Who Owns the Energy Transition?

The energy transition is usually told from its end: the electric car in the garage, the solar roof in the suburbs, the wind turbine on the horizon. But it also has a beginning, and that beginning rarely lies where its fruits are harvested. It lies in the salt flats of the Andes, in the copper-cobalt belts of Central Africa, in the nickel mines of Sulawesi. Where the materials of the future are pulled from the ground is where it will be decided whether the transition is a just one.

This article asks a simple question: who owns the energy transition? Who captures the value, who carries the costs, and who has the power to set the rules? The argument: decarbonisation risks repeating an old pattern in which the Global South supplies raw materials and land, while industry, know-how and profits end up elsewhere. Unlike in the fossil age, however, this pattern is not yet set in stone. Resource-rich states have new levers, and they are beginning to pull them.

Chapter 1

The new map of raw materials

When people talk about critical minerals, they think of mines first. The real bottleneck, though, sits one step further down the chain, in refining. According to the International Energy Agency, China is the leading refiner for 19 of the 20 strategic minerals it analyses, with an average market share of around 70 per cent. For key energy minerals, the three largest refining countries held 86 per cent of the market on average in 2024, up from around 82 per cent in 2020; for mining, the top three held 77 per cent (IEA 2025). The 2026 edition shows the trend continuing: the average share of the single largest refining country rose from 70 per cent in 2023 to 72 per cent in 2025 (IEA 2026).

What stands out is the direction of travel. Despite billion-dollar programmes in the West, concentration in processing has recently grown rather than shrunk. Only for rare earths is a shift visible: new capacity in the United States and Malaysia pushed the dominant supplier's share from above 90 per cent (2023) to 85 per cent (2025), and the IEA considers around 70 per cent possible by 2035 if planned projects go ahead (IEA 2026).

For the question of inequality, this distinction is central. Raw materials are extracted wherever geology happened to leave them. Value, by contrast, is created wherever capital, technology and industrial policy steer it. The geographers Gavin Bridge and Erika Faigen therefore argue that batteries should not be thought of as a linear supply chain but as a global production network in which firms, states and research institutions compete for position (Bridge & Faigen 2022). In that network, the mine is the weakest position: capital-intensive, prone to conflict, and holding the smallest share of the final price.

Chapter 2

Green extractivism

The social and environmental costs of extraction are unevenly distributed, and systematically so. A study by Lèbre et al. (2020) in Nature Communications, which assesses mining projects for 20 metals against environmental, social and governance risks, finds that 70 per cent of cobalt resources and 84 per cent of platinum resources lie in high-risk contexts. Owen et al. (2023) geolocated 5,097 energy transition mineral projects and overlaid them with land-tenure data: more than half of the resource base lies on or near the lands of Indigenous and peasant peoples, groups whose right to free, prior and informed consent is enshrined in United Nations declarations.

Taking the “Lithium Triangle” of Chile, Argentina and Bolivia as their case, Voskoboynik and Andreucci (2022) describe how state and corporate actors legitimise extraction through discourse: old promises of prosperity and modernisation are fused with new images of high technology, green jobs and climate-friendly mining. They call this green extractivism, a form of intensive resource exploitation framed not only as compatible with climate action but as a precondition for it. Fieldwork in the Puna de Atacama shows that brine evaporation is entangled with conflicts over water and Indigenous rights, and that communities are far from united in how they judge the lithium boom (Blair et al. 2023).

In the DR Congo, which supplied about three quarters of the world's mined cobalt in 2025 (USGS 2026), the picture is harsher still. Drawing on interviews and visits to dozens of mining sites, Benjamin Sovacool documented real benefits such as income and local development, but also severe harms: accidents, pollution, damage to health and violent conflict (Sovacool 2019). With colleagues, he describes this spatial displacement of burdens as a “decarbonisation divide”: the clean technologies of the North rest on degraded landscapes of extraction and waste in the South (Sovacool et al. 2020). Calvão et al. (2021) further show how companies outsource responsibility by drawing in artisanal miners who work without fixed wages.

Chapter 3

The sun as a resource

Inequality is not only about metals but also about land and energy itself. According to the IEA, Africa holds 60 per cent of the world's best solar resources but only around 1 per cent of installed solar PV capacity (IEA 2022a). The reason is not a lack of sunshine but expensive capital: the IEA puts the cost of financing renewables in Africa at two to three times that of advanced economies (IEA 2024).

