What is the difference between a carbon footprint and a life cycle assessment?

A carbon footprint answers one question: the carbon intensity of a product or process. Life cycle assessment includes that, and adds other impact categories on top, among them land use footprints, water related scarcity and effects on biodiversity. Pell describes Minviro's work as measuring the environmental impact of products and processes across the whole chain, from raw material producers and refineries to cathode, anode and cell makers, OEMs and recycling. Carbon is a useful metric because it is quantifiable and singular, but it is one indicator inside a wider method.

What does the EU battery regulation require on carbon footprint?

The carbon footprint of batteries sold into the European market has to be quantified using life cycle assessment methodology. Adriana calls this the reason LCA has become the go-to method: it is now written into regulation rather than being a voluntary exercise. She also stresses the reach of it. Speaking at a conference with a large Chinese presence, she notes that the requirement applies to everyone selling into Europe, so manufacturers outside the EU are affected as much as European ones.

Does the Critical Raw Materials Act take the same approach?

Not quite. Adriana points to the section of the proposal covering the environmental footprint of critical raw materials, which suggests life cycle assessment methodology but does not specify carbon footprint. Instead it refers to environmental footprint, because the impacts that need reporting depend on the production route being assessed and which of its impacts are most relevant. She reads that as the European Commission doing a good job on this particular file, since it leaves room for the categories that matter to a given route rather than fixing on one number in advance.

Which emissions scopes have to be included for battery materials?

All of them, in Pell's view. Scope one covers direct emissions from combustion, the sort that comes out of a stack or a truck. Scope two covers the embodied emissions of purchased electricity, heat or cooling. Upstream scope three covers the embedded impact of the chemicals, reagents and consumables a process consumes, which is significant in this industry because hydrometallurgical routes rely on chemical work to liberate and refine materials. Getting that third category is the hard part and often needs a step change in data collection, but he says companies are accepting it as a challenge and including it.

Is battery recycling always low impact?

No. Adriana describes assessing a client's recycling technology and finding its environmental impact was not as low as the company had assumed. Her explanation is straightforward: recycling is a process, every process has embodied impacts, and those impacts never reach zero. She uses the example to argue for the discipline of the method. Life cycle assessment is standardised, scientifically grounded and built on the mass and energy inputs of the process being studied, so it produces numbers that can be trusted even when they are less flattering than expected.

Why does primary data matter for battery supply chains?

Because averages hide the range. Pell says most companies still rely on secondary data, and the background databases behind it are low resolution, sometimes offering one industry average figure for an entire nickel supply chain. Minviro's white paper on nickel sulphate found a difference of eighteen times between the low impact and high impact routes. Without route-specific primary data, buyers cannot identify the producers doing well, sign long term agreements with them, or justify paying more for a low impact supply. He sees the shift to primary data as the next step change in the field.

Episode 120 · 17 January 2024 · 00:11:13

What Europe's carbon footprint rule leaves out

Exploring the Life Cycle of Batteries

Minviro's founder and a colleague from its research team on why the EU battery regulation measures only climate change, what upstream scope three actually demands, and the eighteen-fold gap between two routes to nickel sulphate.

Read the article: What Europe's carbon footprint rule leaves out

Exploring the Life Cycle of Batteries cover art

Robert Pell

Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Minviro

Minviro measures the environmental impact of energy transition supply chains, from mining, processing and refining through cathode, anode and cell production to OEMs and recycling.

Adriana

Research and Development, Minviro

Adriana has spent two years on battery life cycle assessments. Her surname is not given in either the show notes or the recording.

Recorded in Budapest, at a lithium-ion battery conference hosted by Shanghai Metals Market

What this episode covers

Minviro published a white paper showing that the gap between the lowest and highest impact routes to nickel sulphate is a factor of eighteen. Robert Pell uses that number to make a point about data. Most companies calculating a battery footprint today are working from secondary sources, and the background databases behind those sources are low resolution: a single industry average figure standing in for an entire nickel supply chain. Every route is different and carries its own footprint, so what the industry needs is primary data, gathered supply chain by supply chain.

Pell founded Minviro to measure environmental impact across the energy transition. Carbon footprint sits inside that work, but life cycle assessment covers a good deal more: land use, water scarcity, effects on biodiversity and a long list of other impact categories. The client base runs from raw material producers, mineral processing plants and refineries through cathode, anode and cell manufacturers to OEMs, and it does not stop there. Battery recycling is in scope, and so are neighbouring low carbon technologies such as solar, motors and wind turbines.

Adriana, who works in Minviro's research and development team and has spent two years on battery LCAs, explains why the methodology now matters commercially. The European battery regulation requires the carbon footprint of batteries sold into the European market to be quantified using life cycle assessment. Speaking to a room with a large Chinese contingent, she makes the point that this lands on anyone selling into the European market, European manufacturers included. The Critical Raw Materials Act proposal goes further. It asks for an environmental footprint rather than a carbon number, with the impacts that matter depending on the production route being assessed.

