Decarbonising society – envisioned in UN-SDG #13 ‘Climate Action’ – aims to rapidly reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions to combat climate change and achieve a carbon-neutral society by 2050. Decarbonisation of two of the largest CO2 emitting sectors – electric power/heat generation and transportation – requires changing fossil fuels with clean storage and renewable energy technologies. Unfortunately, low-carbon technologies are more material, mineral and metal intensive than conventional fossil fuel technologies. A typical 3 MW wind turbine, for example, requires 4.7 t of copper, 2 t of rare earth elements (REEs) and 3 t of aluminium while electric vehicles (EVs) needs 1.7 to 11 times more copper than conventional cars aside from nickel, cobalt and lithium for their rechargeable batteries (Tabelin et al, 2021).
Because of this, the World Bank identified copper as one of the 17 critical metals/materials necessary for decarbonisation strategies to succeed. Copper is essential in at least eight clean storage and renewable energy technologies and by 2050, the demand for this metal is forecasted to increase to ~29 Mt from 2019 values of ~20 Mt assuming the 2-degree scenario (2DS). To put this increase in demand into perspective, ~550 Mt of copper has been produced for the last 5000 years and this amount is needed in the next 25 years.