Power at the Pinch Point

While solar and wind power have become cheaper than coal power, we’re destined to fail at achieving a climate safe future. Our expedited transition to a low-carbon or net-zero emission economy shows promise with new technologies to use renewable energy and green hydrogen. Developed countries are beginning to utilize electrification and green hydrogen to replace fossil fuels across all sectors, including gas utilities, transportation, and many industries. We are largely overlooking, however, a crucial supply gap: critical metals.

The metals that renewable energy electrification rely on are under supply stress and forecast to reach limits by 2030. Direct electrification is suitable for light duty transport, much of buildings’ energy use, and some light industry. The hard reality is that electrification alone cannot achieve a smooth energy transition. Critical metals are those that are essential for energy technologies, namely copper, lithium, cobalt, nickel, and the platinum group metals (PGMs). Sufficient infrastructure to move electricity to all sites of energy consumption is unattainable; in many cases direct use of electricity is impractical.

Under the International Energy Agency’s scenario for net-zero carbon emissions, by 2040 the demand for copper escalates by 60 percent; cobalt and nickel demand are projected to more than double, while lithium leaps up ten times. The data show that the rise of battery electric vehicles and expansion of electric infrastructure drive the higher need for these critical metals.

To keep pace with unprecedented demand for particular critical metals, scaling up supplies rapidly enough faces severe challenges. It’s no secret now that significant market deficits are likely for lithium, nickel, cobalt, and copper. Near the end of the decade, these shortages are anticipated to strain demand; by 2035 they are forecast to reach supply gaps exceeding 20 percent. While recycling of these critical metals is also expected to grow, the inevitable supply deficits will persist. By 2033, recycled lithium, cobalt, and nickel are merely projected to supply five to 15 percent of battery demand.

That places reliance on mined metals for decades.

Even historic investment efforts to propel primary supply of these metals appear improbable since mining exhibits cyclical growth and requires longer lead times to scale up than the demand curves show.

Meeting the supply gaps poses serious impacts: environmental and social. Does personal mobility justify harmful sea-floor mining? As the world’s largest nickel producer, Indonesia largely relies on coal power, emitting carbon two to six times more than nickel produced from sulphide deposits. The atrocious consequences for communities and their surroundings from Indonesian nickel mining are mounting. Forecasts for BEV use are likely unattainable. The gap in supplies of critical metals and singular dependence on BEVs reveal a risky delay or unhinged path to a climate safe future.

Improving efficiency of critical metals

If efficient use of critical metals cannot enable electrification alone, complementary technologies that use critical metals less intensely and utilize different ones must be anticipated and deployed. Increasing the efficiency of the platinum group metals, such as platinum, iridium, and ruthenium, with more established supply sources and recycling systems than the others becomes crucial to any successful strategy. These critical metals largely serve technologies that can abate emissions in sectors that are the most difficult to decarbonize. The sectors, energy-intensive transportation, large industries (including petroleum refining and steel, cement, and fertilizer production), and chemicals, combine to capture a hefty share of energy consumption.

Since decarbonizing these ‘hard-to-abate’ sectors through electrification is impractical, if not impossible, we will rely on renewable hydrogen and sustainable fuels that either use hydrogen or advanced biofuels.

Alongside electrification, if we deploy green hydrogen-based fuels, fuel cell electric vehicles, hydrogen combustion engines, and bio-based fuels and chemicals, we can largely solve the problems of intermittent supply and transportation of renewable power. At the same time, we will optimize the costs of needed infrastructure.

The underlying question is this: how can the intensity of critical metals use in the energy transformation be reduced sufficiently to achieve the goals of the Paris climate agreement and prevent runaway climate disaster? Although energy efficiency and emission reduction are rightly motivating adoption of batteries

and direct electrification, unless we also plan for critical metals efficiency we will fail. If we optimize both of these strategies together we can solve this question and deliver a successful and smooth energy transition.

