A battery platform for sustainability assessments in the battery production industry

Many new battery technologies are currently being developed worldwide. Environmental and techno-economic assessments are used by companies to design and compare different battery production strategies from a technical, environmental, and economic perspective. However, those assessments require high expertise in process-engineering, LCA and cost analysis fields, which makes them challenging and time consuming. As a result, simplified models of production processes are typically established, which lack the engineering refinement useful for technical decision making. In this work, a new Python modelling platform for environmental and techno-economic assessments of batteries is introduced. Detailed production and product models are implemented and linked to life cycle assessment (LCA) and cost analysis frameworks. This enables performing complex and extensive comparative analysis between different types of battery products and production routes in a simple and time-efficient manner. In this presentation, an overview of the platform structure and its capabilities are introduced. Different production model case studies are presented, whereby the energy and material flows of battery cell factories are simulated, and the results validated against pilot and industrial data. Finally, cradle-to-gate LCA results from the different case studies are also shown and discussed.