With the world in an unprecedented state of flux due to rising global temperatures, the AI revolution, and a shifting political order, the European Union is turning its attention skyward to meet its future resource needs.
In its recently released 2025 Strategic Foresight Report, the European Commission said it feared an OPEC-style cartel of nations controlling the world's access to the vital resources needed to build the cleaner, renewable energy technologies of the future.
With few of those raw materials produced within the EU itself, the commission proposed a solution straight out of science fiction: mining the moon.
"The intensifying global competition for critical resources and the clean tech market share, coupled with a more transactional approach to international relations, could foster new alliances between state and private actors aimed at establishing OPEC-style dominance of specific resources and technologies," the report said, referring to the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.
Collectively, OPEC members control 35% of all oil reserves and account for 50% of all oil traded globally, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. This dominance gives the organization and its member states incredible sway over international oil prices and the world's economy as a whole.
"This control may drive significant price inflation and restrict access to essential materials, posing a serious challenge to the EU's strategic autonomy and clean energy transition," the European Commission report continued. "In response, there may be a growing emphasis on innovation in circular economy practices and advanced mining technologies including space mining, starting with the Moon."
While science-fiction writers and futurists have predicted for decades that humanity would one day turn to other celestial bodies to meet its ever-growing appetite for raw materials, those predictions increasingly have become reality. The clean-energy transition has brought with it skyrocketing demand for oftentimes rare or difficult-to-access resources.
For example, some experts have predicted that, in order to meet the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement, the world will need to mine as much copper in the next 25 years as has been extracted in all of human history to date, Politico reported.
Similarly, the EU's demand for lithium, which is used in batteries that power everything from EVs to smartphones, has been projected to increase by a factor of 12 between 2020 and 2030, per Politico.
With the European Commission acknowledging that, since 2020, "the global order has been shaken tremendously," its strategic report served as an important reminder that the transition to cleaner, renewable sources of energy does not necessarily mean a departure from the fierce competition for limited resources that has defined much of human history.
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