Since extraction of critical metals is finite and damages the environment, they should be used ultra-efficiently as we already experience supply stress due to electrification. The supply chain disruptions of the COVID pandemic painfully demonstrated that economic resilience is also driving domestic security of critical raw materials, those that are at risk of short supply or supply disruption. Given that the US relies on non-domestic supplies of lithium, copper, cobalt, and nickel for BEVs and electrification, what is the zero emissions vehicle with the highest metal efficiency? It’s the fuel cell EV (FCEV), despite the fact that it contains a small battery pack. The fuel cell stack relies on platinum group metals as the most robust catalysts; recent designs employ minimal platinum to catalyze the electrochemical reactions in the fuel cell. Development of catalyst-embedded nanofiber membranes promises landmark reductions of platinum loading.

What are the differences in critical metals efficiency in medium and heavy-duty commercial vehicles? According to an assessment by S&P Global of copper content in vehicles with different powertrains, FCEVs are much more copper efficient than BEVs – particularly for the largest vehicles. If we assume that most of the trucks will need to be electrified, hundreds of kilograms of copper in each battery truck would be required. As we move to ‘energy-by-wire’, large amounts of copper will be needed in new cables (see figure below).

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Power at the Pinch Point: Pivot

By Kris Nelson • October 15, 2025

In a previous post , the issues of inadequate supplies of critical metals were addressed. Here we continue to learn about the use of critical metals in energy use and conclude with the benefits of nanofiber technology to advance efficiency of critical metal use. Energy distribution by metals efficiency If complimentary technologies underpin our strategies toward a sustainable energy future, how can we rapidly advance critical metals efficiency in the energy system? By moving some of our energy ‘by pipe’, in the form renewable hydrogen, hydrogen-based derivatives such as ammonia and methanol, and advanced biofuels, it will cut copper demand to a level that is more likely to be satisfied. Rather than causing massive investments in most of the fossil fuel infrastructure to become obsolete, repurposing parts of the pipeline infrastructure, as is already occurring in Europe and Asia, for sustainable fuels would help propel a feasible transition. Fortunately, this approach would minimize the environmental impact of the net-zero infrastructure needed. While over reliance on direct electrification risks not achieving sufficient efficiency of critical metals, implementing a complementary path entails an energy conversion step. Any such conversion causes some energy loss. Producing green hydrogen from renewable electricity, for example, typically results in a 20 percent loss, so energy efficiency is at best 80 percent; producing electricity in a hydrogen fuel cell would reduce this level. Another factor associated with conversion is the incongruity between energy demand and renewable power supply; it’s largely variable, intermittent, and the supply cannot adjust to demand cycles (geothermal and wave energy are less variable). Clearly, expanded energy storage capacity will be essential to meet seasonal and other time discrepancies and utilize renewable power that would otherwise be lost when it isn’t needed immediately. Unfortunately, the escalating shortages of critical metals eliminates all but a small fraction of the required storage for grid batteries to supply. Use of renewable energy as hydrogen and its derivatives defaults as a practical and metals-efficient method of storing large quantities of energy over long periods. Renewable hydrogen-based fuels also enable moving energy over long distances, including between continents. Green hydrogen from metals efficiency In order to attain the anticipated demand for green hydrogen, largely tapping renewable power directly instead of using grid-tied power, the forecast for the types of electrolyzer technology to be deployed includes about half of the market for the design that is most responsive to intermittent supply: proton exchange membrane or PEM electrolyzers. As the US tax credits become crucial to green hydrogen production, electrolyzers will need to connect directly to renewable power sources. The best available technology to do so is PEM; its efficiency exceeds alkaline electrolyzers, the dominant green hydrogen technology. Since iridium catalyzes the electrolysis reaction in the PEM electrolyzer effectively, it has become the common critical metal among manufacturers and suppliers. While manufacturers and researchers have managed to reduce iridium loading in recent years, the need is to slash it by over 95 percent. International utilization targets for iridium in electrolyzers have emerged to prevent the PEM electrolysis sector from becoming constrained by iridium supply. When iridium demand is modeled for the PEM sector, it shows that iridium utilization must increase by some five-fold by 2050 to avoid iridium supply from stalling PEM electrolyzer capacity. In addition, if closed-loop iridium recycling were