How Earth’s Minerals Are Helping the World Meet Its Climate Goals

How is a battery made? A lithium-ion battery, the most common type, starts in a mine. Miners pump lithium-rich brine out from the earth and then let the liquid sit in pools where water evaporates, leaving behind lithium. The mineral is also mined by blasting it out of pits. Rocks from those pits are then processed to extract lithium.  

To make a battery, that lithium goes through many steps. It’s mixed with other ingredients, coated with copper and aluminum foil, cut, welded, stacked, or wound together. Then it’s encased, filled with a liquid, charged, stored, and shipped to your local store—where you buy it after your TV remote stops working.

Clearly, a lot of different materials go into making batteries. And it’s not just batteries. Solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicle motors, and a number of other clean technologies all require an array of different minerals to manufacture. But what if something happened to disrupt the supply of one of those materials? Often, they cannot be easily replaced with substitutes, so a disruption could slow or stop production entirely. That could have consequences not only for the economy but also for the climate.

The following learning resource will discuss the many minerals needed for the world’s transition to clean energy. It will then outline the challenges for meeting the world’s demand. 

What Are Critical Minerals? 

Critical minerals are raw materials that play a vital role in a country’s economy or national security. The exact definition of which minerals count as critical can vary over time and from country to country based on several factors. These factors include how widely available a mineral is, how vulnerable its supply chains are to disruption, and how important it is to a country’s economy.  

Many critical minerals are essential for clean energy production and storage. Those are often called transition minerals. Batteries, as discussed above, require multiple different critical minerals to produce. But batteries are just one example. Solar panels incorporate materials like aluminum and indium. Wind turbines rely on iron and zinc in their production. Electric vehicle motors rely on magnets that come from materials like neodymium and cobalt. And all those technologies require computer chips that incorporate materials like germanium and graphite. Of the fifty minerals that the U.S. government designates as critical, at least ten are vital to the clean technology transition:
 

Each of those minerals helps the world transition away from fossil fuel technologies. And each will become increasingly important in the coming years. As clean energy technologies have developed and grown increasingly widespread, demand for the minerals used in their production has soared. The World Bank estimates that constructing the solar panels, wind turbines, and energy storage systems required to meet the Paris Agreement’s climate targets will require over three billion tons of metals and minerals. By 2050, demand for some minerals, such as cobalt, graphite, and lithium, is expected to rise by nearly 500 percent compared to 2018 levels. 
 

Geographic concentration makes critical mineral supply chains vulnerable to disruption and drives competition for control. Meanwhile, the rush to meet rising demand has raised concerns about the human and environmental cost of mining those minerals. 
 

Let's take a closer look at some of the challenges associated with maintaining a stable supply of critical minerals. 

International competition: The market for clean energy technology is expanding rapidly. That means investing in clean energy is a smart move for a country’s economy. If the world needs minerals for clean energy technology, then controlling the supply of minerals can yield massive economic returns and increase a country’s influence abroad.

China dominates the global market for refining critical minerals and manufacturing them into batteries. In 2023, China accounted for 77 percent of all lithium imports. It controls more than 60 percent of the world’s lithium-refining capacity. And in 2023, it supplied 80 percent of the world’s battery cells and 60 percent of the world’s electric vehicle batteries. 
 

Policymakers are concerned that China could wield its control over critical minerals to its advantage by restricting countries’ access to them. In fact, it has already done so. In 2010, a territorial dispute led China to briefly place an embargo on exporting several minerals to Japan, where many industries relied on the Chinese imports. 

Instability: A conflict, economic crisis, or climate change–worsened disaster in a country that supplies critical minerals could disrupt supply chains. That could have potentially global implications. Gabon, for instance, is the world’s third largest supplier of manganese. Manganese is used in the production of electric vehicle batteries as well as for making steel. In 2023, Gabon's military took control over the government. That caused a French manganese-mining company to briefly suspend its operations. Although the disruption had minimal effects on the market, it underscored the risk that political instability could pose to global critical minerals supply. If conditions deteriorate and the country faces disruptions to production and transport, or comes under international sanction, Gabon could disrupt the global market for manganese. 
 

