In early 2020, I was standing on a drilling site in Côte d'Ivoire, supervising gold prospection operations for Endeavour Mining. The work was methodical: analyse the soil data, position the drill, log the results, manage the environmental impact. Fifty sites, each one a small act of extraction from the earth.
I didn't know it then, but that experience would shape how I see the energy transition more clearly than anything I've read since.
Here's the paradox nobody wants to say out loud: the cleanest energy future we can imagine runs on one of the dirtiest supply chains on earth. Every solar panel, every wind turbine, every electric vehicle battery requires metals pulled from the ground:lithium, cobalt, copper, nickel, manganese. The energy transition is, at its foundation, a mining story.
The numbers are stark
The IEA estimates that a net zero scenario by 2050 would require six times more mineral inputs by 2040 than today. Copper demand alone - driven by EV motors, grid wiring, and charging infrastructure — is expected to nearly double. Lithium demand could increase by a factor of 40. These are not incremental shifts. They are supply chain transformations of a scale the world has rarely attempted.
And yet, when I look at where transition finance capital is flowing, I see a systematic blind spot. Green bond frameworks fund solar farms and wind parks. Sustainability-linked loans reward emissions reductions at the corporate level. Project finance structures are maturing around offshore wind and green hydrogen. All of this is necessary. But the upstream — the mines that make all of it physically possible — remains largely underfinanced and under-discussed in transition capital circles.
Everyone is racing to finance the energy transition. Almost nobody is financing the thing the energy transition runs on.
Why capital is looking away
The reasons are understandable, if uncomfortable. Mining carries legacy ESG baggage: environmental destruction, community displacement, governance failures in frontier markets. Impact investors don't want "mining" anywhere near their mandate, and let's be honest it requires more patient and significant capital than other smaller impact projects. Green bond frameworks have historically excluded extractives. And the long development timelines of mining projects (often 10 to 15 years from discovery to production) sit awkwardly against the urgency of the energy transition narrative.
But here's what I think is actually happening: capital markets have confused the symptom with the disease. The problem was never mining itself: it was mining done badly, in places with weak governance, by operators with no accountability. The answer to that isn't to exclude the sector from transition finance. It's to build the financial instruments that reward doing it well.
Capital markets have confused the symptom with the disease.
What good looks like
There are early signals that this is changing. The concept of "responsible sourcing" is gaining traction with battery manufacturers who need to guarantee clean supply chains to their customers. DFIs are beginning to look at critical minerals projects through a transition lens rather than a pure extractives lens. And a handful of structured finance teams — including my own — are starting to think about what sustainability-linked instruments in mining could actually look like in practice.
The challenge is that the metrics are harder to define than in energy. Emissions intensity per tonne of metal produced is one starting point. Community benefit agreements are another. Biodiversity impact — the thing I was assessing daily on those drilling sites in Côte d'Ivoire — is a third. None of these are simple to structure into covenants. But that's exactly the kind of problem that transition finance should be solving.
The view from the ground
When I left those drilling sites and went into finance, I brought something with me which have made project finance like mining more tangible: I've seen what extraction looks like from the ground up. I know what a poorly managed environmental impact assessment looks like, and I know what a good one costs. I know that the difference between a mine that destroys a community and one that builds it is almost never about the geology; it's about governance, accountability, and the financial structures that incentivise good behaviour.
The energy transition needs both. It needs the solar farms and the hydrogen plants and the offshore wind. But it also needs the copper and the lithium and the cobalt that make all of that possible. And it needs finance to stop looking away from the uncomfortable parts of the supply chain.
The mine is not the opposite of the transition. It is the foundation of it.
Disclaimer This article reflects my personal views only. Nothing in it should be interpreted as representing the views, policies, positions, or opinions of my current employer, any previous employer, or any future employer with whom I may be associated.