Green transition mineral demands under scrutiny

Taking place in Geneva from September 4-6, the event is being hosted in partnership with Empa, the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology. According to both the WRF and Empa, the issue of mineral resources is too often overlooked in discussions around climate change and the green transition. The International Energy Agency (IEA) predicts that global demand for critical raw materials will quadruple by 2040 – in the case of lithium, demand is expected to increase by a factor of 42.

A typical electric car requires six times the mineral input of a combustion-engine car – mainly copper, graphite, cobalt and nickel for the battery system. Around 67 tons of copper can be found in a medium-sized offshore turbine. To extract this amount of copper, miners have to move almost 50,000 tons of earth and rock, equivalent to five times the weight of the Eiffel Tower. Increasing the sustainability of resource extraction is essential to the success of the green transition.

“Minerals and metals are the backbone of major industries, including energy, construction, mobility and electronics" said WRF managing director Mathias Schluep. "If international governments and industry leaders do not source and use these resources with long-term sustainability in mind, no transition will be green. This issue looms over the climate debate and deserves far greater attention.”

According to the WRF and Empa, the extraction and processing of material resources is responsible for 90 per cent of biodiversity loss, 50 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions and 30 per cent of air pollution impacts. The energy transition and growth in the infrastructure stock globally risk making environmental challenges even more acute.

“The renewable energy transition will require the mobilization of great amounts of raw materials, with several of them being considered to be critical,” said Empa’s head of Technology and Society Laboratory, Patrick Wäger. “It will be essential to understand and appropriately influence the dynamics of joint energy and material transitions in view of respecting our planetary boundaries.”