Optimism and
realism are rarely going along together, and that is obvious in the case of
Rare Earth Elements (REE) in Europe. Here is the story in brief.
Political
reforms, economical re-orientation and high industrial growth rates in China has
led to a tremendous upward spiral of mineral consumption, in this case
accompanied by a shift of emphasis to high-tech and base metals, and industrial
minerals for steel manufacturing and building. In short, China alone was
changing global mineral production and demand figures. Country’s national or
more correctly government mineral policy was by next day the one and only
exploitation strategy implemented and operated by all state-owned mining companies
put in place. Growing needs of mineral resources and supplies should be secured
by all means. Environmental issues were then not paid the proper attention.
Yet, the country is not self-sufficient in the
extraction of essential mineral raw materials and that brought an increased
interest of Chinese miners to other international resources and markets. For
example China controls today the up- and downstream REE minerals supply chain industry.
It is the only functioning economy in the world with respect to REE
exploration, mining, processing, refining and metal production. On the other
hand, there is currently a strong Chinese interest for global investments as
they probably need additional sources of REE.
Following up
these developments the EU had to address these new challenges so that the
appropriate technologies, processes and products are in place, along with
adequate policies to implement and stimulate the required changes, given also
that Europe is not self-sufficient in the extraction
of essential mineral raw materials with REE value supply industrial dependence to
almost over 95% in average. However there is a serious concern whether things
are handled the right way to be able strengthening Europe’s position in the REE
supply chain. At an early approach, options and expectations do not look
optimistic neither realistic. The EU has delivered initiatives, strategies, and
criticality reports on mineral raw materials, has mobilized almost all
experts and put a lot of resource efforts, but to date there have only been some
advanced exploration projects in Europe and Greenland with unclear schedules
towards mining, extraction, processing and metallurgy, although REE mineral
resources coming from European sources (e.g. EURARE project, ERECON network) seem
to be there. In contrast to China the development of REE exploitation in Europe
is progressing slowly, with the absolute need for consensus among the member
states not being the only problem.
In the name of
the free market, with its positive and negative sides, most of the European REE
projects are in the hands of junior prospecting or mining companies, probably
unable to proceed downstream in the supply chain through all stages of the
exploitation process. They naturally do things after their own corporate
strategy and not after the citations and the recommendations of any EU
strategy. In this sense, it is rather uncertain, in case they manage to proceed
with mining, whether they will reach metallurgy or be just satisfied by
producing only ore concentrates.
There seems also to be that Greenland, although they had several
dialogues with the EU, they would really like to see things move faster and that
might bring them to even closer and more concrete agreements with Chinese. For
the EU industrial economy it is important to have the metallurgy in Europe.
This is where the technology and the added value is. Of course for China having
the operation of the whole exploitation and supply chain in place, the country would
get more and more interested to continue being the main controller and key
actor by simply importing REE mineral raw materials and processed ores from
other parts of the world, including Europe and Greenland. Is there any way for the EU to stop or even
control this trend in a more efficient and determined way? Under the present
circumstances, the answer is NO. Europe needs to do things implemented and
operated faster and to put the entire supply value chain industrially forward.
REE and other critical mineral raw materials should also be considered
strategic and this should probably bring governments’ to get more interested
and active, and any potential states’ enterprising activities to be
operationally more involved into exploitation and production process.
