Europe’s battery strategy is usually framed around gigafactories, cell chemistries, and electric vehicle targets. Capacity is measured in gigawatt-hours, and progress is judged by how many plants are announced or built.
What receives far less attention is a layer of the value chain that has a disproportionate impact on cost, risk, and resilience: battery chemicals.
Chemistry shapes factories
Battery chemicals are often discussed as a materials issue: purity, performance, or compatibility. From an industrial perspective, the implications are broader. Chemistry choices determine factory complexity, energy consumption, capital tied up in safety and recovery systems, permitting timelines, and long-term operational risk.
Once a production line is designed around a specific chemical process, these parameters are largely locked in. Changing them later is expensive and disruptive, which is why upstream chemistry decisions often matter more than incremental improvements at the cell level.
Local factories, global dependencies
Much of Europe’s battery manufacturing still depends on imported chemicals, primarily from Asia. These are not marginal inputs but materials required for continuous operation.
As a result, a battery plant can be physically located in Europe while remaining economically and strategically exposed to global supply chains. Transport costs, regulatory friction, carbon pricing, and geopolitical risk are embedded into every cell produced.
Why catalysts and process innovation matter
As carbon pricing mechanisms such as CBAM come into force and regulatory standards tighten, upstream emissions and toxicity increasingly translate into direct financial exposure.
Innovation in catalysts and chemical processes offers a way to address this. New catalysts can lower energy requirements, enable the use of alternative feedstocks, reduce toxicity, and simplify handling. Process innovation enables the production of battery chemicals locally, in compliance with European regulatory requirements, without sacrificing cost competitiveness.
If Europe wants a resilient and competitive battery supply chain, the discussion cannot stop at cells and gigafactories. Resilience starts upstream, in chemistry and process design.