fully deployed by 2035, this would increase the installed capacity in 2050 by ∼2.7x compared to a scenario with no iridium recycling, according to one model . If both of these scenarios are implemented, global PEM electrolyzer capacity could reach 1.3 TW by 2050 using only 20 percent of annual global primary iridium supply, according to the model’s results based on two scenarios of power density improvement using the International Energy Agency’s conservative demand estimate. In order to improve iridium power density, iridium loadings of membrane electrode assemblies (MEAs) must decrease significantly. However, iridium dissolution and agglomeration in lower-loaded MEAs typically cause them to degrade more rapidly and display shorter useful periods. Clearly to achieve similar MEA lifespans, catalyst stability must be enhanced. The research literature indicates so far that relying on polymeric membranes cannot deliver sufficient low-loading stability and performance. They typically contain toxic PFAS chemicals that the EU has banned. The model article concludes, “As a main result, it is found that a terrawatt-scale PEMWE (PEM water electrolysis) industry can avoid being constrained by iridium supply if technological development of a similar level to that seen in PEM fuel cells and high iridium recycling rates are realised.” High surface area technology shows that catalytic loading can decrease by an order of magnitude. A notable example is one company’s experience with perfecting the process of embedding a palladium catalyst into nanofibers: tests show a surface area increase of 2,000 percent compared to polymeric membranes. With a breakthrough catalyst that contains about 50 percent less iridium than conventional catalysts, MemPro is showing that a nanofiber membrane will perform better and reduce iridium to less than 10 percent of today’s MEAs. Even without counting on high recycling rates of iridium-oxides, high-surface area iridium would satisfy 80 percent of hydrogen industry needs. While the prospect of achieving this level of efficiency will depend on effectively perfecting the combination of conductive materials in nanofibers, MemPro’s expertise in processing nanofibers with an embedded catalyst demonstrates the potential benefits for more sustainable production of green hydrogen. One benefit, capturing efficiency and lifecycle gains, would include lowering the cost of green hydrogen from $4-5/kg below $1/kg, eclipsing fossil fuels. As the US and other countries suffer from capacity constraints due to renewable power having to be directly tied to the electricity grid, green hydrogen and hydrogen-based derivatives such as green ammonia can serve as stored power. In shifting to green fuels, renewables capacity can be located where it is most efficient and has fewer land-use constraints. As renewables scale up from the very low levels of adoption we have today, such factors become more crucial. If we want to expedite more effective renewables infrastructure, use of green hydrogen and its derivatives will enable rapid deployment and justify the energy ‘loss’ incurred by conversion. The most demanding and costly elements of BEV charging infrastructure become unnecessary with the hydrogen infrastructure: in remote places or within high-density city cores, where adding electrical service for fast charging is especially challenging. The additional electrical infrastructure would cost more than the hydrogen infrastructure would to serve these needs; lower total infrastructure cost overall would benefit everyone. Since even the boldest net-zero scenarios do not maintain that electrification is a comprehensive solution, complementary technologies will be required to propel increasing deployment of renewable power, serve those sectors that electrification cannot, and, most importantly, raise the critical metals efficiency of the energy transformation. Those technologies – renewable hydrogen, hydrogen-based synthetic fuels, and advanced biofuels – are attaining breakthroughs in critical metals efficiency. Misperceptions around electrification and energy efficiency are becoming increasingly unsustainable as attempts are made to secure metals for ‘efficient’ electrification. The US has the capacity to leverage these solutions alongside direct electrification. We can intelligently optimize the future energy system as a whole, incorporating energy and critical metals efficiency. Most crucially, it enables all of us to achieve a viable energy transition and safe climate.

Epoch Times: Breaking the CCP's Hold on Rare Earths

By Nano Fixation • October 6, 2025

With Nano Fixation’s proprietary technology, we are making strides toward our goal of cutting the cost of using many critical metals by half. This article outlines the history and steps the US has taken to address the lack of domestic and non-Chinese sources for CMs in US industry and defense. While the US has enacted policies and incentives to expedite critical metal mining and refining to avoid reliance on Chinese supplies, the turn-around periods for delivering a growing list of critical metals is too long for meeting our immediate needs. Therefore, Nano Fixation's processing technology can effectively extend supplies while non-Chinese supplies are being developed. Read the full story here .