China’s growing dominance of the battery and rare earth minerals production and supply chain has been an ongoing threat to Europe, as it significantly contributes to China’s electric vehicle sector and makes the continent, and indeed other parts of the world, heavily dependent upon China for these metals and minerals.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which prompted a whole raft of EU sanctions on Russian oil and gas, made policymakers realise just how dependent the EU has been on Moscow for energy and sent them scrambling to find more diverse suppliers.
As such, the European Commission is now hoping to avoid a similar situation with lithium and other rare earth minerals, which are vital for the green transition. Reviving the European mining sector, therefore, has now become more important than ever.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The revival of Europe’s domestic mining sector could reduce the continent’s dependence on Chinese rare earth minerals, as well as risks such as price volatility and loss of competitiveness.
The Critical Raw Materials Act is one of the more decisive pieces of legislation that Europe has rolled out for domestic mining and the production of rare earth minerals in the past few years.
The European Commission said that the aim of the project "is to develop a recycling supply chain for rare earth magnets in the EU and to demonstrate these new materials on a pilot scale within a range of application sectors.
“With targeted economic incentives, we are creating project-planning certainty for private investors - through single points of contact for companies and fast and simple authorisation procedures with clear deadlines for national authorities,” she said.
“At this very moment, if we would produce rare earths in the EU, they would have to go through China (or at least Asia) for some transformation steps into a magnet,” said Stephane Bourg, director at the French Geological Survey according to Investigate Europe.
This increased European dependence on China for critical minerals has left the continent open to significant risks such as price volatility, supply blockages, as well as the loss of competitiveness.
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