Modelling the Demand and Access of Mineral Resources in a Changing World

Abstract

Humanity is using mineral resources at an unprecedented level and demand will continue to grow over the next few decades before stabilizing by the end of the century, due to the economic development of populated countries and the energy and digital transitions. The demand for raw materials must be estimated with a bottom-up and regionalised approach and the supply capacity with approaches coupling long-term prices with energy and production costs controlled by the quality of the resource and the rate of technological improvement that depends on thermodynamic limits. Such modelling provides arguments in favour of two classically opposed visions of the future of mineral resources: an unaffordable increase in costs and prices following the depletion of high quality deposits or, on the contrary, a favourable compensation by technological improvements. Both views are true, but not at the same time. After a period of energy and production cost gains, we now appear to be entering a pivotal period of long-term production cost increases as we approach the minimum practical energy and thermodynamic limits for many metals.

Applicability of Hubbert model to global mining industry: Interpretations and insights

“…The consistency of the forecasting approach lies on collected data on purpose and its quality. This approach is notably used by Sverdrup et al [13] and Vidal et al [12,18] to anticipate mineral resources evolution.…”

Energy Intensity of Final Consumption: the Richer, the Poorer the Efficiency

“…8 We go even further and argue that the Global South must temporarily have more access to energy per capita to build the infrastructure already built in the Global North. 60 If there is a break in the historical data due to breakthrough technologies, then growth in every region could become an option again but climate action would not have been jeopardized by exogenously fixed economic growth.…”

Dynamic modeling of global fossil fuel infrastructure and materials needs: Overcoming a lack of available data

“…Several policy tools are incorporated in the publications, in order to discuss the upcoming challenges. First, recycling could diversify supply sources to reduce pressure on primary materials [35,56] for geopolitical purposes [46], and environmental concerns as dilution of metals in deposits rises [57,58]. However, the short-term objective of energy transition is equivalent to lifetimes of technologies, thus limiting the potential of recycling before 2050 [9,59,45].…”

“…The DyMEMDS (Dynamic Modelling of Energy and Matter Demand and Supply) model is developed to estimate the needs in primary and recycled materials, as well as the energy and CO 2 emissions resulting from the extraction of these materials, along global or national energy scenarios. The entire energy chain is covered from primary energy to final consumption with forty technologies of energy production, storage, transport, transformation along three sectors of energy use: transport, construction and industry [58]. A multi-sector analysis of material stocks and flows is prepared for further work.…”