How China Uses Transition to Renewables to Exert Global Dominance

A global turn to renewables as an energy source is benefitting Beijing, which controls much of the mineral deposits required for such a transition.

Soil containing various rare earth elements for export at a port in Lianyungang, China, in a file photo. STR/AFP via Getty Images

News analysis

While wind and solar energy and electric vehicles (EVs) have been touted as the future, the vast amounts of minerals required for their production will come predominantly from China—alongside all the risks that dependence on a rival nation entails, analysts say.

An August study by energy analytics company Wood Mackenzie titled, “Securing Copper Supply: No China, No Energy Transition,” said that the goals of decarbonizing America’s energy sector and reducing dependence on China are “at odds” with each other. 

“The world cannot decarbonise without copper, a key component of electrification,” the report states. However, “China has continued to dominate investment in the supply chain over the past five years.”

Fundamentally, the transition to renewables represents a shift from energy-dense liquid and gas fuels to lower density mineral-based energy. 

“An energy system powered by clean energy technologies differs profoundly from one fueled by traditional hydrocarbon resources,” states a 2021 report titled, “The Role of Critical Minerals in Clean Energy Transitions,” by the International Energy Agency (IEA). “A typical electric car requires six times the mineral inputs of a conventional car, and an onshore wind plant requires nine times more mineral resources than a gas-fired power plant.”  

Meeting the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement would require quadrupling the production of mineral inputs by 2040. And reaching net zero by 2050, a goal shared by the Biden–Harris administration, would require six times more mineral inputs in 2040 than today, the report states. 

Lithium, nickel, cobalt, manganese, and graphite are critical components of batteries for EVs and storage for wind and solar power. Rare-earth elements are essential for magnets for wind turbines and EV motors. Electricity networks need a huge amount of copper and aluminium to build transmission networks connecting remote wind and solar facilities into the grid. 

However, the supply chains for these materials run through China.

“China on their own has double the market share of energy minerals that OPEC has in oil,” Mark Mills, executive director at the National Center for Energy Analytics, told The Epoch Times. 

OPEC’s share of global oil production is currently about 37 percent, according to Statista. By comparison, China and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where China owns much of the mining industry, together were responsible for 70 percent of global cobalt production and 60 percent of rare-earth elements production, the IEA states. And once materials for renewables are extracted from the earth, China’s dominance becomes even more pronounced. 

China refines about 35 percent of nickel worldwide, 50–70 percent of lithium and cobalt, and nearly 90 percent of rare-earth elements, the IEA reported.

Minerals a ‘Critical Component’ of China’s Economy

Renewable energy industries have become a critical component of China’s economy and its economic growth. 

According to a January report from Carbon Brief, a renewable energy research and advocacy firm, China’s total investment into renewable energy increased 40 percent in 2023 over the prior year, reaching $890 billion and “accounting for all of the investment growth across the Chinese economy in 2023.”

The “clean energy” sector, predominantly wind, solar, and EVs, contributed $1.6 trillion to China’s GDP and was reportedly the largest driver of China’s economic growth. Without this sector, the report states, China’s overall GDP growth rate would have been 2 percent lower.

“I can understand why China would pursue policies pushing green agendas in other countries around the world,” Dan Kish, senior vice president of policy at the Institute for Energy Research (IER), told The Epoch Times. “They don’t have the natural resource wealth that we do.”

By contrast to the United States, currently the world’s largest oil and natural gas producer, China has had to seek alternatives for its energy security. It has pursued a strategy of acquiring rights to mines, often in Africa, and then investing heavily in domestic smelting, refining, and manufacturing facilities to process and assemble the raw materials into solar panels, wind turbines, and battery components.

In so doing, China has turned its weakness—a lack of domestic oil and gas—into a strategic strength. And it appears to be prepared to leverage this newfound power. 

As of August, China has imposed export restrictions on antimony, graphite, gallium, germanium, and rare-earths magnet technology. Antimony is used in battery production, and China controls nearly half of its global supply. Rare-earths are used in magnets for wind turbines and EVs. Graphite is used in EV batteries, and 90 percent of graphite refining is done in China. 

“When a country enjoys a market dominance in critical materials of 50–90 percent,” Mills said, “when in history has such a country not exercised some political or financial power because of that market dominance?”

China’s grip on these markets is likely to tighten, despite nearly $1 trillion being allocated to renewable energy under the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act and the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Act.

A 2023 report by the Swiss bank UBS projected that Chinese-controlled lithium mines, including those in Africa, would increase output from 194,000 tons in 2022 to 705,000 tons by 2025, increasing China’s share from 24 percent to 32 percent of the world’s supply. In addition, China’s share of cobalt production is expected to increase from its current level of 44 percent to 50 percent of global output over the next two years, according to Darton Commodities, a U.K. cobalt trader.

Of the $55 billion invested in new copper mines since 2019, half of that sum was spent by China, according to Wood Mackenzie. And China is also investing heavily in downstream industries.