Both are careful about what the current rules do not cover. Pell calls the regulatory focus on climate change a real step forward, while noting it misses the central premise of the method, which is to look at sustainability as a whole. Optimise a system for one impact category and you have to check you have not pushed up land use change or biodiversity impacts instead. He also frames life cycle assessment as one tool among several. It describes global impacts, and it does not replace environmental impact assessments or the local studies that sit behind a permit for a new factory.

On emissions accounting, Pell argues the battery materials value chain has to capture all three scopes. Scope one is direct emissions from combustion, out of a stack or a truck. Scope two is the embodied emissions of electricity, heat and cooling. Upstream scope three is the embedded impact of chemicals, reagents and consumables, which matters because hydrometallurgical routes use chemical work to liberate and refine material. Collecting that data is hard, and he says many companies are now taking it on. Adriana's example of numbers surprising people is recycling: a client's process turned out to have a higher impact than expected, because any process carries embodied impacts and none of them reach zero.

Questions from this episode

What is the difference between a carbon footprint and a life cycle assessment?: A carbon footprint answers one question: the carbon intensity of a product or process. Life cycle assessment includes that, and adds other impact categories on top, among them land use footprints, water related scarcity and effects on biodiversity. Pell describes Minviro's work as measuring the environmental impact of products and processes across the whole chain, from raw material producers and refineries to cathode, anode and cell makers, OEMs and recycling. Carbon is a useful metric because it is quantifiable and singular, but it is one indicator inside a wider method.
What does the EU battery regulation require on carbon footprint?: The carbon footprint of batteries sold into the European market has to be quantified using life cycle assessment methodology. Adriana calls this the reason LCA has become the go-to method: it is now written into regulation rather than being a voluntary exercise. She also stresses the reach of it. Speaking at a conference with a large Chinese presence, she notes that the requirement applies to everyone selling into Europe, so manufacturers outside the EU are affected as much as European ones.
Does the Critical Raw Materials Act take the same approach?: Not quite. Adriana points to the section of the proposal covering the environmental footprint of critical raw materials, which suggests life cycle assessment methodology but does not specify carbon footprint. Instead it refers to environmental footprint, because the impacts that need reporting depend on the production route being assessed and which of its impacts are most relevant. She reads that as the European Commission doing a good job on this particular file, since it leaves room for the categories that matter to a given route rather than fixing on one number in advance.
Which emissions scopes have to be included for battery materials?: All of them, in Pell's view. Scope one covers direct emissions from combustion, the sort that comes out of a stack or a truck. Scope two covers the embodied emissions of purchased electricity, heat or cooling. Upstream scope three covers the embedded impact of the chemicals, reagents and consumables a process consumes, which is significant in this industry because hydrometallurgical routes rely on chemical work to liberate and refine materials. Getting that third category is the hard part and often needs a step change in data collection, but he says companies are accepting it as a challenge and including it.
Is battery recycling always low impact?: No. Adriana describes assessing a client's recycling technology and finding its environmental impact was not as low as the company had assumed. Her explanation is straightforward: recycling is a process, every process has embodied impacts, and those impacts never reach zero. She uses the example to argue for the discipline of the method. Life cycle assessment is standardised, scientifically grounded and built on the mass and energy inputs of the process being studied, so it produces numbers that can be trusted even when they are less flattering than expected.
Why does primary data matter for battery supply chains?: Because averages hide the range. Pell says most companies still rely on secondary data, and the background databases behind it are low resolution, sometimes offering one industry average figure for an entire nickel supply chain. Minviro's white paper on nickel sulphate found a difference of eighteen times between the low impact and high impact routes. Without route-specific primary data, buyers cannot identify the producers doing well, sign long term agreements with them, or justify paying more for a low impact supply. He sees the shift to primary data as the next step change in the field.

Listen to this episode Watch on YouTube

Part of Europe: policy and money

Transcript

About this transcript. Generated automatically from the recording, then corrected against a glossary of company and guest names. It has not been checked line by line. Machine transcription mis-hears technical terms, numbers and names, so treat any figure here as a prompt to check the recording rather than a quotation of record. Spotted something wrong? Tell us.

