Carbon prices for meeting the Paris agreement and their impact on key metals

•The paper looks at carbon prices, target-consistent with the Paris agreement and their impact on four key metals and mining companies.•The impact would still be within the market driven price variations of recent years for copper and gold.•The situation looks different for steel and aluminium and for the companies, where prices and profitability would be significantly impacted.•In some cases even the minimum carbon prices used in this study would make mining unprofitable.