New IEF Report: Critical Minerals Move to the Mainstream
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia – 19 December. A new IEF report, A Critical Minerals Enabled Energy Future, highlights how critical minerals have moved from the margins to the mainstream, underpinning the technologies driving growth, competitiveness, and decarbonisation. As demand accelerates and supply chains remain highly concentrated, critical minerals are emerging as a new frontier in energy geoeconomics, reshaping trade flows, investment priorities, energy security, and producer consumer relations.
The report examines the scale of the challenge and identifies pathways to strengthen resilience, including diversified supply, recycling and circular economy solutions, innovation, and crucially, more transparent, predictable, and rules-based markets. It also shows how sustained producer-consumer dialogue, underpinned by better data and shared analysis, can ease frictions, build market confidence, and support fair and inclusive outcomes by improving predictability and reducing uncertainty.
"Critical minerals are no longer a niche issue at the margins of the energy transition," said Jassim Alshirawi, Secretary General of the International Energy Forum. "They are now central to energy security, economic competitiveness, and the credibility of national climate strategies. Without secure, transparent, and resilient mineral supply chains, the energy transition itself is at risk."
Key findings include:
- Access to knowledge and human resources are as critical to mineral supply chains as access to resources and markets themselves.
- More than 60% of global critical mineral demand is met through international trade, creating deep interdependence between producing and consuming regions.
- Producer–consumer dialogue is essential to the reliable functioning of critical mineral markets.
- Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming mineral exploration by dramatically improving discovery efficiency and precision.
- Market resilience, strengthened through producer–consumer dialogue and effective risk-management strategies, remains essential for critical-mineral market security.
