As competition for natural resources fractures the global order, Saudi Arabia is cementing its position as the centre of gravity for international discussions to accelerate the production of minerals the world needs for clean energy and digital technologies.
Ministers and senior representatives from more than 100 countries gathered in Riyadh this week for the Future Minerals Forum, an annual event that has become a mainstay of the minerals industry’s calendar since its launch in 2022.
Among them were representatives from all G20 countries, which include the US, Canada, China, Germany, France and Russia, as well resource-rich African and Latin American nations, the Saudi government said.
The fast-expanding forum has been a tour de force in helping position oil and mineral-rich Saudi Arabia at the heart of the conversation to step up production of minerals at a time when competition for resources is dominating global politics.
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President Donald Trump has made control over natural resources and access to critical minerals a core tenet of the US’s national security strategy as it seeks to curb China’s dominance over mineral supply chains. In a massive disruption to the global order, Washington has deployed forces to seize Venezuelan oil, both physically from sanctioned tankers and indirectly by deposing its leader, and is making a play to acquire mineral-rich Greenland from fellow NATO-member Denmark.
“The reality is that we are in the middle of what is happening in the world,” Adel Al-Jubeir, Saudi Arabia’s minister of state for foreign affairs, told the minerals conference.
“Our objective is not to seek more territory or more people or more minerals,” he said. “Our objective is stability and calm so that we can focus on resources and building a better future.”
A global decision-shaping platform
The world’s second-largest oil producer, Saudi Arabia sits on minerals worth an estimated $2.5 trillion – including lithium, rare earths, zinc and copper – all of which are needed to manufacture batteries and other clean energy technologies.
Under its Vision 2030 development plan, Saudi Arabia has made mining a key pillar for diversifying its economy away from fossil fuels and is investing its oil revenues into becoming a hub for processing and trading minerals.
“There’s only one [country] – that’s the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia – that has the trust of enough countries to convene at this critical time,” said Scott Brison, vice-chair of BMO Wealth Management, whose banking arm specialises in the metals and mining sector.
“This [forum], in a very short time, has become the Davos of mining,” he added.
Like the famed Swiss ski resort, which will host the annual World Economic Forum next week, the Future Minerals Forum has become a must-attend annual event for investors and decision-makers, who seek to broker deals and invest in mineral value chains.
Saudi Arabia’s minister of industry and mineral resources, Bandar bin Ibrahim Al-Khorayef, described the event as “a global decision-shaping platform” that “influences policies, mobilise[s] investment and build[s] collaboration across the entire mineral value chain”.
It comes just weeks after Saudi Arabia opposed any discussion of possible binding rules at the UN to limit the environmental harm caused by mining and make supply chains more transparent.
US pitch for partners
The forum focused on the challenges of meeting rapidly-rising demand for minerals, driven by the roll-out of clean energy technologies and AI infrastructure, amid funding gaps and political uncertainty.
Industry leaders agreed that Saudi Arabia’s geographic location, mineral wealth, extensive relations with both the West and China – originally built on fossil fuel exports – and vast amounts of cheap energy make the Kingdom well-placed to become a global minerals processing hub.
Amid geopolitical tensions, “the Kingdom has the ability to be a neutral processor” and supply the US market, said José Luis Manzano, chairman of private investment group Integra Capital.
The US and Saudi Arabia have already agreed to co-operate on mineral supply chains, with the US government pledging to finance a new rare earths refinery in the country.
Earlier this week, Trump signed an executive order calling for “agreements with foreign trading partners” to help reduce US dependence on China.
Addressing the Riyadh conference, Audrey Robertson, the US assistant secretary for critical minerals and energy innovation, defended President Trump’s approach to securing mineral supplies from resource-rich countries, insisting the US “seeks to have great partnerships where we all bring different things to the table”.
“There’s no strong-arming, there’s only strategic alliances to better our nations and better the world,” she said. Yet, when it comes to Greenland, she warned: “I would take our president at his word.”
Riyadh pledges to break with old ways
Delegates also discussed improving the transparency of mineral supply chains and ensuring that local communities endowed with mineral wealth benefit from their extraction.
Saudi minister of state for foreign affairs Al-Jubeir said the “old ways” that saw “foreign companies come in, mine, exploit, take all the value outside of the country and leave the host country with nothing but a big hole on its territory” had to change.
“The new view is we need to invest. We need to keep as much of the value chain as we can in-country so that we produce jobs [and] opportunities, which in turn produce stability, which in turn helps all of us around the world.”
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At the same time, to establish itself as a minerals processing hub, Saudi Arabia is seeking to broker bilateral deals with developing countries, particularly in Africa, to secure access to resources it can refine.
