Complex energy view won’t change soon: IEA’s Tae-Yoon Kim
- 30 July 2024
In 20 years in global energy market and policy research Tae-Yoon Kim hasn’t seen such a complex picture, indicating the 282-page tome the International Energy Agency put out on energy transition metals this year is only going to get bigger. And the team he’s heads in Paris is surely going to grow, too.
“When I joined the agency global energy security was mainly about oil and gas,” says Kim, head of the IEA’s energy minerals analysis unit.
“It is now a much more complex picture.
“If you also look at how the energy is produced and transported and consumed, the chain has become more complex.
“And there are many more weak links, or potential weak links, in the energy system [and] in energy supply chains.
“But certainly the complexity may well increase before we see any return to what we’ve been accustomed to with oil, gas and coal.”
And nuclear power, of course, which is another story.
The IEA’s 2024 Critical Minerals Outlook report, coming on the back of the agency’s first ever Critical Minerals and Clean Energy Summit and initial market review last year, is a deep dive into materials underpinning growth in the use of key clean energy technologies such as wind turbines, electric vehicles and solar panels. So, lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper, graphite and rare earth elements.
Kim says the six-person team that put together the latest report is already working to expand coverage of manganese and silicon, which were relative footnotes in the 2024 study.
A broader focus on other clean energy material supply lines, such as vanadium, seem likely to follow.
The IEA’s 2024 Critical Minerals Outlook report contained many vital takeaways.
Kim says two he will take into a pivotal discussion at Resourcing Tomorrow in London in December, focusing on energy industry strategies for the minerals required for the energy transition, are the report’s highlighting of critical mineral supply chain diversification – “where we are making progress and where progress is lacking” – and related energy market security at a time of rising geopolitical “complexity”.
“In the past our focus has primarily been on oil market security,” he says.
“Now in the energy transition the definition of energy security is broadening.
“Oil and gas security is also still crucial, but there are some other elements we need to be concerned about.
“One of the key things that surprised us [during compilation of the latest report] was the level of concentration of future critical minerals supply.
“We talk a lot about this high level of geographical concentration of production [and] it is well known that today’s mining and refining operations are heavily concentrated in a few countries. But if you look at the future supply sources and the project pipeline it is similarly dominated by today’s leading producers.
“So we are not making progress on diversification and, on the current view of the global project pipeline, we don’t see that much improvement in the coming years based on today’s development status.
“That is something that … makes us worry about the future security of supply chains.
“Copper is the metal we are most concerned about because based on today’s announced projects the expected mine supply from these projects covers just 70% of the need in 2035.
“Beyond the medium term we don’t see the high-quality larger-scale projects … and that may increase pressure on the supply-demand balance in the future.”
Asked about factors that could alter the broader supply security view, Kim said: “Depending on the materials there are projects that are very early stage in certain [developing] regions – projects that we didn’t include in our base case supply projections – that could emerge faster, depending on how policy makers can incentivise the development of those projects.
“That can change the picture quite a lot.”
Kim says metal recycling and technology innovations across energy transition value chains are seen as being among “the variable tools to ease supply constraints”.
“We had specific requests from some of our member countries [for data and analyses] to help them better understand how policies can help the scale-up of recycling of critical minerals and metals,” he says.
“The team is now working on another special report on critical mineral recycling.”
