Critical minerals for the energy transition

Assembled from 15 blocks · 2 evidence · 13 related

1. Story
2. The set of materials whose supply is judged both economically essential and vulnerable to disruption — in the energy context principally lithium, cobalt, nickel, graphite, copper and the rare earths, above all neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium and terbium for permanent magnets. Three properties define the problem and each is routinely misdescribed. First, criticality is about concentration and substitutability, not geological scarcity: rare earths are not rare, and the binding constraint is that separating and refining them is done in very few places. Second, the concentration is overwhelmingly in *processing* rather than mining — cobalt is mined mostly in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and nickel increasingly in Indonesia, but refining and the manufacture of battery-grade and magnet-grade material is dominated by China across almost every material, with rare-earth separation and graphite anode material the most concentrated of all. Third, mineral markets are cyclical and the transition's demand signal is not: lithium prices rose roughly an order of magnitude into late 2022 and then collapsed through 2023 and 2024 as new supply arrived, a swing that shut mines and cancelled projects while long-run demand projections barely moved. The strategic consequence was demonstrated rather than argued during 2023–2025, when China imposed successive export controls on gallium, germanium, graphite, antimony and then rare earths and their magnets. Not a place.
3. Knowledge
4. Critical minerals for the energy transition
5. Connections
6. The horizontal-axis wind turbine
7. Lithium-ion battery storage
8. Bayan Obo mining district
9. Copper
10. International Energy Agency
11. The lithium price collapses after its 2022 peak
12. China imposes export controls on rare earths and magnets
13. Evidence
14. Supports the account of mineral demand growth, the concentration of refining and processing capacity relative to mining, the country shares for lithium, cobalt, nickel, graphite and rare earths, and the price volatility of the 2022–2024 cycle. V55 verification basis: not retrieved in this session; processing concentration is therefore described qualitatively as "dominant" rather than as percentages, and no country share is stated as a number anywhere in this pack.
15. The reference source for world energy balances, final energy consumption by carrier, generation mix, technology cost trends and scenario pathways used throughout this pack. V55 verification basis: no edition was retrieved in this session — iea.org was refused by the network egress proxy — so every figure attributed to this series is stated as a magnitude with the specific gap named on the citing record, and no current-year quantity should be presented to a reader without confirmation against a named edition.