Advancing the State of Prospective Materials Criticality Screening: Integrating Structural Commodity Market and Incentive Price Formation Insights

Abstract

Broad, screening-style assessments of criticality highlight economically important materials facing significant threats to secure, sustainable supply. The studies identify many valuable metrics influencing the likelihood and impact of constraint; however, approaches to aggregating these metrics vary and lack unifying, causally grounded strategies. The present work seeks to advance the state of criticality screening by targeting this gap with structural commodity market insights. Grounded in the principle of price as indicative of economic scarcity, the model uses a small number of high-level metrics to drive changes in future incentive price (i.e., cost of opening new mines) by influencing structural markets elements in different ways (i.e., shape of long-run supply, demand, and incentive curves). Metrics like resource cover, ore grade loss, barriers to entry, secondary supply, end-use substitution and dematerialization rates, and all help to approximate changing supply–demand balance and inform criticality. The approach balances strengths of rapid, broad screening with insights of more detailed market modeling.