A study on the impact of technological innovation on the sustainability of critical mineral supply from a multidimensional perspective: a case study of cobalt

Technical innovation is a key factor influencing the supply of critical mineral. Past scholars have often overlooked the time lag effect of technological innovation and the heterogeneity and correlation of different technologies. Focusing on the critical mineral cobalt, this study combines social network analysis and the ARIMAX method to investigate the evolutionary characteristics of the cobalt industry's technological innovation network and analyze the impact of technological innovation and other factors on the supply of critical minerals. The research finds that the scale of the technological innovation network continues to expand, and the cohesion and stability of the network are continuously enhanced. Technological innovation has a one-year and significantly positive time lag effect on mineral supply. The economic and price impacts on supply are significantly positively correlated in the short term, and the impact of mineral supply on itself has a two-year time lag effect with reserves. Further research indicates that different types of technological innovation have significant heterogeneity in their impact on mineral supply. In functional technological innovation, efficiency enhancement has the greatest impact, followed by cost reduction, with safety improvement having the smallest impact. In process technological innovation, the impact of "extraction" type is the greatest, followed by "processing" type, with "smelting" type having the smallest impact. In terms of time lag effect, technological innovations in different functions and process stages have time lag effects of 1–3 years.