Minerals import demands and clean energy transitions: A disaggregated analysis

Global energy transitions entangled with a paradigm shift from fossil fuel to renewable energy consumption elevates the demand for clean energy technologies, such as solar photovoltaics (PV), wind turbines, electric vehicles (EV) and power storage systems etc., which require significant volumes of minerals as raw materials. We measure the import-demand function of minerals by incorporating the role of renewable energy production capacity for selected OECD countries. We apply the cross-sectional autoregressive distributed lag (CS-ARDL) approach to analyse the panel time-series data due to common correlation, country heterogeneity, non-stationarity and potential endogeneity over the period 1990–2020. Our findings confirm that the overall renewable energy production, including installed solar and wind capacities, fosters the import demands for both the aggregate and disaggregate minerals (copper and nickel) in the long run. We also observe that the copper price elasticity of demand holds the Marshallian demand hypothesis, while the nickel price violates it in the long run. Besides, we find a heterogeneous effect of the income factor on the mineral import demand. Therefore, our findings recommend optimizing mineral resources to reinforce the global agenda of energy transitions toward a decarbonized or a net-zero emissions trajectory by the 21st century.