MATERIALIZE · Material Realizable Energy Transformation – Navigating the Material Bottlenecks of a Carbon-Neutral Energy System

The urgent need for a global energy transformation requires major and rapid shifts in energy technologies, accompanied by changes in material demand and supply, which can potentially result in material bottlenecks. Despite great interest from policy and research, current approaches fail to account for key drivers of material bottlenecks, such as: (i) new material demands of specific energy technologies (e.g. iridium for electrolysis), (ii) phased-out material supply (e.g. gypsum from fossil power plants), (iii) competing material demand beyond the energy system (e.g. iridium for smartphones), and (iv) limits in material availability and disposability (e.g. recyclability, carbon-neutral waste handling) resulting in an underestimation of bottlenecks, while even more importantly integrated mitigation strategies are not investigated at all.MATERIALIZE will generate this urgently needed new holistic understanding about how these drivers can affect the global energy transformation and which mitigation strategies are best suited to pave the way towards a material realizable energy transformation. The key novelty of MATERIALIZE will be to transform elements of the yet disparate fields of energy and material system modelling at unprecedented levels of detail into one innovative interdisciplinary, scalable, nested, and prospective model framework. MATERIALIZE aims to conduct boundary-pushing research on the global scale of the whole energy system with 3 objectives: (i) unveil potential material bottlenecks, (ii) identify alternatives navigating these, and (iii) assess the impacts of alternatives on the energy and material systems. The deeply advanced understanding of the energy-material nexus will produce timely insights about most robust transformation pathways, which will ultimately open up new frontiers to develop new alternatives and navigation strategies and to explore spatially-explicit economic and political implications of a material realizable energy transformation.