Good News & Bad News, page-652

Not a bad read from the IEA, forecasting clean energy critical materials demand out to 2040. Below is a link to the executive summary, which states that Lithium has the highest demand growth of all the key materials, with 40 x demand in climate-driven scenarios. Unfortunately, it appears they have used 2019 data for their current lithium supply/demand balances. Also unfortunate, was a recommendation that countries without supply should stockpile the materials, I'll leave it to them to reconsider that recommendation in their next report. Though, all in all, they've done a good job, highlighting the wall of demand that is coming. My 2 cents, tight market conditions remain long term, all projects will be needed, thus prices will need to rise from today and remain high to encourage less economic projects online. Very good place to be for existing producers, particularly those producers with meaningful expansion opportunities.

https://www.iea.org/reports/the-role-of-critical-minerals-in-clean-energy-transitions/executive-summary

On a related supply/demand balance matter, EU mining hopefuls are already running into severe opposition from an environmental perspective. The pro mining camp say that mining is no longer dirty, and that they need to educate the peeps as such. My read, no mining permits coming anytime soon, thus only questions wrt EU upstream participation.

https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/no-longer-dirty-eu-leaders-want-challenge-perceptions-lithium-mining-2021-05-05/