Potential of European Countries for the Sustainable Supply of Critical Battery Minerals to Europe : A Data Driven Assessment

Sammanfattning

The growing importance of battery minerals such as copper, nickel, and graphite in driving Europe’s renewable energy and electric vehicle sectors has led to increasing demand for accurate production forecasting. These materials are vital for achieving the continent's energy transition goals, making reliable long-term projections critical for strategic resource planning. This study explores forecasting techniques to project production trends for these key minerals in major European producer countries and world totals, using historical data, spanning from 1980 to 2022,. The forecasting horizon considered in this research was 20 years. Three forecasting methods were applied: Seasonal Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (SARIMA), Holt’s linear trend (damped and non-damped), and Holt-Winters’ additive and multiplicative models. These approaches were selected to compare their performance in handling varying production patterns, with their accuracy assessed through error metrics such as Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Mean Squared Error (MSE), and Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE). A comparative analysis was also conducted against the International Energy Agency's (IEA) supply and demand forecasts to validate the results and contextualize the findings within global trends. The results reveal that the performance of forecasting models varies significantly across different countries and contexts. SARIMA excelled in cases with stable seasonal patterns, while Holt’s methods demonstrated strengths for non-stationary data. Additionally, this study highlights discrepancies between projected production and IEA’s stated policies scenario for demand and base-case supply estimates, underscoring the challenges in aligning long-term forecasts with external benchmarks. This analysis offers critical insights into the strengths and limitations of each forecasting approach, emphasizing the importance of tailored methodologies to optimize resource planning for Europe’s energy transition.