last highlighted date: 2023-05-20
Highlights
- For example, EU demand for lithium — commonly used in electric-vehicle batteries and for energy storage — is expected to increase twelve-fold by 2030, with similar trends also expected with regards to other critical raw materials such as nickel, copper, and cobalt, all of which are imported into Europe and central to things like clean renewable energy production.
- The report indicates that if the EU is to reach its clean energy targets, it will need 35 times more lithium and seven to 26 times the amount of rare earth metals in 2050 compared with today.
- “In China, you get a permit for a mine in three months as opposed to 15-to-17 years in Europe,” Schaefer continued.
- According to the European Commission’s 2020 list of critical raw materials, which includes 30 minerals and metals, the EU has significant reserves or resources of antimony, bauxite, cobalt, fluorspar, graphite, indium, magnesium, niobium, phosphate rock, platinum group metals, rare earth elements, and vanadium, among others.
- “I think that the way that we mine in Europe is probably … one of the best ones in the world. But we don’t get permitted to do mining,” said Mikael Staffas, CEO and president of Swedish mining firm Boliden who also commented that Europe “happily [imports] metals from other parts of the world” that mine with far lower environmental standards.”
- Already, Swedish mining company LKAB plans to mine a recently discovered reserve of over one million tons of rare earths in the Kiruna area in the north of the country. “It is possible to drastically innovate mining and make it more attractive to Europe,” says Mike Buxton, Section Head for Resource Engineering at TU Delft in The Netherlands.