Energy transition metals: supply and demand dynamics in a geopoliticised market

The clean energy transition has transformed a set of formerly niche mineral commodities—lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper, manganese, graphite and the earth elements—into strategic resources whose availability increasingly conditions climate policy, industrial strategy and interstate relations. This integrative review synthesises the peer-reviewed literature, official statistics, legal texts and documented market events bearing on the supply and demand dynamics of these energy transition metals, with particular attention to the geopoliticisation of their markets; the evidence window is January 2021 to July 2026, and the last full search was performed on 8 August 2026. On the demand side, electric vehicles, battery storage and grid expansion have driven roughly 10% annual demand growth, and International Energy Agency scenarios project aggregate demand roughly doubling by 2040 under stated policies and nearly quadrupling under a net-zero pathway; chemistry shifts—above all the rise of lithium iron phosphate cathodes—nonetheless inject deep uncertainty into metal-specific trajectories. On the supply side, extraction and especially refining remain extraordinarily concentrated: China refines the majority of most strategic minerals, Indonesia mines two-thirds of the world’s nickel, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo accounts for about 74% of mined cobalt. The 2023–2025 price collapse curtailed Western supply investment precisely as governments sought diversification, while export controls, resource nationalism and state-backed price floors proliferated. Secondary supply offers a partial remedy, but recycled material currently meets only around 10% of key-mineral demand (secondary share of total supply, 2024 basis) and is constrained by feedstock timing and its own geographic concentration. The review’s contribution is a conceptual framework linking a structural trilemma—among secure diversified supply, rapid and affordable deployment, and environmental and social safeguards—to a policy–price feedback loop through which market volatility has become partly endogenous to policy—with a causal role for state action supported at high confidence only in episodes led by dominant suppliers or creating administered price tiers, and an associated or amplifying role elsewhere—and to an emerging, still partial, bifurcation of the market into price-segmented blocs; a structured analysis of eight intervention episodes supports gradable rather than categorical causal claims. The principal limitations are the rapid obsolescence of 2025–2026 market data and the absence of formal econometric identification. Research priorities and policy implications for producer and consumer countries—particularly developing and emerging economies—are outlined.