Raw materials are essential for the global economy and future development depends on their continued supply. In general, their deposits in the Earth’s crust are also geographically clustered, making security of supply a potential risk. In many cases, the exhaustion of economically competitive minerals deposits in industrialized countries has made supplies increasingly dependent on the political stability of mineral-rich emerging economies. At the same time, increasing demand from these emerging markets, new technologies that require large amounts of rare minerals , low substitutability in applications and low rates of recycling have made economies more vulnerable to potential supply disruptions.
The purpose of this report is to perform for the first time an analysis of critical minerals for the OECD countries as a whole. In addition, this is done not only today, as previous reports have done, but also in 2030, in order to form an initial picture of how possible trends in economic development will affect which minerals are critical in the long-run future. Three measures of mineral supply risk are used: substitutability, recycling rates and the concentration of production in countries that are judged by international datasets to be relatively politically unstable. The analysis identifies around 12 to 20 minerals or minerals groups, which are critical in the OECD today.