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.