Arvanitidis reported on re-shaping the mineral industry in the EU. The growth of industrial economies, like for instance the Chinese and the Indian, led to a tremendous upward spiral of mineral consumption. The demand is became so great that even low mineral concentrations and mining related waste can reasonably be considered ore deposits. This means the global mineral industry needs to be reshaped.
EU critical raw materials occur in genetic associations with common industrial and other high-tech metals e.g.
• In, Ga with Zn
• Te, Se, Co with Cu
• REE with Fe
• PGM with Cr and/or Ni
Minerals4EU is a Knowledge Base Platform that goes along and in line with the SIP for EIP on RM. It portends a dynamic value chain, delivering adding value intelligence and foresight services, and challenging the development of a permanent structure to achieve sustainable exploitation.
•Raw materials are fundamental to Europe’s economy, and they are essential for maintaining and improving our quality of life. At the heart of this work is defining the
critical raw materials for the EU’s economy. These critical raw materials have a high economic importance to the EU combined with a high risk associated with their supply.
•The first criticality analysis for raw materials was published in 2010 by the Ad-Hoc Working Group on Defining Critical Raw Materials. Fourteen critical raw materials were identified from a candidate list of forty-one non-energy, non-food materials In the 2013 exercise fifty-four non-energy, non-food materials were analysed.
• Low carbon technologies require that the correct resources are available. Many wind turbines designs use magnets containing rare earth elements (REE), and solar panels and energy efficient lighting rely on metals such as silicon, tellurium and indium, among others;
• Exhaust emissions from internal combustion engines are managed through catalytic converters containing platinum group metals;
• Most of the environmental technologies and applications (e.g. photovoltaic cells, electric and hybrid vehicles) allowing energy production from renewable resources
will use, so called, high-tech metals (e.g. REE, PGM, niobium, lithium, cobalt, indium, vanadium, tellurium, selenium) that were derived or refined from minerals, which Europe is strongly import dependent.
Read on ... very informative re European conditions.
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