Critical Minerals

Our Motivating Challenge

The growing strategic importance of critical mineral supply chains is reshaping national industrial policy and economic diplomacy worldwide, as governments, industry, and finance respond to the challenge of scaling to meet the demands of the green transition. At the same time, there is a deficit of applied scholarship on energy transition value chains, which are complex and mutable. In this context, producer countries stand to benefit from greater capacity to design value-capture mechanisms and social investment plans resilient to commodity market volatility.

In partnership with the Carnegie Corporation of New York, JFI’s Energy Transition Value Chains Portfolio (ETVC) is building this capacity, combining our capabilities and expertise in metals & mining, policy analysis, economic research, software development, and financial modeling. Our tools and research insights are designed to help producer countries capture a greater share of the benefits from the extraction, trade, and use of resources critical to the energy transition. The scope and scale of our work vary according to the specific needs of our partners. They can include tailored, context-specific support — such as applying data-rich methodologies to identify and position local value chain investment opportunities — as well as systematic efforts, such as developing and applying fiscal regime modeling tools or advancing mineral market optimization to support more effective development outcomes.

Our Capabilities

The critical minerals portfolio combines our researchers’ expertise in metals and mining, economic research, financial modeling, software development, and policy analysis, with organization-wide expertise in developmental economics and macroeconomics. Through close research partnerships and collaborative development, our work bridges rigorous applied research with implementation and makes complex public finance and market design challenges more accessible to decision-makers.

Partner with Us

Our partners include policymakers at the national and subnational levels domestically and abroad, private investors, industry experts, and NGOs. If you’d like to hear more about partnering with us, please email us at [email protected]; we welcome questions and comments. ETVC provides a combination of policy design, modeling, and direct assistance across primary areas of work.