Critical mineral supply chains and the economics of energy transition: A carbon decomposition perspective of growth and decoupling

Abstract

Critical minerals like copper, lithium, cobalt, nickel, and rare earth elements form the backbone of low-carbon technologies and are central to the success of global energy transitions. Their availability and the security of their supply chains determine the scalability of renewable energy systems, electric vehicles, battery storage, and hydrogen technologies. For member countries of the International Energy Agency (IEA), which plays a pivotal role in global energy markets, ensuring resilient access to these minerals is inseparable from the broader challenge of decoupling economic growth from carbon emissions. This study examines the dynamics of energy and carbon decomposition as mechanisms for decoupling economic growth from energy-related emissions across certain IEA countries between 1995 and 2022. The analysis employs a decomposition framework that incorporates value-added carbon intensity, value-added energy intensity, and CO₂ transport and storage while accounting for the enabling role of critical mineral availability. The results reveal that improvements in energy decomposition significantly strengthen the decoupling of growth from emissions, whereas increases in carbon decomposition weaken it. Similarly, higher value-added energy intensity is positively associated, and carbon intensity is negatively associated with decoupling, while expanded CO₂ transport and storage capacity tend to reduce its effectiveness. Notably, integrating into the analysis considerations related to mineral supply demonstrates that stable and diversified access to critical resources magnifies the benefits of energy decomposition while mitigating the risks that are linked to carbon intensity. These findings underscore the dual importance of policy frameworks that advance energy efficiency and decomposition and strategies that secure critical mineral supply chains to ensure clean technologies’ scalability.

Keywords

Critical minerals / Economic growth decoupling / Energy transition / IEA countries

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Hu Fu: Supervision, Software, Resources, Methodology, Formal analysis, Data curation. Mona Alariqi: Writing - review & editing, Writing - original draft, Visualization, Validation, Data curation, Conceptualization.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

This study was supported by the Chongqing Technology Foresight and Institutional Innovation Project "Research on Optimization of Resource Structure" (CSTB2024TF11- DIXOO86).

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