0:00Introduction

Dr Simon Engelke

0:00Hello everyone, thanks so much for joining. We are calling or we are speaking right now in beautiful Budapest. We are currently at the lithium-ion battery 2023 conference hosted by SMM in the Shanghai Metals Market. I'm very fortunate to have Adriana and Rob with me from Minviro. We are going to share some insights on LCAs and carbons and all of these important topics related to batteries. Thanks for joining. Thank you for having us. Great, maybe Rob could start by introducing

Robert Pell

0:37your organisation and what you do for your company. Yeah, for sure. My name is Robert Pell, I'm the founder and CEO of Minviro. What we do at Minviro is everything you can imagine associated with life cycle assessment. So measuring the environmental impact. Many people are familiar with carbon footprint. What's the carbon intensity of products or processes. And life cycle assessment is fundamentally includes this, but it includes many other impact categories as well. So measuring the environmental impact of products and processes. And this might be things like land use footprints, water related scarcity, things related to biodiversity. So many impact categories. And our focus is really in the energy transition space. So we work with raw material producers, mineral processing plants, refineries, going right through to cathode anode manufacturers, cell manufacturers, and then going right through to OEMs. We're not, don't stop there, we go right through to battery recycling and other parallel sort of low carbon tech like PV, motors, wind turbines, stuff like that.

Dr Simon Engelke

1:39Fantastic. Thank you. And maybe, of course, I think there's a lot of talk about that, right? Like people know, okay, we're going to, we want to have a more sustainable industry, but there's still a lot of challenges to overcome. Maybe also from a technical perspective or like how it's going to set up from an R&D perspective, Adriana, maybe can you share about like how does this all work? How's this

1:57Battery LCAs and the European battery regulation

Adriana

1:57going to be done? Yeah, for sure. I can set some light on that. So I'm part of the research and development team here at Minviro. I've been doing battery LCAs for the past two years. So I think I kind of have a good idea of what's going on in the battery industry and specifically of what's going on in the very upstream. So Minviro, as Rob mentioned, we deal with environmental impacts across supply chains. And this is a very specific, employed by the so-called life cycle assessment methodology. And this is very important nowadays, because we are seeing that this is the go-to methodology that is being considered in regulation. So I'm talking specifically about the European battery regulation and the carbon footprint of the batteries. This is really important because it will need to be quantified by means of the life cycle assessment methodology for all the batteries that will be sold in the European market. So this is especially important for this conference because we have a very impressive Chinese audience and Chinese presence. So this will affect everyone, not just European battery manufacturers, but also

Dr Simon Engelke

3:06people from the outside. Great. Thanks for sharing that. And I guess, you know, if you look at the space, you mentioned, for example, biodiversity. I just came back from another conference and we had this discussion about, you know, it's not only carbon. I don't know if people think it's only CO2. And in some ways it's a good metric because it's one, right, you can use it as quantifiable. But of course, there's many aspects around it. So I guess I'm wondering maybe from your perspective, you know, if you look at perfect, like perfect, the Holy Grail, you know, we trace it all and we reduce everything and we increase or reduce depending on which way it makes sense. Like how far are we? Like where are we staying today?

Robert Pell

3:43What would you say it's a mistake of the land? Yeah, that's a good question. You can see by the regulations, there's a narrow focus on the climate change impact or the carbon footprint. And although this is sort of a big

3:57Beyond carbon: unintended consequences and the Critical Raw Materials Act

Robert Pell

3:59step and improvement in the industry to actually get this as a regulation and a requirement across the full life cycle of a product, it still doesn't hold the sort of the central premise of life cycle assessment, which is that you're trying to understand a holistic view of sustainability. And if you imagine, so for example, if you're optimizing a system to reduce the climate change impact, you want to make sure that there's no unintended consequences. You know, you don't want to have increased impacts on biodiversity, on land use change, things like that. And but if you fundamentally think about, you know, the other, you step out a little bit, you look at the global challenge, we're fundamentally trying to electrify our transportation system, to optimize it for climate change. So I think that's why there's such a narrow focus on that impact category. But I think as the industry and understanding of sustainability evolves, I'm hopeful that we'll adopt sort of the true life cycle assessment approach, which captures those broader range of impact categories.

Adriana

4:55If I may add, the European Commission is doing a good job on this one. For example, I'm talking about the Critical Raw Materials Act proposal. In that proposal, we can see there's a section for the environmental footprint of the critical raw materials, and they are suggesting to use the life cycle assessment methodology, but they do not specify carbon footprint. They do a specified environmental footprint, because it will depend on the most relevant environmental impact of that production route that you are assessing, that you will need to report on, as Rob mentioned.

Robert Pell

5:31Yeah, I was going to just add one more thing as well, which is just to highlight that, you know, life cycle assessment as an approach is a tool in the toolkit. It doesn't replace like environmental impact assessments or local assessments. You know, you can kind of think of them as understanding the local impacts versus global impacts from different processes.

