About ESM
ESM Acquisition Corporation is a blank check company seeking to benefit from the global transition towards a low carbon economy.
The ESM leadership team’s expertise and experience in the mining and natural resources sectors provides us with a competitive advantage in potentially finding an attractive target that explores for, mines, processes and/or refines commodities that are critical in order to achieve de-carbonization.
Market Opportunity
The growing impact of climate change has created an ever-increasing sense of urgency among governments, corporations and communities to reduce global carbon emissions, which are reflected in the 2016 Paris Agreement. We believe that government regulation and a global consensus around the need to reduce CO2 emissions will necessitate wide-ranging changes in the generation, storage and use of energy, which has the potential to result in structural changes to many segments of the global economy.
MOREWe believe demand for the key raw materials and commodities that will enable this shift to a low carbon economy is set to increase dramatically. As an example, the World Bank expects that new energy technologies will result in meaningful demand growth over the next three decades for key base metals, including aluminum (+9%), copper (+7%) and nickel (+99%). In addition, the World Bank has estimated global demand for certain key inputs in electric vehicle (“EV”) batteries will increase dramatically over the next three decades, including graphite (+494%), lithium (+488%) and cobalt (+460%).*
We believe a rapid increase in expected demand for these key raw materials and commodities can create highly attractive economic opportunities because the supply of many of these products tends to be inelastic and mining majors have broadly curtailed capital investment since 2012. In particular, the mining and other processes required to turn these raw materials and commodities into usable form can be highly capital intensive and involve long lead-times for permitting and development. For example, new mining projects can take 10 or more years from identification of a resource to commission. As such, we believe many of these key raw materials and commodities are well-positioned to benefit from the favorable price dynamics that often accompany structural supply-deficit scenarios.
* Figures shown are the expected demand from energy technologies by 2050 as a percentage of 2018 production.