As the world electrifies, a new set of materials is taking center stage. Copper, nickel, lithium, cobalt, and rare earth elements form the backbone of the energy transition. They enable everything from electric vehicles and solar panels to transmission lines and grid-scale storage.
But the systems responsible for supplying these minerals remain stuck in the past. Mining continues to rely on energy-intensive methods developed decades ago. Refining is concentrated in a handful of countries, exposing supply chains to geopolitical risk. Ore grades are falling, and permitting timelines routinely exceed a decade, far beyond what climate targets or markets can tolerate.
Mining is the single greatest limiter to the energy transition. Without meaningful innovation in how we extract, process, and recover the minerals, decarbonization will stall long before it scales.
The mining sector is worth over $2.1 trillion globally, but it is structurally misaligned with the pace of the energy transition. Projects routinely take decades, and fewer than one in a thousand discoveries becomes a producing mine. Meanwhile, declining ore quality, rising input costs, and a fragmented ownership structure make system-wide modernization difficult. The top ten companies control just 14.5% of the market.
At the same time, mineral demand is accelerating. Copper use is expected to triple by 2040. Lithium demand could grow sixfold. And the demand for other metals such as aluminium, nickel, and rare earths is rising just as rapidly.
In spite of this, refining capacity is still brittle. China controls more than 70% of global rare earth processing, 60% of lithium, and over 80% of graphite anode production. The U.S, by contrast, is more than 50% import-reliant for most key transition minerals, and nearly 100% for some.
Government intervention like the Inflation Reduction Act, Europe’s Critical Raw Materials Act, and Trump’s Energy Executive Order aim to rebuild domestic capacity, respectively, but progress is slow. In the absence of sweeping reform, investors, industrialists and entrepreneurs have focused largely on one thing: finding new supply.
Most successful mining startups today are exploration-focused. From geophysical mapping to AI-assisted mineral targeting, these technologies have raised hundreds of millions of dollars to fast track discovery. But, discovery is slow, risky, and costly. Site permitting, financing, and development can take decades. And projects that pencil at $12,000 per ton of nickel may collapse if commodity market prices fall to $11,000. Price volatility, not scarcity, is typically the primary issue in mining.
In a constrained system, optimization is often the fastest path to progress. In mining, small efficiency gains in energy use or recovery can shift the economics of marginal deposits. In effect, one can create new supply without breaking ground on a new mine.
So where, exactly, should founders and investors be looking? Conversations with mining operators, engineers, and researchers point to a simple pattern: the biggest opportunities map to the balance sheet or in the absence of perfect information, the industry’s cost and energy structure.
Crushing and grinding, known collectively as communition, are the most energy-intensive processes in mining, consuming ~22% of site energy and nearly a fifth of operating costs. And they’re universal: every ore body, regardless of its mineral content, must be broken down before it can be processed.
Despite its ubiquity, communication has hardly changed over the past century. Most mines still rely on ball mills, large, rotating drums filled with steel spheres used to pulverize ore by brute force. The method is simple, but the physics are punishing: halving particle size requires squaring energy use. And most rocks, being stronger in compression than tension, making them inherently resistant.
Despite accounting for ~4% global energy use, communition remains overlooked. Thankfully, however, that is starting to change. Labs and startups are experimenting with ore weakening treatments, real-time optimization, and selective fragmentation. The potential payoff here is enormous, small reductions here can unlock millions of tons of mineral resources, making communition one of the clearest leverage points in the supply chain.
Haulage and loading are the second largest energy and cost driver. Diesel fleets dominate most mine operations, driving up emissions and requiring costly particulate ventilation underground. Here, electrification is emerging as a viable alternative. Battery-electric vehicles (BEVs) cut fuel use, eliminate diesel particulates, and reduce ventilation loads. As mines deepen and regulatory pressure mounts, electrified fleets and intelligent haulage will become increasingly important.
Conventional mining extracts and processes ore and waste rock the same. Precision mining changes that equation. Using advanced subsurface imaging, selective equipment, and real-time analysis, operators can focus only on what’s valuable, improving recovery, reducing waste, and minimizing environmental disruption. In water-scarce or politically sensitive regions, these capabilities allow for increased operational efficiency and regulatory flexibility.
The richest ore grades found today aren’t in the ground, they’re sitting in tailings ponds, electronics, and industrial waste streams. Recovering metals from these sources avoids the permitting, infrastructure, and geopolitical risks of traditional mining. Beyond this, urban mining also expands the customer base. Instead of selling to conservative mining majors, startups operating in this space can sell to recyclers, manufacturers, or cities, all of which are entities with clearer sustainability mandates and faster procurement cycles. It won’t replace traditional mining, but often offers a faster, more tractable path to market for early-stage technologies.
Even the most promising mining technologies face a structural bottleneck: value capture. Mining is vertically disjointed. Junior mining companies handle exploration. Majors lead production. Midstream vendors (those developing sensors, equipment or software) often sit outside procurement budgets and struggle to command pricing power.
There are two emerging playbooks to combat this. The first: own and operate the resource. Companies like Lilac Solutions and Summit Nanotech have taken this route, pairing their technologies with direct site control. The second: partner early and position as an enabler. This route sees startups embed themselves with junior mining companies at the exploration stage in exchange for royalties or equity.
Tailings re-processing offers a third, more complex option where the path to value capture is narrow. Tailings are often treated as environmental liabilities, or conversely, as booked reserves already reflected on the balance sheet, making negotiations around extraction rights difficult.
Startups and investors hoping to achieve venture-scale returns in this sector will need more than technical differentiation. The best ideas will pair technical insight with business model fluency, designing for value capture through long-term offtake agreements, JV structures, or creative business models that link performance and recovery.
As supply gaps widen and operational continuity becomes a strategic imperative, we may see greater openness to new technologies, but given the fragmented nature of the industry that shift will likely be slow and uneven.
Not all critical minerals are created equal. Their importance varies not just by volume but by vulnerability: how difficult are they to substitute, how emissions intensive are they to produce, and how exposed are they to geopolitical friction.
To understand where innovation matters most, we mapped a set of key transition metals across two axes: U.S. import reliance and projected cumulative CO₂ emissions through 2040, drawing on data from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), International Energy Agency (IEA), and peer-reviewed lifecycle assessments.
The results reveal two distinct clusters of constraint:
It also surfaces an investable gap: Technologies that can reduce emissions or enhance supply resilience across this matrix are not just environmentally necessary, they’re geopolitically vital.
The transition to a low-carbon economy will require unprecedented quantities of metals and minerals. Meeting that demand while reducing environmental harm may be one of the greatest innovation challenges of our time.
For mining, sustainability is no longer a compliance box. It’s an operational mandate. And for investors and entrepreneurs, the intersection of mining, climate, and infrastructure is fertile ground, where material impact and commercial opportunity are tightly linked.
The path forward won’t rely on exploration alone. It means rethinking the physical systems that define extraction and recovery: how we grind, haul, refine, and reuse. It means investing in modular processing, digitized permitting, waste valorization, and electrified operations. It means treating mining not as a relic, but as the industrial base of the energy transition.
