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.