Developing a Battery Impact Calculator ‘MineBIT’ to deeply decarbonise battery products required for low carbon economies.

The transition to a low-carbon economy is well underway and accelerating. However, low-emission energy and transportation systems, such as Electric Vehicles (EVs) or solar panels, are more mineral-intensive compared to fossil fuel equivalents. As such, mineral extraction is projected to rise by 965% for lithium, 585% for cobalt, 383% for graphite and 241% for indium by 2050 \[World Bank, 2019\] increasing associated environmental stresses.

To deeply decarbonise supply-chains, downstream users of minerals (such as OEMs assembling EVs), need to be able to understand the environmental performance of their supply chains to ensure the technologies they build are not offset by poor environmental performance at mine-sites. To build sustainable, low-impact products, they also need to optimise manufacturing processes, chemical selection and build using circular economy principles (enabling high-grade recycling when products reach end-of-life) whilst still producing premier, competitive battery products.

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) provides a method to systematically measure impacts of supply chains and dynamically redesign battery compositions (aka low impact _and_ high-performing chemicals) whilst responding to shifts in commodity markets to reduce the carbon footprint of projects. Yet LCA requires excellent data to accurately quantify different impacts for raw material extraction, processing and refining at a mine-site by mine-site level. However, datasets built by the mining community to feed into LCA are often meagre/non-existent undermining their integrity.

**Minviro Ltd** is a UK SME pioneering world-leading LCA tools to enable the mineral value-chain to radically improve their environmental credentials. The company is a spin-out from the world-class Camborne School of Mines, comprising of mineralogists, mining-engineers and LCA specialists and is currently working with some of the largest diversified mining companies in the world and downstream end-users to ensure raw materials used for the low-carbon economy are sourced at minimal environmental cost.

Minviro's strategic research partner, from the **Sustainable Materials and Manufacturing Group at WMG, University of Warwick**, are specialists in modelling dynamic supply-chains; sustainable materials/manufacturing systems; digital lifecycle management; battery system engineering; new product development; and advanced propulsion systems.

This fusion of experts, will translate amazing British science into a world-beating innovation, building novel and licensable battery impact calculator 'MineBIT', underpinned by data-driven (peer-reviewed) and temporal LCA. This highly novel 'off-the-shelf' tool will fully comply with international standards ISO14040 and ISO14044 and enable non LCA experts across global supply-chains (including OEM's, Tier 1 and Tier 2 suppliers and investors) to source chemicals and dynamically build products with minimal environmental cost.