World Mining Congress 2026 — Lima, Peru | June 24–26, 2026 Technical Program Introduction | Page 1 WORLD MINING CONGRESS 2026 Lima, Peru | 24–26 June 2026 Technical Program — Foreword by the Technical Program Chair Mining and the Global Energy Transition: Why This Congress Matters We stand at an inflection point in human civilisation. The accelerating transition from fossil fuels to clean energy — wind turbines, solar panels, battery storage systems, and electric vehicles — is not primarily a technological challenge. It is, at its foundation, a materials challenge. Every megawatt of renewable energy capacity installed, every electric vehicle that displaces a combustion engine, every grid-scale battery that stores the sun's energy overnight, depends on a foundation of mined materials: copper, lithium, cobalt, nickel, manganese, rare earth elements, graphite, and many others. Mining is the industry that makes that future physically possible. The scale of this requirement is extraordinary. Credible analyses by the International Energy Agency and the World Bank project that achieving net-zero emissions by 2050 will require a four- to sixfold increase in the supply of critical minerals over the next two decades. A single onshore wind turbine requires roughly nine tonnes of copper and hundreds of kilograms of rare earths. A utility-scale battery storage facility requires thousands of tonnes of lithium and nickel. The global electric vehicle fleet, if it reaches the one billion vehicles projected under ambitious climate scenarios, will require cumulative copper demand equivalent to several times the entire copper production of the twentieth century. These numbers are not abstractions; they represent the challenge to which the mining industry must rise. Yet confronting this challenge requires something more than acknowledging the scale of demand: it demands an recognition of urgency. The world needs these materials now — not in thirty years. We cannot afford the luxury of incremental improvement or business as usual. We cannot afford to be wasteful with time, capital, or resources. This Congress is convened in that spirit of urgency, and that urgency defines its central challenge: how does the mining industry rise to meet a compressed and unforgiving timeline? The papers and discussions at WMC 2026 will focus on two interconnected fronts. The first is radically increasing output from existing assets — responsibly, without cutting corners on safety or environmental stewardship, but with a seriousness of purpose that challenges every assumption about what “normal” production looks like. The second is significantly shortening project delivery timelines: compressing the years — and too often, the decades — it takes to bring new capacity into production. Both imperatives demand that we challenge the status quo, question inherited constraints, and resist the institutional inertia that slows the industry’s response to the greatest materials challenge in modern history. These dual imperatives are given precise and urgent form in the foundational paper of this Congress, “Mind the Gap,” by Doris Hiam-Galvez and co-authored by Allan Moss, Peter Harvey, Nestor Deza, Nathan Stubina, Roberto Valle. Using copper as its prime example — the metal most central to electrification and the one whose supply shortfall is most clearly in view — the paper lays out in unambiguous terms the gap between what the energy transition requires and what current trajectories will deliver. It is a paper about delivery: about what it will concretely take, operationally and institutionally, to close that gap within the timeframe that matters. We commend it to every delegate as the lens through which to read this program.
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