Op-Ed: Europe wants critical minerals, just not the mines
Europe has spent years designing a strategy to secure critical minerals, but its hardest problem may be one Brussels cannot legislate away: finding communities willing to host the mines and processing plants needed to make that strategy work.
Opposition to Serbia’s Jadar lithium project rose from 55.5% in mid-2024 to 63.5% by March 2025, according to the EU Institute for Security Studies. Serbia isn’t an EU member, but Brussels has designated Jadar a strategic project because of its potential importance to Europe’s lithium supply chain. Many of the people who would live alongside it want it stopped.
The EU’s Critical Raw Materials Act already sets ambitious benchmarks for 2030: 10% of strategic raw materials extracted domestically, 40% processed in the bloc and 25% recycled, while limiting dependence on any single foreign supplier to 65%. Setting those targets was the straightforward part. Finding somewhere to put the mine, smelter or tailings facility is considerably harder.
The problem isn’t simply permitting. It is social licence — the continuing acceptance of a project by the communities affected by it. Europe can shorten administrative timelines and subsidize investment, but neither guarantees that people will accept an industrial operation next door.
Trust deficit
That resistance isn’t irrational. Mining consumes land and water, creates waste and can leave environmental damage long after production ends. Communities also have ample reason to scrutinize promises from mining companies rather than accept them on faith.
But that is precisely why treating Europe’s minerals problem primarily as an administrative bottleneck misses an important constraint.
Much of the debate about Europe’s materials gap focuses on slow permitting and decades of allowing extraction and processing to migrate to countries including Chile, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Indonesia and China. Both contributed to today’s dependence. Neither eliminates the political problem governments encounter when they try to bring those activities home.
China illustrates the contrast, although not as absolutely as it is sometimes portrayed. The country has experienced environmental protests and local opposition to industrial projects. The difference is institutional: China’s political system gives opponents fewer avenues to delay or stop projects the state considers strategically important.
Beijing spent decades building the mines, refineries and smelters that helped establish its dominant position in several critical-mineral supply chains. Europe shouldn’t want China’s political model, and removing a community’s ability to challenge a project isn’t a policy worth importing. But the difference in how much institutional friction local opposition can generate helps explain why China could build mineral-processing capacity much faster.
The US offers a more useful comparison. American mines also face lawsuits, environmental challenges and opposition from local and Indigenous communities. Washington has responded by using federal financing, strategic authorities and efforts to accelerate permitting rather than eliminating legal challenges altogether.
America also has advantages Europe cannot easily reproduce: more sparsely populated mining regions and communities where resource extraction remains part of the local economy. Nevada has space that Saxony doesn’t.
That makes social licence particularly important for Europe.
The term is well established across the global mining industry, including Europe, but obtaining that licence varies enormously between jurisdictions. Research into European lithium projects has found little major opposition to Finland’s Keliber development, for example, while projects in France and Portugal have attracted substantially more controversy.
Finland never abandoned mining to the same extent as much of Western Europe. Familiarity doesn’t guarantee acceptance, but it can influence how communities judge a new project. Trust is easier to establish where mining remains part of the economy than where the industry disappeared generations ago.
Mining companies also determine how much trust they deserve.
Rio Tinto’s destruction in 2020 of the 46,000-year-old Juukan Gorge rock shelters in Western Australia, despite their cultural significance to the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura people, became a global example of how quickly an industry’s social licence can collapse. The fallout ultimately cost senior executives their jobs.
The lesson wasn’t that communities are unreasonable to distrust mining. It was that trust is an asset companies can build — and destroy.
Europe therefore faces something more complicated than an image problem. Modern mines can be automated, remotely monitored and subjected to environmental standards unimaginable to previous generations, but none of that makes mining impact-free. New operations still consume land, use water and generate waste.
The contradiction is that Europe’s energy transition requires enormous quantities of materials while many Europeans remain reluctant to accept the industrial activity required to produce them.
Europe wants the battery. It is much less comfortable with the mine behind it.
No substitute
Recycling won’t resolve that contradiction soon enough.
The International Energy Agency expects manufacturing scrap to account for about two-thirds of available battery-recycling feedstock in 2030. Large volumes of end-of-life EV batteries won’t become available until later as today’s vehicle fleet ages, leaving recycling plants competing for limited material in the meantime.
The financial consequences are already visible. Battery recycler Ascend Elements filed for Chapter 11 protection in April 2026 after raising substantial private and public funding. Li-Cycle also ran into severe financial trouble after securing a $375-million US Department of Energy loan facility for its Rochester recycling hub.
Those companies faced their own operational and financial problems, but the broader constraint remains: recycling capacity cannot recover metals from batteries that haven’t reached the end of their lives.
That makes the EU’s 25% recycling benchmark useful as a long-term objective, but recycling cannot substitute for primary mining quickly enough to solve Europe’s immediate supply problem.
Europe still faces permitting delays, skills shortages, high costs and difficult project economics. Social opposition isn’t the only constraint, but it may be the one industrial policy is least equipped to solve. A government can change a permitting deadline. Changing how a community thinks about a mine takes years of credibility, consultation and demonstrated environmental performance.
That means local consent shouldn’t be treated as an inconvenience standing in the way of industrial policy. It is what allows industrial policy to survive contact with reality.
Europe’s choice ultimately isn’t between mining and no mining. It is increasingly between mining more of the materials it consumes at home or relying on mines, refineries and communities somewhere else.
Europe will get its lithium, copper and rare earths either from projects such as Jadar, Barroso and Beauvoir or through supply chains controlled elsewhere, often on somebody else’s terms.
It can’t have both the mine it refuses and the independence it wants.
* Tobias Rossi is a founding partner of Atlas Strategy, a consulting firm specializing in geopolitics, business sustainability, and strategic intelligence. He has held prominent roles in the Office of the Secretary-General at the OECD, the Cabinet of UNESCO’s Assistant Director-General for Social and Human Sciences, and Forrester Research. He is a graduate of the London School of Economics.
No comments:
Post a Comment