7.2 What are critical materials?

Critical materials are the resources, typically metals and minerals, needed to produce a wide range of modern products, such as smartphones, medical equipment and technologies for the energy transition. The unique characteristics of these materials have catapulted numerous technologies, including wind turbines, solar panels and batteries for EVs to the forefront of the energy transition.

Ensuring sufficient quantities of these materials is challenging, for several reasons: • Extracting them is difficult. • Only a handful of countries have deposits. • There are no direct substitutes.

• The quality of the natural resources has declined. • Only small amounts of materials are used in end-use applications, making them hard to recover. • Rapid scale-ups of supply are often complicated by large price fluctuations stemming from imbalances in supply and demand.

The literature reveals little consensus on which materials are classified as critical (DERA, 2021; European Commission, 2021e; IEA, 2020; Hund, 2020). The European Commission’s critical raw materials list includes 30 materials (European Commission, 2020). The US Geological Survey’s 2021 Draft List of Critical Minerals includes 35 materials (Federal Register, 2021).

The most important critical materials are copper, nickel, lithium and REEs, particularly neodymium and dysprosium. Copper is a crucial component of power lines connecting generators with endusers. Lithium and Nickel are used to produce rechargeable batteries. Neodymium and dysprosium play key roles in the permanent magnets found in wind turbines and EVs. None of these elements can easily be replaced by alternatives.

Other critical materials may become more important in the future. They include aluminium (used in overhead power lines and batteries), cobalt (often used in EV batteries), chromium, gallium, germanium, graphite (used as an anode in lithium-Ion batteries), indium, iron, lanthanum, lead, manganese, molybdenum, platinum, rhenium, ruthenium, scandium, silver, vanadium, tantalum, titanium, yttrium and zinc.