Evaluation of European Critical Raw Material Assessments under Energy Transition Considerations: Applications and Prospects

This article evaluates the results of the European criticality assessments for raw materials of utmost importance to successfully manage the European energy transition towards achieving net-zero. Since 2011, the European Commission has published every three years a list in which raw materials of interest are critically assessed with respect to their economic importance and supply risk. These publicly available data are used and analysed by using methods of descriptive statistics to identify potential patterns and anomalies. Furthermore, a novel attempt is made to rank all raw materials of interest using the Euclidean distance as well as other metrics such as Manhattan, Chebychev or Minkowski distance. The results show that based on the Euclidean distance particularly tungsten and manganese are the two most critical raw materials. Since 2017, all raw materials show in average an increasing trend in economic importance and in Euclidean distance, but also a decreasing trend in supply risk. Moreover, the gradients of the Euclidean distance indicate a wider variation within the raw materials of interest. Concluding remarks include future applications of distance-based metrics particularly in the area of sustainable strategy development in portfolio analysis or life cycle assessments as well as for the introduction of a new distance-based classification scheme.