SFA provides expert advice and strategic solutions that reflect its longstanding commitment to policy and commercial leadership, ensuring alignment with the challenges of today’s fast-evolving energy landscape. With a proven track record of consulting across the business cycle, including engagement with investors, start-ups, mergers and acquisitions, joint ventures, divestments, and policymakers, SFA remains at the forefront of supporting global energy transition objectives.

Drawing on extensive experience in energy markets, initially rooted in critical metals, SFA offers a balanced perspective on carbon-intensive and net-zero technologies. Its approach combines legislative, technological, economic, and commercial dimensions to deliver tailored, data-driven analysis.

SFA’s work acknowledges the intrinsic interconnectedness of key elements on the periodic table, from their geological origins and processing pathways to their end-use applications. As next-generation energy technologies increasingly depend on these elements, SFA’s deep supply chain analytics provide essential insight to inform strategic decision-making.

SFA’s strengths include its deep expertise in global emissions legislation, which is critical in light of the transition from traditional fuels to a wide range of low-emission technologies. This encompasses a clear understanding of the metals demand associated with powertrains, including hybrid internal combustion engines, battery electric vehicles, fuel cell electric vehicles, and sustainable aviation fuels.

SFA also brings a comprehensive understanding of the roles played by critical minerals in hydrogen production, renewable energy sources such as solar, wind, and geothermal, nuclear energy, power infrastructure, smart grids, and energy storage solutions. Increasingly, the organisation focuses on materials beyond battery metals and platinum group metals, applying decades of modelling and forecasting expertise to an expanding array of minerals, metals, and materials.

In manufacturing technologies, SFA analyses the evolution of end-use technologies and patterns of material substitution, assessing their implications for critical minerals demand and, crucially, how these trends influence recycling processes, secondary metal supply, and the allocation of circularity credits.

• Our economic and regional assessments delve into renewable energy costs, including solar, wind and others. We evaluate the impact of regional factors on electricity costs, green hydrogen, and the influence of subsidies and incentives on technology adoption.

• Our global mineral supply chain analysis is instrumental in guiding strategic decision-making and ensuring the security and sustainability of critical mineral supplies.

• We excel in short and long-term forecasting, using advanced evaluation and scenario modelling techniques to anticipate shifts in mineral demand, considering broad and nuanced market trends.

• SFA is committed to fostering international collaborations, encouraging innovation, and to sharing knowledge in the critical minerals sector. Our role in supporting policy development leads to creating resilient strategies aligned with sustainable development goals.

• Our risk management strategies adeptly address the complex challenges and geopolitical dynamics in critical mineral markets, ensuring robust and strategic approaches.

• By cultivating strategic global partnerships, we facilitate leadership in the energy transition, championing a sustainable, efficient, and profitable future.

For more information and to schedule a meeting with SFA (Oxford), please contact David Mobbs, Head of Marketing (dmobbs@sfa-oxford.com).

David Mobbs

Head of Marketing

A deep understanding of the impact of technologies on commodities

As part of our long history of PGM research, we have been analysing and following the evolution and impact of emissions legislation and compliance, energy policies and new technologies on key metals, which has enabled us to develop a thorough understanding of emissions-cutting and fuel efficiency technologies. Our research delves deep into the automotive battery and fuel cell technology developments to derive the impact on the platinum group metals and battery raw materials such as nickel, cobalt and lithium, and other strategic metals.

SFA’s proven industry experience and cutting-edge analysis with strong links from mine sites to end-users, as well as a unique insight into the complex global commodities marketplace, are what gives us our competitive edge. 

Our extensive knowledge base and diversification are accumulated from constant interaction with end-users, consultancy work, monitoring of new production capacity and closures, technological developments, trade data, macroeconomic drivers and industrial indices. Much of the data associated with end-users is very difficult to obtain and we have succeeded in acquiring this data over a number of years through industry-sponsored research and interaction with stakeholders.

Clients continue to use our expertise and granular analysis on tomorrow’s technologies and their impact on commodities to augment their growing business needs and investment decisions. Our ethics and integrity regarding confidentiality have never been compromised. As has always been the case with SFA – being in the right place, at the right time, working with the right companies and researching the right metals. Consequently, we have built up a large and unique network of loyal, long-standing clients to become renowned and trusted advisors throughout the industry.