Boating in Lombardy
Image: picture alliance / picture agency-o
The EU wants to secure critical raw materials for the energy transition. Far too late, says Benedikt Sobotka, CEO of the Kazakh mining company ERG. He finds the attitude of Europe dishonest.
The EU Commission has presented the Critical Raw Materials Act to promote the mining and recycling of 18 strategically important raw materials. The right approach to securing Europe’s future?
The European Union has thus laid the foundation for a systematic approach to the issue of raw material security. The plan contains the right building blocks and basically has the potential to improve the security of supply of some critical raw materials. At the moment, Europe’s dependence on a few producers and supplier countries, especially in the area of raw materials for the expansion of electric mobility and renewable energies, is considerable, and even dramatic in the area of further processing of these raw materials, so-called “refining”. However, Europe is 20 years too late compared to other regions. The People’s Republic of China, but meanwhile also Canada and now also the USA are far ahead here. And they all compete for the same strategically important raw material deposits in countries like Argentina, Indonesia, the Congo or Gabon. Nobody should therefore expect that the precarious situation of European raw material supply security will change in the next five to ten years. Unfortunately, it is precisely the period in which we expect the most critical phase of lack of security of supply, because the demand for the materials identified by the EU will increase most dramatically, especially in this period. So the prosperity of Europe is at stake. To put it bluntly: what use are battery factories in Europe if they are empty because Europe lacks the raw materials?
#Critical #raw #materials #Europes #prosperity #stake