BAKU, Azerbaijan, May 21. Global annual revenues from coal production in 2040 are expected to drop below $200 billion, while revenues from minerals necessary for green energy production will increase to almost $300 billion, Trend report via the World Energy Outlook Special Report from the International Energy Agency (IEA).
To compare, global coal revenues in 2020 amounted to more than $400 billion, while income from energy transition minerals was way below $100 billion.
“Today revenue from coal production is ten times larger than those from energy transition minerals. However, there is a rapid reversal of fortunes in a climate-driven scenario, as the combined revenues from energy transition minerals overtake those from coal well before 2040,” the IEA said.
Meanwhile, if the Paris Agreement scenario is achieved, the
share of clean technologies is supposed to increase significantly
over the next two decades to over 40 percent for copper and rare
earths, 60-
70 percent - for nickel and cobalt, and almost 90 percent - for
lithium, the researchers noted.
However, the report also noted that the global shift to clean energy will drive the demand for critical minerals for renewable energy production the lack of which might slow down the green transition.
Today’s supply of those necessary minerals already falls behind. The issue is that many of those come from a small number of producers (for example, compared to oil and gas producers). In the case of lithium, cobalt, and rare earths, the world’s top three producers control well over three-quarters of global output, the IEA added.
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