The global energy transition is increasing the demand for several critical minerals, said IRENA Director-General Francesco La Camera. | Fayez Nureldine/AFP/Getty ImagesThe world’s supply of critical minerals is vulnerable to disruptions that could slow the transition to clean energy because their mining and refining are concentrated in the hands of a few companies and countries, an international renewable energy body said on Tuesday.
The global energy transition is increasing the demand for several critical minerals, said IRENA Director-General Francesco La Camera, raising the need to develop policies that will help expand the number of sources and the countries that can benefit from their production. IRENA said a small number of countries play an outsized role in the mining and processing of critical materials. Australia, for example, mined 47 percent of the world’s lithium last year, while China led in graphite output with a 65 percent market share. The Democratic Republic of Congo mined 70 percent of the world’s cobalt.
By contrast, critical mineral reserves are widely distributed around the globe, presenting opportunities to diversify mining and processing. Developing countries account for much of the global production of materials essential to the energy transition although some of them have much smaller shares of global production than reserves, the report said. Bolivia, for one, has the largest lithium reserves in the world, but it produced less than 1 percent of the supply in 2021.