Executive Vice-President Šefčovič hosts a high-level roundtable on strategic raw materials projects

At the invitation of Executive Vice-President for the European Green Deal, Interinstitutional Relations and Foresight Maros Šefčovič and Commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton, a high-level roundtable will be held in Brussels this afternoon with representatives of 20 important raw materials projects.

The projects, selected with the help of European Raw Materials and Battery Alliances, represent the extraction, processing and recycling potential in Europe and in countries with whom the EU has strategic partnerships on raw materials. They are expected to play an important role in the EU's efforts to achieve the Critical Raw Materials Act objectives.

The roundtable will allow the participants to share information on projects' development, with a focus on efforts to ensure projects' sustainability.  It will also be an opportunity to hear project owners' views on how the Commission could best support them including in the context of implementing the Critical Raw Materials Act once it enters into force.

All selected projects are expected to start before 2030. Raw materials sectors represented in this afternoon's roundtable include lithium (Germany, Czechia, Spain, Finland) and critical Rare Earth Elements (Estonia, Poland), as well as the recycling sectors (France, Italy, Sweden, Romania), among others. In addition, partner countries will showcase a molybdenum mining project in Greenland; a natural graphite project in Norway; tungsten deposits in Kazakhstan; a Rare Earth Element extraction and processing project in Canada; and a lithium brine extraction and processing in Argentina. 

The Commission encourages representatives of those and other projects to prepare for the first call for applications for Strategic Projects, expected to be launched in early 2024, once the Critical Raw Materials Act (CRMA) enters into force.