The New Resource Curse

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Saleem Ali

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May 8, 2026, 5:05:32 PMMay 8
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Greetings Ecominerals 

See attached new provocative paper in Foreign Affairs 

The New Resource Curse _ Foreign Affairs.pdf

Indra Øverland

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May 9, 2026, 7:20:36 AMMay 9
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Dear Saleem 

Thank you for sharing this important article. The authors have some valid points: China has a very strong grip on critical materials and clean energy tech supply chains; other countries need to work out how to deal with this. However, I would also think this is well known and what would be more interesting is concrete suggestions for how to deal with this and rebalance the world. 

Meanwhile, a central tenet of the article is sensationalist and misleading: “the kinds of economic and geopolitical volatility that defined the oil age may well look minor compared with the turbulence the critical minerals era is poised to unleash.” 

This ignores the fact that clean energy technologies are highly diverse and constantly changing, with innovative research ongoing in many different directions. Just within one battery chemistry like LFP or SIB, there can be a multitude of research directions and initiatives. It is hard to predict which of these research efforts will be successful, but it is fair to assume that with so many possibilities in play some of them will be. Empirically, it is easy to observe that there is constant incremental progress and occasionally there may be larger leaps. And one of the main purposes of the research and progress is often precisely to reduce dependency on expensive or constrained materials. The authors list “cobalt, lithium, nickel, rare earths, and a dozen others essential to the energy transition”. Perhaps they are unaware that there are technological shifts on the  horizon that could potentially weaken demand for some of these minerals.

Technological changes occur not only in the technologies that consume on critical materials, but also in the technologies for finding, extracting and processing them. In some cases, there has not even been much effort to look for a mineral because there wasn’t much demand for it. If demand quintuples, that will obviously change. 

The authors also appear to commit the classical error of getting stocks and flows mixed up. Fossil fuels come as flows. That is to say, consumers are dependent on a constant flow of fuel - for example, tankers passing through the Strait of Hormuz. Every. Single. Day. With renewable energy, the fuel is free and largely sourced domestically. Once one has equipment in place, one is not dependent on additional critical materials to capture that energy, only if one wants to *expand* one’s capacity for capturing that energy. Critical materials and the equipment made of them are thus not equivalent to oil and gas, but to oil and gas platforms, pipelines and tankers.

Furthermore, high percentages of critical minerals can be recycled. This means that the more one extracts, processes and uses of those minerals, the more one has of them. That is diametrically opposite to fossil fuels, which are continuously and completely destroyed through use. To make matters worse for the authors / better for the world, it turns out that some clean energy technologies have much longer useful lifespans than expected, e.g. solar panels.

In sum, this piece comes over as a severe case of taking old ideas, patterns and concerns from the fossil fuel era and hurriedly transposing them onto a new system which is in fact quite different. This has the advantage of requiring little effort of the analyst and correspondingly little effort on the part of the reader. The analyst can recycle old accounts in which they are well versed; for the readers these accounts are familiar and thus perhaps easier to take in - like fairy tales.

This is not to deny that an energy system based on renewable energy involves significant challenges, they just aren’t as similar to those of the fossil fuel system as many people find it convenient to think. As renewable energy “fuel” is free but requires high capex and benefits from and is driven by economies of scale in manufacturing, these may be more fruitful directions to look in for trouble (access to capital for developing countries; ensuring local content when economies of scale dominate). China’s massive strength in the new energy paradigm does not come mainly from its stranglehold on critical materials but from scale and from the fact that it has been willing to bet big time on these technologies while others have dragged their feet, or worse, shot them through. China’s strong position on critical materials may be a consequence of the bet it has made on clean energy, rather than a cause of some new geopolitical superpower.

There is a particular irony in these faux pas as the piece is titled “The New Resource Curse” but not only fails to identify but may even reinforce one of the main risks facing countries in connection with the shift from fossil fuels to critical materials dependency: namely that countries become overly reliant on exporting minerals in which they are resource rich, only to fall flat on their faces when technologies and demand shift. 

In sum, this International Affairs piece is a bad case of promoting Myth # 1 of the four myths of the geopolitics of renewable energy https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214629618308636 

The modus operandi of International Affairs enables it to publish some catchy pieces. Unfortunately, the lack of proper peer review, use of data and attention to existing research increases the risk of publishing such a piece.

Indra

__________________________________________________________
Indra Overland
Research Professor and Head of Center for Energy Research, Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI)
Associate Researcher, Oxford Institute for Energy Studies
 
Recent publications


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All best 

Saleem 
--------------------------------
Chair, Department of Geography & Spatial Sciences
Blue and Gold Distinguished Professor of Energy and the Environment
University of Delaware, 125 Academy Street, Newark DE 19716, USA



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Jay Singh

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May 12, 2026, 9:05:39 AM (12 days ago) May 12
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Dear Indra - I sincerely appreciated your counter to the article. The article does speak to the current policy establishment but overlooks the aspects and nuances that you laid out, which in my mind are critical especially for any company or government looking to invest. As a practioner for the last over two decades, I am so glad that you brought this out. Thank you!

Jay Singh, PhD


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