Untangling the Battery Supply Chain: Why Traceability is the New Power Source

The battery supply chain is a tangled web of materials sourced from across the globe—from cobalt in the Congo to lithium in Chile, and components manufactured everywhere from China to the U.S. This complexity creates major challenges in tracking the origins and movement of materials. Enter traceability systems: essential tools that provide transparency on where materials come from, who handled them, and how they evolved—crucial for complying with tariffs, labor laws, and ethical sourcing standards.

Transcript

00:00:00 You and I know the battery supply chain. I'll use the term Frank. It's complex to say the least, but you're there. You're rolling your sleeves up. Truly, how complex is this supply chain?
>> So, it's a great question. It is complex. Um when you start to think about the fact that every battery has materials in it, chemicals in it, um

00:00:24 critical minerals in it, those critical minerals are sourced in any number of places. So you can have critical minerals sourced in uh in China. You can have critical minerals sourced in Chile. Um those critical minerals are mixed with other materials that are sourced somewhere else. So um you have from from just material extraction point of view um materials that are coming out of

00:00:53 different areas uh as many as a dozen or half a dozen you know um at a time. And then when you layer in the fact that um those materials are being mixed with uh constituent materials that uh for for manufacturing and processing and those materials could be coming from Michigan, they could be coming from Ohio. Um that they could be coming from Mexico. Um and the fact that that mix is then being

00:01:21 produced or manufactured um in uh South Carolina or or um Alabama. um you have a very com a geographically very complex uh ecosystem that has evolved around batteries and to me I don't bake but it sounds like you're trying to make a Betty Crocker cake. It's very complex and very hard to follow where everything's coming from and then you have the Congo and you have

00:01:47 all the issues with the Congo around the cobalt and you're putting into let's call a big mixing pot. How do you I mean I know we're going to get this in a minute but you're working at trace. How do you track everything since you you have things from the Congo, from Chile, from from China, then it's all going into say a big mixer, but how do you track and follow all this?

00:02:03
>> Yeah. So, so that's really the essence of a traceability system. Um, you know, the International Energy Agency has a great uh a great quote about this. Traceability systems can enable the collection of data on product origin, geographic path, and the sequence of entities that held ownership or control over the product and its physical evolution. That's kind of the essence of

00:02:26 it. Um I think a a good traceability system enables the identification of the material when it's extracted. Um what its geographic path is um and um the as as the the definition puts it the the sequence of entities that held ownership. So ownership or control of the material. There are so many different players that um it's really going to become necessary to understand

00:02:55 where this material is coming from for all sorts of reasons. There's tariff reasons within the United States. Um there is uh forced labor laws um uh that that have to be followed. There's foreign entities um that need to be tracked. So um so really the essence of a traceability system is to kind of put that order and logic and identification and transparency around where the

00:03:21 material is coming from, who's touching it, and what they're doing with it.