Minviro published a white paper on nickel sulphate showing a difference of eighteen times between the low impact and the high impact routes.
Same material, eighteen times the footprint, depending on how it was made.
That number is where Robert Pell ends up when he is asked what needs to change, and the answer he draws from it is about data rather than about nickel. Most companies putting a footprint on a battery today are working from secondary sources, and the background databases behind those sources are, in his description, quite low resolution. A single industry average data point can stand in for the whole of the nickel supply chain. What Minviro has spent the last few years arguing is that every route is unique and carries its own footprint, which an average is not capable of showing.
Carbon is one category on a longer list
Pell founded Minviro to measure the environmental impact of products and processes, and carbon is the part of that work most people recognise. Carbon intensity is a single quantifiable number, which is part of why it has travelled so well.
Life cycle assessment includes it and keeps going. Land use footprints. Water related scarcity. Effects on biodiversity. A long list of other impact categories besides.
The company's focus is the energy transition, and the span of the client base is the striking part. Raw material producers, mineral processing plants and refineries at one end. Cathode and anode manufacturers, cell manufacturers and OEMs in the middle. It does not stop there either: battery recycling is in scope, and so are neighbouring low carbon technologies such as PV, motors and wind turbines.
The regulation asks for one number, and everyone has to produce it
Adriana works in Minviro's research and development team and has spent two years on battery life cycle assessments, most of that attention on the very upstream end of the chain.
Her account of why the method suddenly matters commercially is short. Life cycle assessment has become the go-to methodology because it is the one written into regulation. The European battery regulation requires the carbon footprint of batteries to be quantified by means of life cycle assessment for every battery sold into the European market.
She was making that point in a room with a heavy Chinese presence, and she made the reach of it explicit. The requirement lands on anyone selling into Europe, not just on European battery manufacturers.
Pell is careful about what that requirement covers and what it leaves alone. The focus in the regulations is narrow: climate change impact, and nothing else. He is not dismissive of that. Getting environmental measurement written in as a requirement across the full life cycle of a product is a real step forward for the industry.
His reservation is that a single category does not hold the central premise of the method, which is to understand sustainability as a whole. Optimise a system to reduce its climate change impact and the next thing to check is that the optimisation has not created unintended consequences somewhere else: increased impacts on biodiversity, on land use change, on categories nobody is currently asking anyone to report.
He also supplies the reason the rules look the way they do. The global project is to electrify the transport system in order to optimise it for climate change, so climate change is the category the regulation tracks. His hope is that as the industry's understanding of sustainability develops, the broader range of categories comes with it.
Adriana thinks one file already points that way. The Critical Raw Materials Act proposal has a section on the environmental footprint of critical raw materials, and it suggests life cycle assessment methodology without specifying carbon footprint. It asks for environmental footprint instead, because what needs reporting depends on which impacts are most relevant to the production route being assessed. She reads that as the European Commission doing a good job on this one.
Pell adds a boundary that gets lost in the enthusiasm. Life cycle assessment is a tool in the toolkit and does not replace environmental impact assessments or local assessments. One describes global impacts, the other describes what happens in a particular place, and the permitting file for a new factory needs the second kind.
Scope three is where the work is
On emissions accounting, Pell's position for the battery materials value chain is that all three scopes have to be captured.
Scope one is direct emissions from combustion, what comes out of a stack or out of a truck. Scope two is the embodied emissions of purchased electricity, heat or cooling. Upstream scope three is the embedded impact of the chemicals, reagents and consumables a process consumes.
That third one is not a rounding error in this industry, which is why he keeps pressing on it. Hydrometallurgy as an approach uses chemical work to liberate or refine materials, so the embodied impact of those chemicals is a meaningful share of the answer. Getting the data is difficult and sometimes takes a step change in collection. His observation is that many companies are now accepting that as a challenge and including it anyway.
A recycling process that came back worse than expected
Asked for something in the data that surprised her, Adriana goes to recycling.
Minviro assessed the environmental impact of a recycling process one of its clients had in place, and the result was higher than the client had assumed it would be. Her explanation is unsentimental. Recycling is a process, every process carries embodied impacts, and those impacts will never be zero.
She uses the case to argue for the discipline of the method rather than against the client. Life cycle assessment is standardised, scientifically grounded, and built on the mass and energy inputs of the process being studied, which is what makes it possible to trust a number that nobody wanted.
What primary data is actually for
Minviro is five years old, and Pell's read on that period is that the industry has shifted enormously in its willingness to adopt these approaches.
The next shift he expects is the requirement for primary data, gathered supply chain by supply chain, replacing the industry averages currently doing the work.
The reason he wants it is commercial rather than punitive. Route-specific data makes it possible to identify the producers who are performing well rather than simply to penalise the ones who are not: to select the low impact suppliers, and sometimes to pay more, under long term agreements with the production routes that earn it.
Which is the practical meaning of a factor of eighteen. Without the data to tell the two routes apart, a buyer is paying the same price for either.
This piece draws on the full conversation, which is available with a complete transcript on the episode page.