Critical minerals can also exacerbate instability in countries where they are mined. Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), for example, produces many critical minerals, including 70 percent of the world’s cobalt, which is a component in batteries and magnets. Ongoing conflict between armed groups in the DRC has posed a challenge to supply chains for the mineral. But the high value of cobalt and other critical minerals has also fueled the conflict. Armed groups have taken control over certain mining areas and used critical minerals to fund their operations, either by illegally taxing them or smuggling the minerals into neighboring countries to sell.
 

Human rights abuses: The rapid rise in demand for critical minerals has outpaced the development of systems to govern safe and fair labor practices. In Democratic Republic of Congo, for example, formal regulations and controls over mining critical minerals like cobalt are still in development. Small-scale mining operations account for up to 30 percent of Cobalt mining in the country. They often don’t follow official rules and regulations and have been reported to operate in unsafe conditions and rely on child and forced labor. 

But the issue is not limited to informal operations. Human rights groups have noted allegations of abuse by mining companies in several different countries. These include Indonesia, Myanmar, Peru, and Zambia. In particular, Chinese mining companies have been linked to numerous allegations. One report [PDF] on a Chinese-owned nickel-mining facility in Indonesia detailed a pattern of labor exploitation. It also highlighted illegal land grabs, unsafe working conditions, and intimidation. Often, those abuses occur among marginalized or vulnerable communities and can exacerbate other challenges they already face. 

Environmental damage: Even though clean energy technologies will help combat climate change on the whole, mining the critical minerals that go into those technologies can come at an environmental cost.

Most mining methods for critical minerals also use large quantities of water. In Chile, for example, a common lithium-mining technique involves pumping lithium-rich brine from underground aquifers into large pools. In the pools, the water evaporates and leaves behind the lithium. That method uses up to half a million gallons of brine water per ton of lithium. Although the brine itself is unusable, pumping large quantities of it to the surface can cause fresh water to flow into the brine aquifers, depleting freshwater supplies. In Chile’s Salar de Atacama region, lithium and copper extraction have reportedly consumed over 65 percent of the local water supply. This puts Indigenous farming communities under pressure in an already water-scarce region. 
 

Waste from mining and processing can also contaminate water and soil in nearby communities with residual minerals and chemicals. In Tibet, for example, lithium mining has leaked chemicals, including hydrochloric acid, into the nearby Liqi River, poisoning fish and killing livestock. 

The Future of Critical Minerals

Governments around the world are already taking steps to safeguard their access to critical minerals and address the environmental and humanitarian harms of mineral mining. Mineral-rich countries like Democratic Republic of Congo have taken steps to formalize and safeguard mining operations. In the United Nations, a panel of more than one hundred countries and multilateral organizations issued a report [PDF] in 2024 recommending guidelines for responsible and transparent mining practices. Brazil and Colombia have also proposed a treaty aimed at codifying responsible and transparent mining practices for critical minerals.
 

Meanwhile, countries that rely on importing minerals have sought to secure their supply chains by stockpiling strategic reserves and developing domestic sources of critical minerals. Australia, Canada, and the European Union have all recently adopted policies aimed at boosting their respective domestic mineral-mining, refining, and battery-manufacturing industries. In the United States, the 2021 Inflation Reduction Act [LINK] included tax benefits for domestic mineral-processing facilities. 

Discoveries of new mineral deposits are helping the process in several countries. In the United States, for instance, mineral exploration in Arkansas revealed a reserve containing up to nineteen tons of lithium—nine times the projected global demand through 2030. Likewise, companies have discovered large amounts of minerals, including cobalt, manganese, and nickel, on the sea floor in the Pacific. Advances in deep-sea mining could make gathering those minerals more cost-effective and help secure supply chains. 

New technologies and methods could also make land-based mining more efficient and reduce environmental damage. Some companies are exploring methods such as direct lithium extraction, which involves removing lithium from brine without evaporation. That method can lessen the intense water demand of lithium mining and could even be faster than the evaporation method. 

Still, building new mining and processing infrastructure and developing new methods and technologies takes time. And new advancements in mineral extraction could present unforeseen risks of their own. In the meantime, demand is rising at a pace that outstrips current production trends. Securing reliable access to critical minerals, and doing so responsibly, will remain a prominent issue for policymakers seeking to tackle climate change for years to come.