Abstract
Reducing greenhouse gas emissions and producing and using low-carbon energy requires building a new infrastructure for electricity generation, transmission and storage, as well as new equipment. This calls for large quantities of "basic" raw materials and rare metals, which require equally large quantities of energy to produce. The issues associated with the production of raw materials and energy are therefore inseparable, and need to be tackled together. The raw materials sector is extremely dynamic: production of base metals has doubled in 15 years, with growth rates of up to 10%/year for certain "technological" metals. Against this backdrop, the challenges and stakes of the energy transition are many, and they must not be focused solely on achieving a technico-economic optimum. Energy scenarios and the technologies developed to achieve them must not be decoupled from the constraints linked to access to the resource, and they must integrate the geopolitical, social and, of course, environmental dimensions of this access, at the risk of not being feasible on a global scale.