Dr Simon Engelke

5:52I think it's an excellent, very important point. And more recently, for whatever reason, I had to look at through a lot of, you know, permits and, you know, when you start new factories,

6:00Scope one, scope two and upstream scope three

Dr Simon Engelke

6:00and as you say, there's a lot of local assessments as well, which are quite crucial. And I think one thing maybe also looking at different scope, right? Scope one, two, three, people talk about that. Where do we stand with that? I mean, as I've heard a lot about, again, also another in here conversation, also another conference about, you know, carbon, you know, adjustment mechanisms. So it seems like there's a lot of conversations about how well can we actually, you know, how well can we capture the different scopes? So maybe also a bit of your learnings, say your perspective and what's happening today.

Robert Pell

6:33Maybe I'll briefly touch on our experience in the battery materials value chain. It's essential to capture all the, all these scopes. So scope one, which refers to direct emissions from, from sort of combustion, or, you know, you get out of a stack or out of a truck, by my insight. Scope two, so embodied emissions of electricity or heat or cooling in some instances. And then you've got upstream scope three, which is the embedded impacts of all the chemicals, reagents, consumables that you might use. And this is super important because, you know, inherently a lot of these processes, if you think about hydrometallurgy as an approach, you're using chemical work to, to liberate or refine materials. And so we need to understand the embodied impact of those chemicals. It's, it's, it can be challenging. It's something, you know, it is sometimes a step change in actually getting all that data, but you can see that many, many companies are really sort of like, accepting this as a challenge and, and then including it. So you have full scope one, scope two, and upstream scope three.

Dr Simon Engelke

7:31Great. And I'm not sure if there's something you can say to that. I'm just wondering, because we see a lot of different things, right? You're like in the, in the, in the data of the companies, and you see lots of different things. And I'm wondering maybe, because we also looked at all kinds of like new processes, for example, binding, the self discussion, like essentially any process in the battery dial chain, someone's trying to innovate and reduce. And I'm just wondering, like based on what you have seen, do you have seen some very interesting developments, something which really surprised you, something maybe people should know more about,

7:58When recycling is not as clean as assumed

Dr Simon Engelke

7:59it's maybe different than people think. Just wondering if there's anything like that.

Adriana

8:01Yeah, well, actually, I do have one example, and it's related to recycling technologies. In this case, battery recycling, for example, we did some work evaluating the environmental impact of the recycling process that one of our clients had in place. And it turned out that the environmental impact of that technology was not that low as they would have thought, because in reality, we are evaluating a process, a process has its embodied impacts, and it will never be zero. That's, that's, that's, that's impossible, in my opinion. And we quantify that. And one more time, I would like to highlight the importance of the life cycle assessment methodology, because it's a methodology, it's very robust, is based on the ISO standard 1440, and is, is robust, scientifically robust. It's based on data, energy and mass energy inputs of your process. So, it's a reliable methodology that you can trust, and you will find out the environmental impacts of your production process, which necessarily are not

Dr Simon Engelke

9:08always as low as you think. I think that's a really important point, also getting, getting the real numbers into this. So, I'm sure people can ask you if they want to assess it and get some good results in that, or some, some more real results. Great. And maybe, maybe what, what's something maybe you hope for, if you like, you know, if you would have a session like this in five years or 10 years time, like, you know, what, what do you think hopefully has changed, like, in the sector?

Robert Pell

9:31Yeah, that's a good, it's a good question. So, I think we, there's been many discussions about, you know, we're just at the start of this, like, you know, we, we're, we're a pretty young company, and we, we've seen the industry shift enormously and adopt these types of approaches in, in five years since our formation. But what you're seeing is another step change in, in a requirement for primary data. So, at the moment, if you're a battery company, or you're an OEM, or, you know,

9:57Primary data, and the eighteen-fold spread in nickel sulphate

Robert Pell

9:58you're relying on a lot of secondary data, and the existing background databases were, were quite low resolution. So, you, you might have an industry average data point for the whole of the nickel supply chain. And what we've tried to promote over the last few years is highlighting that actually every route is unique, and it has its own unique footprint. You know, you have, we published a white paper highlighting that nickel sulfate, the difference between the low impact and high impact routes has a difference of 18 times. And so, what, what we really need is primary data for all these different supply chains, so that we can actually not just penalise the art performing well, but, you know, highlight those ones that are doing good, selecting those low impact suppliers, paying more, sometimes, to make sure that they have these long-term agreements with these sustainable production routes.

Dr Simon Engelke

10:44Fantastic. Great. And I think, you know, the sun is on our side. Very beautiful. But now, we really appreciate it, and I hope we, and I guess, as you said, I think we're bringing more visibility into this actor is crucial, and I think also to make the right decision. So, I think I'm fully agree on this, and, you know, excited to see you. Yeah. Want to go and join it from here? Thanks for joining. Thanks so much.

Adriana

11:03Yeah, thank you. Thanks so much.