Unearthing Potential: Rethinking Mining For A Net Zero Future

There is no net zero future without mining. In fact, in the decades to come, mining operations will need to ramp up considerably to unearth the vast quantities of physical material required to make modern life possible — from the metals embedded in clean energy and electrified transport systems to the minerals that support modern agriculture and infrastructure. That expansion creates a fundamental challenge: today’s mining systems are energy-intensive and resource-heavy, and increasingly act as a bottleneck for the clean energy transition. But this challenge also creates an opportunity. Advances in mineral discovery, data-driven mine planning, adaptive processing, selective separation, and waste recovery could dramatically reduce mining’s footprint while improving resilience and supply security. If mining can be made more precise, more efficient, and more circular, it won’t just support the energy transition — it will unlock the speed and scale required to make net zero achievable.

Energy and atoms: almost every climate tech challenge boils down to one or both. 

Energy allows us to do things: move, build, cook, transport, and manufacture. Atoms are the materials we use to build the physical world: buildings, bridges, vehicles, batteries, solar panels, wind turbines, transmission lines, fertilizers. 

To stabilize the climate, we need to decarbonize how we generate and use energy — and how we source and use the atoms that make modern life possible. 

Mining for a net-zero world is about solving two big problems at once: getting the huge volume of new atoms we need to build a clean energy system, and doing so in a way that doesn’t cause more emissions. It’s a tall order in a multi-trillion-dollar global industry. 

We need more atoms to build a clean energy future. 

Atoms don’t just fall from the sky. If it’s not grown, it must be mined — and even what we grow depends on minerals, from phosphorus and potassium in fertilizers to trace elements that enable modern agriculture. That’s why humanity extracts 100 billion tons of material — atoms — from the Earth each year. And demand is only increasing as the global population grows, living standards increase, and clean energy infrastructure scales.

In the long run, a net-zero future will actually mean extracting less material overall. Each fossil fuel atom can only be used once, requiring constant mining and drilling to replenish, but metals and minerals that go into making solar panels and wind turbines may not need to be replaced for decades. But during the transition, demand for certain critical atoms will rise sharply: lithium, nickel, and cobalt for batteries; copper and aluminum for wiring and grids; and rare earth elements for wind turbines and electric vehicle motors.

Mining for these minerals is projected to grow manyfold in the decades to come. Mining is foundational to the energy transition, so we need to get better at doing it at larger scales than ever before. Additionally, demand for structural materials (like steel, cement, and aluminum) is projected to increase, amplifying the need to reduce the emissions intensity of our mining and materials system.

We use energy to mine atoms.

While mining is essential to a cleaner climate future, ironically, it’s also energy-intensive and often fossil-based. Diesel-powered trucks haul ore. Electricity-intensive crushing and grinding reduce rock to powder. High-temperature processes refine minerals into usable forms. If we expand mining using today’s methods and the same energy sources, we risk embedding a new wave of emissions, land disturbance, water use, and waste into the very technologies meant to solve the climate crisis.

Most emissions from mining come from two key sources: first, diesel-powered equipment is used in hauling, drilling, and excavation; and second, the energy-intensive processes of crushing, grinding and refining raw materials.

But emissions alone are not the full story. The deeper problem is inefficiency. Modern mining is remarkably imprecise. Vast quantities of rock are excavated, crushed, and chemically treated to recover a small fraction of the material we actually want. Valuable atoms are routinely lost to waste streams because we lack the tools to identify, separate, and process them efficiently. Processing plants struggle with variable ore quality. Tailings (leftover waste materials, including crushed rock, water, and processing chemicals) accumulate by the billions of tons. Enormous amounts of energy and water are spent moving, grinding, and treating material that never becomes a useful product. 

In short, today’s mining system is built for volume, not precision. To achieve a net-zero future, we need to mine more — and we need to mine better. That means rethinking how we discover mineral deposits, how we plan extraction, how we process complex materials, and how we treat waste — not as an afterthought, but as a future resource.

Mining for a net-zero world is not about choosing between climate action and material supply. It’s about transforming how we understand, extract, and use the atoms that make decarbonization possible. That shift means moving beyond incremental improvements to fundamentally rethink mining as a system — one that treats efficiency, resilience, and material stewardship as design constraints rather than afterthoughts. New tools, data, and scientific approaches (including AI) are beginning to enable that transformation, opening pathways to dramatically reduce environmental impact while ensuring secure, scalable supply. We believe these imperatives and moonshots are where innovation can most effectively reshape mining’s role in a net-zero future.