BAKU, Azerbaijan, January 13. About $1.2 trillion is needed in mining, critical material production and manufacturing of the clean energy technologies globally to bring the necessary capacity online by 2030, Trend reports, citing the latest publication from the International Energy Agency (IEA).
"Bridging the production gaps described above would require enormous additional investments in the coming years. Investments associated with projects already announced reach around 60 percent of this, with large gaps in critical mineral mining and for some technology manufacturing," the report said.
According to the IEA, mobilizing such volumes of investments is achievable, however, the timeline is extremely tight, especially taking into account the long time of putting products on the market.
"Most of the investment (including for projects already announced) needs to occur over 2023-2025, implying an average of more than $270 billion per year over the period. To compare, this is about two-thirds of current annual capital spending of the oil and gas industry, and nearly seven times higher than the average annual investment seen in clean energy supply chains over 2016-2021," the Agency noted.
As the Agency analysts assess, mining of copper, lithium, nickel and cobalt alone will require around $130 billion per year over 2023-2025, equivalent to total mining investment in 2021, implying a doubling of overall investments in the sector this year.
"The copper mining market, which accounts for over half of the required mining investments, may be in part balanced through demand reduction in other sectors and recycling. For the refining of those minerals, announced projects cover about 80 percent of investment needs for copper, but only over 40 percent for other metals. In terms of clean technology manufacturing capacity, announced projects cover two-thirds of investment needs to 2030," the report noted.
Thus, in total, investment in clean energy technologies and infrastructure reaches over $4.5 trillion in 2030 in the NZE Scenario, the IEA said.
"This scale of investment is unprecedented. Mobilizing it across all regions, technologies and supply chains is an enormous task. Bottlenecks can occur as a result of policy and regulatory risks, a lack of confidence in demonstration and firstof-a-kind projects, uncertainty about project pipelines, wider macroeconomic factors such as currency stability, and geopolitical events," the Agency added.