Rapidly evolving ESG transparency scrutiny hits miners amid surging EV demand

An electric vehicle charging station. Australian miners have told blockchain company Everledger that transparency demands around their ESG credentials and the new energy metals they produce are evolving faster than what many of them can grasp. Source: Boonchai Wedmakawand/Moment via Getty Images

Australian miners are concerned about how rapidly evolving transparency expectations will affect their ability to keep up with the demand for new energy metals that they are already struggling to deliver, according to Everledger Ltd., the company commissioned by the Australian government to set up its first digital blockchain for critical minerals.

"Miners have reported rapidly evolving environmental, social and governance, or ESG, transparency scrutiny," Everledger head of product Rakalene Condon said in an interview. "Every single miner we have spoken to has told us that the speed of change of expectations for transparency which they are seeing in the market ... is huge. It's hitting all of them," she said.

Critical minerals developers seeking debt or equity in recent months have reported ESG as being top of mind for potential financiers and off-takers, "whereas 12 to 18 months ago, those questions may have been minimal or at the bottom of the list," Condon said.

Miners often need to substantiate ESG claims more readily these days to get finance, said Condon, who is overseeing the blockchain pilot project.

"As demand for these critical minerals increases — and overwhelmingly the demand for transparency increases beyond what some companies are currently able to readily substantiate — miners are saying they anticipate a need to change the way they report ESG credentials to efficiently meet that demand," Condon said.

The comments came amid growing concerns about the sector's ability to supply surging electric vehicle demand due partly to adverse legislation where abundant raw materials are hosted, such as Greenland and Chile.

The Australian office of global technology business Everledger, a founding member of the Global Battery Alliance, won a A$3 million pilot project from the Australian government in July to create a digital certification for critical minerals throughout the supply chain.

Everledger had built the world's first transparent and blockchain-enabled supply chain for diamonds before expanding into gemstones, pearls, apparel, wine and wool.

Partnered with the Western Australia and Queensland state governments among other entities, Everledger is now building a platform that allows parties to build and share their verified ESG credentials and story, or track specific minerals from extraction to processing and export to global markets, Condon said.

European moves

Miners and the Australian government are carefully watching the legislative developments in Europe, which is working to become a key player in the EV supply chain, Condon said.

Industrial and EV batteries will each have a unique electronic record by Jan. 1, 2026, with the introduction of battery passports, which will register and provide public information about every battery model sold and operated in the EU. Experts say this is expected to have ripple effects into other jurisdictions and upstream, and affect how the raw materials are mined.

BHP's Escondida copper mine in Chile. In its first carbon-neutral sale, BHP used blockchain technology to track copper cathodes and associated emissions from its Chilean mines to Southwire's U.S. operations. Source: BHP Group

To aid the visibility of miners' ESG credentials to those players further downstream at the EV and renewables level, "blockchain is moving up the curve into actually being used in more applications, and people are becoming more comfortable with it," Condon said.

Diversified major BHP Group touted how blockchain helps it reliably collect, access and share data about products to prove its environmental and ethical credentials and increase supply chain transparency.

BHP traced nickel shipments from its West Australian Nickel West operations to Tesla Inc.'s Gigafactory Shanghai in a transaction that used blockchain technology to support the EV maker's due diligence of product provenance and confirm if any raw material dilution occurred in the supply chain, BHP Chief Commercial Officer Vandita Pant said in a Dec. 12 statement.

BHP also partnered with copper cable and wire manufacturer Southwire Co on a pilot that traced copper cathodes and associated greenhouse gas emissions from its Chilean mines to Southwire's U.S. processing operations in the miner's first carbon-neutral sale in October.

However, the task is not so easy for small- to mid-tier companies, which tend to contract out or buy off-the-shelf products like enterprise resource planning software to handle matters that are not usually deemed as "core" to their business compared to the day-to-day task of exploration and mining, Condon said.