China’s investment into smelting and refining of raw materials for renewables amounted to 97 percent of the global total, Wood Mackenzie stated. Likewise, China’s investment in manufacturing, turning raw materials into components for wind turbines, solar panels, and EVs amounted to 80 percent of the global total.

The share of these minerals used by the energy sector was minimal until the mid-2010s, according to the IEA. But as the transition has gathered speed, energy production has become the fastest-growing source of demand for minerals. 

Over the next two decades, the IEA projects that the energy industry will account for more than 40 percent of the global demand for copper and rare-earth elements, 60–70 percent of the demand for nickel and cobalt, and almost 90 percent of the demand for lithium. EVs and battery storage are already the largest consumer of lithium, displacing consumer electronics, and are poised to overtake stainless steel as the largest user of nickel by 2040.

An analysis published in May by American Clean Power (ACP), an advocacy group for renewable energy, stated that America’s electric utilities added a combined 5,585 megawatts (MW) of new solar, wind, and battery capacity in the first quarter of 2024, an increase of 28 percent over the year-ago period.

“Utility-scale solar surpassed 100 gigawatts (GW) of installed capacity, and the first offshore wind project in federal waters began supplying 132 MW of clean, reliable power to the grid,” the ACP report stated.

US Subsidizes and Restricts Its Mining Industry

The IEA reported that for every dollar the U.S. invested in fossil fuels in 2023, it invested $1.40 into alternative “clean” energy. Still, critics challenge the notion that the United States will ever become self-sufficient with mineral-based energy the way it has become with fossil fuels, citing political barriers to mining and building new refineries.

“[The transition] is damn near an impossibility, especially if we want some control over the flow of minerals,” Kish said. “It’s not a geological impossibility; it’s a political impossibility.”

Due to environmental concerns, new mining operations are either restricted or banned on more than half of all federally owned public lands, according to the National Mining Association (NMA), an industry advocacy group. As much as 86 percent of the land area in certain Western states is federally owned, and these states account for 75 percent of our nation’s metals production, and includes key reserves of copper, zinc, rare earths, and other metals.

In June, the NMA criticized a decision by the Biden–Harris administration to ban mining and drilling on 28 million acres in Alaska, and block the proposed Ambler Road Project, a project to create access to mining sites that has previously received all of its required approvals.

“While this administration blocks access to American resources that are critically important to building the secure mineral supply chains we need, it is looking overseas and even investing in foreign projects to produce the very minerals we could be mining here at home under world-leading environmental and safety standards,” stated NMA president and CEO Rich Nolan in a press release. 

Analysts are not optimistic that new smelting and refining infrastructure will be built outside of China.

Citing the low cost and the scale of refining and smelting facilities in China, Wood Mackenzie argues that western firms will “struggle to compete due to lower utilisation rates and higher operating costs.

“The investment case for building subsidised capacity outside China in a market already teeming with capacity is lacking, with players desperate to avoid a race to the bottom,” the report states. “Meanwhile, it is unlikely that government incentives such as the IRA will prop up these industries indefinitely.”

These factors could work against administration efforts to support domestic mineral production. 

In 2022, the Department of Energy (DOE) announced a $140 million program to support rare-earth elements and critical minerals mining and refinery construction, to be funded under the Infrastructure Act. This project, if completed, would focus on recycling of existing materials, often in waste form.

And recycling could go a long way toward providing the critical supplies for renewables, advocates say. 

A Texas-based company called EDP Renewables argues that once a solar panel reaches the end of its 30-year life, 95 percent of its photovoltaic module can be recycled. In addition, they state, “80–94 percent of a wind turbine (by mass) is made up of readily recyclable materials, including steel, copper, aluminum, and iron.”

And while the United States is a currently a net exporter of scrap copper, a new smelting complex built in the state of Georgia will begin treating this scrap for domestic use, the Wood Mackenzie report states.

Transition to Renewables ‘Not Happening’

However, despite all the efforts to shift America’s energy and transportation to a mineral-based system, critics say there really is no “transition to renewables.”

“We are adding additional wind and solar to the U.S. and world grids, but we are also increasing the consumption of hydrocarbons at the same time,” Mills said. “The transition narrative is based on the idea that one is replacing the other.

“Just for the record, that’s not happening.”

Far from slowing down, global oil consumption exceeded 100 million barrels in 2023, setting a record, while demand for coal rose to record levels for the second straight year, according to the 2024 Statistical Review of World Energy, written jointly by the Energy Institute (EI), KPMG and Kearney.

And despite its heavy investments in renewable energy, China’s economy is hardly “green.”

China is currently leading the world in the construction of new coal plants, according to the Global Energy Monitor’s 2024 annual report on coal energy.  

Global coal power capacity grew 11 percent since 2015, and global coal use hit an all-time high in 2023, the report stated, “with China driving two-thirds of additions.” 

China currently accounts for almost 60 percent of worldwide consumption of coal in power generation.