Where large solar projects are built, the distributional question returns in a new form. Morocco's Noor complex near Ouarzazate is held up as a flagship. The anthropologist Karen Rignall studied its origins and showed that the energy transition there is as much a political project as a geographic one: it reshapes land use and power relations without automatically replacing the centralised forms of state control that sustained the fossil regime (Rignall 2016). Haddad (2022) describes how local communities were barely involved in planning and implementation and had to fight for a share of the benefits.

Then there is the industrial side: according to the IEA, China's share of every manufacturing stage of solar modules, from polysilicon to the finished panel, exceeded 80 per cent in 2022 (IEA 2022b). The sun may shine in the South, but the factories stand elsewhere.

Chapter 4

Unequal exchange, reissued

Why does this pattern keep repeating? The suspicion that trade in raw materials systematically favours the industrialised world is old. In 1950, Raúl Prebisch and Hans Singer argued, independently of each other, that the prices of primary commodities tend to fall over the long run relative to the prices of manufactured goods (Prebisch 1950; Singer 1950). Countries that export ore and import machines would have to export ever more to buy the same. The Prebisch–Singer hypothesis has been debated ever since, and commodity booms regularly seem to refute it. Yet it shaped a generation of development policy, from import substitution in Latin America to today's calls for local value addition.

Environmental scholars have extended the argument. The human ecologist Alf Hornborg proposed that unequal exchange is not only a matter of prices but of matter and energy: industrial centres import more resources, land and labour than they export, and accumulate the capacity to keep doing so (Hornborg 1998). This ecologically unequal exchange stays invisible as long as trade is measured in money alone.

Hickel et al. (2022) tried to make it visible. Using environmentally extended input-output data, they calculated how many resources and how much labour flow, in net terms, from the Global South to the North. For 1990 to 2015 they put this drain at 242 trillion US dollars (in constant 2010 prices), and at 10.8 trillion dollars in Northern prices for 2015 alone. The method is contested among economists because it rests on a particular way of valuing price differences. The underlying observation, that raw material exporters structurally retain less of the value created, is far less controversial.

The energy transition can sharpen this mechanism. Critical minerals are indispensable to the world economy, yet they account for only about 3 per cent of the price of an average electric vehicle, even though they make up around a quarter of battery cell costs (IEA 2026). At the same time, mineral prices are notoriously volatile. Cobalt fell to a nine-year low in early 2025, before Congo's export halt sent prices sharply up again (Reuters 2025). For economies that depend on a handful of commodities, such swings translate directly into budget crises.

Research on the resource curse has long described how dependence on minerals can weaken institutions, crowd out other sectors and concentrate rents in few hands (Auty 1993). The producing countries' dilemma is therefore twofold: they capture little of the value, and the little they capture is unstable. Breaking out of it requires more than higher prices. It requires a different position in the network.

Chapter 5

The North brings the mines home

In recent years, industrialised countries have responded with a strategy the political scientist Thea Riofrancos calls the “security–sustainability nexus”: governments that offshored mining for decades are bringing it back in the name of supply security, while justifying it with the higher environmental standards they claim at home (Riofrancos 2023). State and industry pull in the same direction, but the tensions within this nexus expose the contradictions of green capitalism.

In 2024 the EU wrote this logic into law. The Critical Raw Materials Act (Regulation (EU) 2024/1252) sets benchmarks for strategic raw materials by 2030 (European Union 2024):

For countries in the Global South, this cuts both ways. Diversification can mean new partnerships and investment. But the EU is pursuing its own resilience first. Whether partner countries gain refineries and manufacturing or keep exporting only ore is not settled by the regulation. It is a matter of negotiation.

Chapter 6

The counter-move: resources as leverage

The most interesting development of recent years is unfolding in the South itself. Resource-rich states are actively trying to improve their position in the network, with very different tools and results.

These cases show that resource nationalism is back. Whether it reduces inequality depends on who benefits from the extra revenue: local communities and workers, or mainly national elites and foreign partners.

Chapter 7

What a just transition would take

The energy transition is necessary if climate targets are to be met. That is exactly why the question of who owns it is not an academic one. The research points to at least four starting points.