世界经济论坛-能源转型与地缘政治：关键矿物是新石油吗？（英）-2024.4-18页

免费

3.0 babyfacer 2024-05-15 27 8.11MB 16 页免费

侵权投诉

Energy Transition

and Geopolitics:

Are Critical Minerals

the New Oil?

WHITE PAPER

APRIL 2024

Executive summary

The energy transition will cause big shifts in

dependencies – away from oil and other fossil

fuels, and towards a raft of critical minerals such as

lithium and copper. Will this trading of places lead to

politically and environmentally dangerous futures?

This paper offers a broad framework for answering

this question. It also suggests that most of the

feared new dependencies on critical minerals can

be managed.

Most of the policy concerns about critical

minerals have been around fears that supplies

won’t keep pace with soaring demand and that

raw and processed critical materials are overly

concentrated in a few countries, notably China. For

most critical minerals, however, there hasn’t been

much incentive to expand or diversify supplies

radically. That is now changing, and adequate new

supplies will plausibly appear, with the probable

exception of copper, a mineral with a long history

of supply struggles.

Critical minerals and oil have notably different

demand factors. For oil, the global economy has

little ability to temper demand quickly in response

to shortages or manipulations in supply. Some big

oil suppliers are responsive to state interests when

they make investment and production decisions,

which at times helps them manipulate supplies.

By contrast, most critical minerals are used only

when new projects are built. With the right policies

in place, demand can be highly responsive.

Suppliers, knowing this, are less likely and able to

corner the market.

Moreover, most mineral suppliers respond

principally to market conditions, rather than state

interest. The risks to the global economy that

the clean energy transition will create geopolitical

tensions over critical minerals – as has happened

thus far with oil – are not as great as feared so

long as the market forces that govern supply and

demand are properly harnessed. Innovation can

also help temper demand, as has happened with

cobalt where worries about dependence on slave

labour have led innovators to ﬁnd alternatives to the

mineral and to identify new sources of supply.

This report identiﬁes an array of “no regrets”

policy initiatives that can help ensure that “trading

places” does not have adverse economic and

environmental consequences. Among these is

helping markets operate more effectively, such

as by creating more transparency of data about

transactions and the encouragement of forward

markets that will make it easier to signal scarcity

and ﬁnance new supplies.

Energy Transition and Geopolitics:

Will Critical Minerals be the New Oil?

April 2024

Energy Transition and Geopolitics: Will Critical Minerals be the New Oil? 3

Introduction

How likely is it that the clean energy transition,

advancing rapidly in much of the world, could

replace dependence on oil and other hydrocarbons

by dependencies on critical minerals? Analysts and

pundits are debating this question – and are often

coming up with answers that set alarm bells ringing.

This paper accepts as likely that dependencies on

critical minerals will rise as the “energy transition”

causes a big rise in the need for wiring, batteries,

magnets and other key elements of cleaner energy

systems. In tandem and with time, dependence

on oil is likely to wane. But will this shift in

dependencies be bad news for geopolitics, energy

security or the environment?

This question has been hard to answer, partly

because debates are advancing without much of

a framework for analysis. Dire forecasts typically

start with the expected surge in demand for critical

minerals, with predictions often based on little

more than the assumption of exponential growth.

But a proper look at dependencies requires

looking at how the whole system for supply and

demand might respond, and how innovations in

technologies, markets and governing institutions

might alter those responses. The early days of

the oil crisis in the 1970s saw similar errors in

forecasting – with an obsession with supply, the

assumption of exponential growth in demand and a

failure to account for how the whole system might

respond. These errors in forecasting can lead to

grave mistakes in policy and investment.

This white paper is an effort to offer a preliminary

framework for thinking about supply, demand and

trade-offs as the dependence on critical materials

increases.1 It looks at supply and demand in

turn, and argues that while most of the concerns

about critical materials have focused on the level

and concentration of supply, the most important

factors driving potential scarcity in critical materials

are actually found in the realm of demand. It then

identiﬁes an array of “no regrets” policy measures

that can help make the inevitable shift towards

more dependence on critical minerals less

dangerous for the global economy, environment

and political order.

Energy Transition and Geopolitics: Will Critical Minerals be the New Oil? 4

研报加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载研报到电脑，查找使用更方便

立即下载

摘要：

EnergyTransitionandGeopolitics:AreCriticalMineralstheNewOil?WHITEPAPERAPRIL2024ExecutivesummaryTheenergytransitionwillcausebigshiftsindependencies–awayfromoilandotherfossilfuels,andtowardsaraftofcriticalmineralssuchaslithiumandcopper.Willthistradingofplacesleadtopoliticallyandenvironmentallydangerou...

展开>> 收起<<

世界经济论坛-能源转型与地缘政治：关键矿物是新石油吗？（英）-2024.4-18页.pdf

共16页,预览5页

还剩页未读，继续阅读