supply chain transparency barely mentions sustainability.
She reduces it to a logic she thinks anyone should follow. The more visibility you have into something, the more control you have over it. Dark corners in a supply chain, where you do not know what is happening or who is involved, are where a company is exposed. Every department in a large corporate wants the opposite: resilient supply and resource security. The passport asks for precisely that visibility.
The precedent raised in the conversation is semiconductors. Before COVID there was little transparency into that supply base either, and it took the shortage to force carmakers to go and build it. The observation that follows is uncomfortable and probably right: people do not care about visibility while supply is fine, and only discover what they are missing on the day a supplier fails.
She is also alert to the failure mode on the other side. There is a balancing act between being inviting enough that companies come in and try it, and letting the whole thing become a marketing exercise. If it is purpose-led branding, it changes nothing.
One methodology, and the first honest comparison
What the passport enforces, in von Dalwigk's reading, is method.
Everyone will have to calculate a carbon footprint the same way, which makes it possible to compare apples with apples for the first time. Reporting done voluntarily to promote a product carries the opposite risk, greenwashing that damages the credibility of the whole industry rather than one company.
That matters for the case for electrification itself. If the argument is that these vehicles are better than fossil fuel cars, the sourcing and the footprint behind them have to be demonstrable. Von Dalwigk's view is that the value here is collective: the passport is not much use as an individual company's promotional tool, but it can lift a growing industry to another level.
The closing note in the conversation is a caution rather than a flourish. The battery was picked first among digital product passports, and it has the most complex and most global supply chains of the lot, so the hope is that everything after it proves easier. That hope is hedged in the recording almost as soon as it is offered, on the grounds that a battery is one component of a car among many.
Which leads back to restraint. In supply chains this complicated you can measure a great deal, and not all of it is needed. The discipline is to measure what is meaningful, and to stop there.
This piece draws on the full conversation, which is available with a complete transcript on the episode page.