Connected to the initiative area:
Financing the Energy Transition

Portfolio

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.

Part of the initiative:

Financing the Energy Transition

Critical Minerals Contributors

Higher Education Finance

Eduard Nilaj

Fellow

Special Projects

Francis Tseng

Lead Developer

Chief Research Officer

Jerome Hodges

Financing the Energy Transition

Jonah Allen

Lead Researcher, Energy Transition Value Chains

Higher Education Finance

Laura Beamer

Lead Researcher

Financing the Energy Transition

Madeline Craig-Scheckman

Fellow

Social Wealth

Paul Katz

Senior VP

Financing the Energy Transition

Shane Sethi

Research Fellow

Social Wealth and Financing the Energy Transition

Sina Sinai

Senior Research Associate

Related Tools

Tooling

Mineral Market Dashboard

The dashboard benchmarks varying projections for transition-critical mineral market growth.

Tooling

Mining Fiscal Regime Simulator

Enables more informed and critical comparison of the varying tax and royalty pathways for producer country value capture from the mining sector.

Related Publication Series

Series

The energy transition represents a significant opportunity for countries producing the materials critical to electrification. In this series, we look at eight such materials: aluminum, cobalt, copper, natural graphite, iron, lithium, manganese, and nickel. As demand for so-called “critical minerals” grows, producer countries must develop robust strategies for effective value capture to transform a temporary windfall into an opportunity to grow shared wealth and climb the value chain. Doing so demands both institutional capacity and political will.

Series

How do mineral-producing countries pursue industrial policy? The ways in which countries perceive, navigate, and capitalize on their mineral sectors have key implications for global supply chains, and strategic governance of critical minerals is essential to achieving equitable and secure decarbonization in a fragmenting global order. This series will explore strategic divergences between mineral-rich countries that are implementing mineral-based industrial policies, using Australia and Indonesia as case studies. Questions investigated will include: What types of policies are most common or preferred, and why? Which policies appear most effective in achieving national goals? How does each country’s domestic context shape its broader mineral governance framework? And how do trade and investment flows influence Australia and Indonesia positioning themselves in the global sphere?

Series

Decarbonization and development are driving up demand for critical minerals; the countries that produce these minerals have new opportunities to capture value both from mining and from more lucrative downstream activities. Yet mineral price volatility and overcapacity across the supply chain have put these ambitions to the test. The mix and scale of transition demand now and in the future, and the expectations behind them, will shape realized growth in market volumes, while prices, which are volatile and uncertain, will determine fiscal windfalls as well as the viability of projects both upstream and downstream. This series examines mineral market dynamics to ground more robust policy objectives aimed at lasting development outcomes.