Morocco calls for global mobilization to address critical mineral supply risks

The global community must launch an unprecedented mobilization to address structural risks in the supply of minerals essential for the energy and digital transitions, Morocco’s energy transition and sustainable development minister said on Tuesday.

“Current investments are not yet matching our future needs. We all know that we need to extract more minerals in the next 30 years than the world has extracted since the dawn of humanity,” Leila Benali said, addressing the OECD Critical Minerals Forum in Istanbul.

The forum, organized as part of the OECD’s Emerging Markets Forum Series, was held at the OECD Istanbul Centre to discuss the resilience of global value chains and mineral security.

Minister Benali noted that there are 42 critical minerals that form the backbone of the energy and digital transitions.

She pointed out that while demand is rising rapidly due to surging technology use, the production, processing, and refining of these materials remain dangerously concentrated in a few regions, posing a risk.

“We need a sustained global mobilization to address this situation,” Benali said.

The Moroccan minister emphasized the scale of the challenge by providing specific industrial targets. She stated that within the next six years, the world must increase copper extraction by 25%, cobalt by 100%, and lithium by more than 300%.

Highlighting the interconnectedness of modern infrastructure, Benali added that every power grid and every battery requires copper, lithium, and rare earth elements.

She also stressed that “green steel” production has become a critical threshold for renewable energy investments, such as wind turbines.

– Diversifying and expanding supply chains critically important

OECD Secretary-General Mathias Cormann said the top three producing countries control 89% of global cobalt production, 74% of lithium, 74% of nickel, 88% of graphite and nearly 90% of rare earth elements, while China alone refines 70% of capacity across 19 of the world’s 20 critical minerals.

“No supply chain risk analysis can responsibly ignore those facts. A single disruption, whether a pandemic, natural disaster or geopolitical decision, could trigger broad economic harm,” Cormann added.

He stressed that diversifying and expanding supply chains is critically important and urgent. “Getting this right will help build economic resilience, it will help accelerate digital innovation and it will underpin energy security all at once.”

Cormann warned that if every country sought to build its own subsidized processing capacity without coordination, it would drive up costs, divert resources from productive uses and create new vulnerabilities instead of removing existing ones.

He also said that countries could achieve resilience goals faster and at lower cost by relying on open rules, trade and cooperation rather than entering a subsidy spiral.

“We need open markets, new investment flows and genuine partnerships between producer and consumer countries.” and “the OECD stands ready to help deliver all three,” he added.

• global mobilization
• Morocco's energy transition and sustainable development minister
• OECD Critical Minerals Forum in Istanbul.