Several ministers from mineral-rich African nations, including Democratic Republic of the Congo, Zambia, Ghana, Mauritania and Morocco, attended the conference.
Riyadh is also working with the World Bank on funding opportunities for seven planned infrastructure corridors to accelerate minerals development in Africa and Latin America and help get resources to the market.
Saudi strategy stirs Africa tensions
Nonetheless, Nafi Quarshie, Africa director of the Natural Resource Governance Institute, who attended the forum, told Climate Home News there is “tension” between Saudi Arabia’s plan to process minerals and African nations’ ambitions to add value to their resources and reduce exports of raw materials.
“There’s a kind of a push for Africa to do business with Saudi Arabia,” she said.
It remains unclear how African governments can ensure that any minerals agreement with Saudi Arabia creates a win-win situation and helps drive investment to refine ores into higher-value products for clean technologies on the continent, she added.
There were few civil society representatives in the glitzy halls of the King Abdulaziz International Conference Center, while communities impacted by mining projects were not represented.
Yet, if Saudi Arabia is serious about doing things differently, activists and affected peoples need to be included in the forum to put transparency, human rights and environment protection at the core of the discussions, said Quarshie.
The post At ‘Davos of mining’, Saudi Arabia shapes new narrative on minerals appeared first on Climate Home News.
At ‘Davos of mining’, Saudi Arabia shapes new narrative on minerals
Energy and Transport Day at COP31 ironically saw a second morning of horrible traffic jams and over-crowded buses and trams, meaning early events at the venue had to be hastily rescheduled.
This COP has more than 68,500 registered participants, together with another 24,500 workers needing to reach the venue, which is around 25 kilometres from the centre of Antalya.
Once things finally got underway in the halls, the focus was on two main voluntary pushes: transitioning away from fossil fuels (TAFF) and the COP31 Global Electrification Pledge, meant to usher in the “age of electricity”, according to the Turkish presidency.
The pledge sets a goal of raising electricity’s share of final energy consumption from around 23% today to 35% by 2035 (known as 35×35) by electrifying transport, buildings and industry.
“This year’s energy crisis has shocked us out of our complacency and demonstrated the inherent vulnerability of dependence on energy imports. Electrifying the global economy is now essential to boost energy security, cut emissions, and drive economic growth,” COP31 President Murat Kurum said in a statement.
The COP31 presidency is “determined to chart a path forward and use the annual UN summit to build momentum”, he added. But it remains to be seen whether and how the pledge will be incorporated into the final cover decision from Antalya, as some fossil fuel-producing countries are set to oppose any mention of the electricity to meet it coming from clean sources.
Neither is it clear which countries are backing the pledge. Climate Home News understands that no list is expected this week, as Turkiye rallies governments to the cause. Australia and other recent COP host nations are on board, while the European Union co-hosts the first “Electrification Forum” on Tuesday, bringing together governments, institutions, businesses and financiers.
The International Energy Agency (IEA), meanwhile, will lead a Global Electrification Tracking Mechanism to monitor global and regional electrification trends.
The IEA says the 35×35 electrification goal is within reach with strong political backing. But a recent analysis from Climate Action Tracker shows current policies will only lead to a share of 28% for electricity by the deadline.
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On the TAFF front, Brazil’s COP30 presidency held a high-level event to showcase its new global roadmap, which is essentially a toolkit to help countries start planning their transitions away from coal, oil and gas.
Here, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said countries should use the document to build their own concrete national roadmaps including clear timelines, responsibilities and financing needs.
By the next Global Stocktake of national climate plans in 2028, “every country should be able to show what it has done to cut fossil fuel use or production, what it will do next, and how it will measure progress,” he said, in a challenge to governments.
He added that it is “long past time to stop treating the transition away from fossil fuels as taboo or intractable” and called on COP31 to “move from discussing the transition to organising it, financing it, and delivering it”.
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As with the electrification pledge, the TAFF process remains a pick and choose effort. Some fossil fuel-producing nations are adamant it will stay that way and are likely to resist any attempt to anchor the roadmap in the cover decision or other negotiated outcomes at COP31.
Nonetheless, energy security concerns are expected to lead to an almost 60% increase in renewable capacity growth from 2026-2031 compared to the previous six years, according to the IEA, with solar power accounting for three quarters of that growth.
Declarations aim to electrify shipping and rooftops
One sector that is tricky to electrify – mainly because of a lack of chargers in the middle of the ocean – is maritime transport.
