The energy-critical metals: technologies with a human face

Abstract

The importance of energy-transition issues was poignantly summarised in 1973, by economist Ernst Schumacher (Schumacher 1973, p. 99): ‘ energy is for the mechanical world what consciousness is for the human world. If energy fails, everything fails .’ Schumacher's words have ever greater societal relevance since his cautionary predictions are now manifested, after half a century of the Great Acceleration (Steffen et al. 2015) in energy use, population increase and global warming. Schumacher (1973) regarded natural resources as valuable Earth materials, pivotal to the transition from coal to natural gas and uranium fuel productions. The World Economic Forum promotes energy transitions and their associated technological innovation clusters as part of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (Prisecaru 2016; Philbeck and Davis 2018). But if we take Schumacher's approach of putting valuable Earth materials at the heart of debates about economy, there is scant evidence of revolution. Instead, we see graphs of exponential production of an increasing array of raw materials, whether they are described as bulk metals or critical raw materials, and geoscientists are repeatedly required to identify the geological capacity for raw materials production (Konnunaho et al. 2023; Moore et al. 2023; Savinova et al. 2023; Valenta et al. 2023; Gardiner et al. 2024).