Tribune. Like the Internet, which was deployed around the world at the turn of the 2000s, a large number of low-carbon and digital technologies such as electric vehicles, marine wind turbines or 5G, will be deployed in an accelerated manner and massive during the 2020 decade.
Growing global mobilization for climate preservation, post-pandemic recovery measures and technological progress will fuel these upheavals. This is on condition that the minerals and metals essential to these technologies – such as cobalt, nickel, copper, manganese, graphite and rare earths – do not form an irremediable obstacle.
Threat
Three elements contribute to their strategic nature and represent as many vulnerabilities, even threats.
First of all, the state of reserves and the economic and technical limits to production which may prevent it from meeting the boom in demand. The prices of certain products could soar, as is in part already the case at present, increasing the costs of technologies and slowing the massification of their deployment, which is essential for the decarbonization of the world economy.
Chinese companies control much of the world’s lithium and cobalt production, a strategic asset for Chinese tech groups
Then, the industries that consume them are exposed to geopolitical risks linked to the location of reserves and production sites, as well as to the organization of value chains. For example, the very unstable Democratic Republic of the Congo accounts for 60% of global cobalt production. Chinese companies control much of the world’s lithium and cobalt production, which is a strategic asset for Chinese tech groups.
While nickel production is diversified, its refining, essential to create products incorporated into batteries, is concentrated in the hands of Chinese industrialists. It is perfectly conceivable that large European industrial groups will in the future be forced to sell part of their capital or their technologies, in order to guarantee their supply of minerals.
Finally, these mining processes generally consume a lot of energy, water and chemicals, and often raise questions about the working conditions and good governance of companies in the sector. Producing the technologies we need to decarbonize without investing in improving upstream processes could cause environmental and human damage that would partially negate the expected gains and also weaken the consensus around the energy transition.
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