Regulation has been an important driver for the push toward clean energy technologies but industry has accelerated this mindset, the chief executive officer of Nth Cycle said.
According to Megan O'Connor, the past several administrations in the United States have prioritized establishing a domestic supply of critical minerals used to power the energy transition. "Whether rare earths for critical defense technologies or materials for the renewable energy transition, many regulators and officials see this as a national security issue and they're right," she told Fastmarkets in an interview."There's a broad realization that all these great technologies that are really going to truly transition us to a fossil-fuel free economy are reliant on materials and if we can't get them, we won't be able to achieve the net-zero carbon emissions goals that we have all set," she said. But industry has been critically important in accelerating the path towards the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement, which aspires to limit the rise in the mean global temperature to 1.5 ?C above pre-industrial levels, noted O'Connor."It was an almost drastic...