Demand for critical minerals needed for technology and the energy transition could triple by 2030 and quadruple by 2040, the head of the United Nations political affairs told the U.N. Security Council on Thursday. Rosemary DiCarlo said the minerals now underpin technologies from the digital economy to the energy transition, and she warned that the growth in demand is pushing mineral supply and supply chains into the center of security concerns. She spoke at a Security Council event hosted in part by the United States, which holds the council presidency this month.
DiCarlo told the council that trade in raw and semi-processed minerals reached approximately $2.5 trillion in 2023. She said the projections were based on U.N. reports from 2025, and she characterized the mineral sector as increasingly central to the global economy. “This represents more than 10% of global trade,” DiCarlo said, before adding: “Demand could triple by 2030 and quadruple by 2040.”
At the meeting, U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who chaired the session, framed critical minerals as a national-security issue for Washington and its allies. Wright said it was in the security interest of the United States and its partners not to become overly dependent on any single country “for materials critical to our economies and national security.” He also linked the mineral work to efforts to prevent conflict and support cooperation among countries, saying it was “directly tied to preventing conflict and building a world where countries can cooperate and move forward together.”
Wright’s remarks were made against a backdrop of recent efforts by the Trump administration to secure critical minerals for high-tech industry, including electric vehicles and fighter jets. The AP reported that the Trump administration is making “bold moves” to shore up supplies of minerals needed for those applications, and it described China as having previously “had a stranglehold on rare earth minerals” and choked off their flow in response to Trump’s sweeping tariffs last year. While the two countries later reached a truce to pull back high import taxes and stepped-up rare earth restrictions, China’s limits remained tighter than before Trump took office.
In related remarks to the council, China’s U.N. Ambassador Fu Cong said that as the global energy transition accelerates and technology including artificial intelligence advances, demand for critical minerals and other resources continues to rise. Fu said that supply-and-demand imbalances were becoming more pronounced “as the world enters a new period of turbulence and transformation,” and he urged greater international cooperation to keep mineral supplies stable and support global economic growth.
Fu also urged countries to participate in China’s “green mining” initiative, describing it as a transformation of the mining sector introduced at the G20 summit in South Africa last November. The U.S. effort to diversify critical mineral supplies includes cooperation with Australia and Ukraine, the AP reported, and it said the administration is also stepping up cooperation with Venezuela and Congo. (The AP said earlier Thursday that the U.S. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum told the council Venezuela’s government would provide security assurances to mining companies that invest in mineral-rich areas long controlled by guerrilla members, gangs and other illegal groups.)
The AP reported that Congo’s President Felix Tshisekedi has offered U.S. companies access to eastern Congo’s mineral resources as part of a broader exchange involving support to fight rebels and build infrastructure. Congo’s U.N. Ambassador Zenon Mukongo, a current Security Council member, stressed the need for the private sector to play a role in mineral industry and supply chains while respecting national laws, saying that involvement should not contribute to financing armed groups or involve illegal exploitation of mineral riches.