But a newly formed group of ports, shippers, campaign groups and think-tanks want electricity to be used where it can in the sector – electrifying ships on short routes like ferries, plugging ships into the electricity grid when they’re in port and electrifying the machines that handle ships’ cargo.
While the COP31 presidency has proposed a 35% by 2035 goal, this group said on Tuesday they want electricity’s share of final energy demand in shipping to rise to a more modest 20% by 2035 – up from a negligible amount today. The Danish Port of Esbjerg and Californian Port of Long Beach are among the backers of the Maritime Electrification Breakthrough Goal.
Maritime electrification projects could get a huge boost from the International Maritime Organisation’s Net Zero Fund, if it is agreed at intergovernmental talks in London starting later this month.
Also on Energy Day at COP31, a group of countries including Australia, Bangladesh, Kenya, Nigeria and Vanuatu signed onto the Global Rooftop Solar Declaration, an Australia-led initiative to try and double the number of solar-powered households to 300 million by 2030.
It’s not clear exactly how many countries are backing it. But the presidents of Palau and Pakistan also joined leaders to discuss the initiative while Indonesia’s state-operated utility PT PLN signed up too.
Australia’s climate minister Chris Bowen said in a statement: “Many countries have the sunshine, the space and the demand, but lack the finance, infrastructure and workforce needed to unlock this opportunity. This declaration is about changing that.”
Coal phase-out partnerships offer emerging economies early help
A multilateral initiative launched in Antalya aims to tackle one of the key demands from coal-producing countries in the Global South: help to access the existing pool of funding for transitioning away from fossil fuels.
Through “Coal Transition Partnerships”, the Powering Past Coal Alliance (PPCA) – a group of governments and other actors launched in 2017 – is seeking to unlock more than $23 billion by supporting developing countries to draw up their first phase-out plans.
Backers of the initiative include the Asian Development Bank (ADB), the Climate Investment Funds (CIF), the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and climate research think-tanks like Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) and TransitionZero.
Julia Skorupska, head of the PPCA secretariat, told Climate Home News in Antalya that the early interventions could help developing countries access larger financial mechanisms along the lines of the Just Energy Transition Partnerships (JETPs), which are working to help several developing countries phase out their coal fleets.
She added that countries are required to have done “a lot of work” before applying for transition funding, including having investment plans and a portfolio of projects. “For us that feels like a gap,” she said.
She added that the initiative has received “a lot of interest” and is meant to enable early-stage planning in coal-dependent emerging economies such as Kazakhstan, Indonesia and Pakistan.
By the time of the next Global Stocktake – the UN’s five-year review of climate progress – in 2028, the PPCA aims to be supporting ten of the world’s most coal-dependent countries. These include Indonesia, Vietnam, India and South Africa, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).
Farah Heliantina, energy transition official at Indonesia’s Ministry of Economic Affairs, said in a statement that the country’s experience “has taught us how challenging this transition can be”, as uncertainty in global fossil fuel markets threatens energy security at home.
Finance for the transition away from fossil fuels has proven difficult to channel effectively. At COP26 in Glasgow in 2021, South Africa was the first country to announce an $8.5bn JETP – funded by a group of donor countries including the UK, Germany and France – which included projects like early power plant retirements, reskilling workers and building transmission lines for renewable energy. However, by 2025, only around $3.8bn had been allocated.
After the war in Iran disrupted oil and gas markets this year, countries with gas-fired power fleets like China, Korea, Japan, and some European countries have turned to easier-to-source coal generation to keep their economies running, the IEA has highlighted. Skorupska said there’s a risk that new coal investments could become stranded.
“Fundamentally, we want to think about how we can help people overcome those shorter-term challenges to get the real long-term benefits of the transition away from fossil fuels,” she said.
Traffic chaos set to get worse as leaders arrive tomorrow
The first two days of COP31 have seen travel chaos which looks set to get worse tomorrow. As world leaders arrive in town and head to the conference centre, some roads will be closed so that the VIPs can be ferried in past not-so-important delegates. The COP31 presidency is warning of “severe disruptions”.
In an email to all COP participants, it advises getting to the venue by 7am. There will be more public transport than usual between 5-7am, after which time no public transport can leave the area, the email says, without specifying when it will resume.
Route schedules are still being planned and will be shared “as soon as possible”, the COP31 Transport Coordination Center says.
The 42 world leaders causing this heightened level of disruption on Wednesday will speak from 2pm local time. They include Brazil’s recently re-elected President Lula, European Commission President Ursula Von Der Leyen and China’s Vice President Han Zheng. The Turkish and Australian leaders are not on the list, but are expected to speak as COP31 co-hosts.