Burn and churn or mine and refine? Why the clean transition means less extraction

A common misconception is that the climate transition will drastically increase mining. While clean technologies do require critical raw materials, the comparison should not be with an imagined world without mining but with our current system: one that continuously extracts and burns enormous amounts of fossil fuels.

Today, billions of tons of oil, gas, and coal are extracted each year—used once and lost, requiring constant replenishment. Critical raw materials, by contrast, are different. They don’t disappear when used; they can be recycled and reused. Over time, this transition will reduce the total amount of materials we mine. Even when only comparing coal to critical raw materials, research by Nijmens et al. (2023) shows a net decrease in mined ores. And that’s without considering the billions of tons of oil and gas that will no longer be needed—around 4 billion tons of oil and 3 billion tons of gas extracted annually for energy purposes.

Figure: As the climate transition progresses, ore extraction for critical raw materials increases (based on the IEA’s scenario of net zero by 2050). However, ore extraction for coal decreases simultaneously, resulting in a net decrease in total mined ores. Source: Ortelius (2025), adapted from Nijmens et. Al. (2023)[1]

This shift doesn’t mean mining impacts should be ignored. On the contrary, they need to be addressed responsibly. But the overall trend is clear: we’re swapping a never-ending hamster wheel of extraction for a system that actually holds onto its resources—building a stock of materials that can be kept in circulation. The importance of critical raw materials was once again underlined by the EU's Clean Industrial Deal, emphasizing their central role in securing a sustainable and resilient supply chain.

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[1] J. Nijnens, P. Behrens, O. Kraan, B. Sprecher, and R. Kleijn, “Energy transition will require substantially less mining than the current fossil system,” Joule, vol. 7, no. 11, pp. 2408–2413, Nov. 2023, doi: 10.1016/j.joule.2023.10.005.