Changing local and global impacts of critical minerals supply for the clean energy transition

摘要: The transition to clean energy is occurring rapidly, across the entire supply chain of energy, from production to generation to consumption. This transition is set to transform the structure of supply chains as well as the magnitude of required production of various resources–both fuels and nonfuel minerals particularly. Technologies such as electric vehicles (EV) and renewable energies such as photovoltaics (PV) and wind turbines exemplify the expected transition, with larger amounts of metal expected to be required, while fossil-fuel extraction should decline in any scenario except where carbon capture and storage (CCS) is introduced (Watari et al., 2018). Thus it can be anticipated that not only will there be direct impacts and benefits of energy transitions associated with lowering emissions of both greenhouse gases and localised pollutants at the point of electricity generation or fuel utilisation (Chapman et al., 2018), but there will also be upstream implications as metallic mineral production chains expand and ultimately fuel mineral production chains decline. The type of impacts are expected to shift due to the change in the mix of minerals produced, as will the location of impacts, given that primary mineral resources are geographically fixed in-place (the primary resources cannot be relocated in the same way that a manufacturing plant could be). It is not only environmental impacts that will change, but also the benefit and burden of social and economic impacts (Chapman et al., 2016).While the influence of this transition is still gradual, due largely to the small starting share of clean energy technologies within the energy mix, it is foreseeable that …