The future of Spain and Europe wants to be green, decarbonized, electrified. Climate neutrality is wanted by 2050 and this anticipates a boom in demand for the raw materials that are essential to it, be it for its batteries, for its wind turbines, its drones, its robots, its chips… For everything.
Problem: these, “criticisms”, according to the EU, increased their number to 30 on the 2020 list, the last one. In 2017, there were 27. In 2014, 20. In 2011, 14. And they come mainly from China; and from Brazil, Chile and the US in America; Congo and South Africa in Africa.
The mines re-import on the maps. And Europe is dependent on others to obtain the essential resources of the green economy that is wanted in the 21st century. Surprise!: in these, on the map, Spain is a mine.
They are not exploited.
“Spain is a geologically complex country with great mineral wealth, especially in the west of the Peninsula. At a European level we are a power in producing copper, strontium and tungsten. In addition, there are indications to consider it of interest to exploit the resources of lithium, cobalt, nickel, without forgetting the rare earths. Between the years 1960 and 1990 there was a great investment both to increase knowledge and to take advantage of mining resources. Then it was over; the economy focused on other sectors. Today it changes again”, explains Susana Timón, senior scientist at the Geological and Mining Institute of Spain.
100% of the strontium already comes from Spain, one of the 30 critical raw materials listed by the EU, for example. It is used in pyrotechnics, construction, alloys, atomic clocks… Most of the hafnium is supplied from France and is key to the nuclear industry.
Almost everything else is missing. And for now, nothing.
And this despite the fact that, as Guillaume Bertrand, director of the georesources division of the French National Geological Service, himself a central piece in drawing up the European geological map of critical materials, insists to La Vanguardia, “if we talk about their size, some deposits in Europe they are very large and some are world class. For example Beauvoir, in the center of France, or Cinovec, in the Czech Republic, for lithium. If you talk about their relevance to the European industry, they definitely are.”
A missed opportunity to, as happened before with coal at the beginning of the industrial revolution, grow thanks to privileged access to the basic raw material that will sustain the new green economic cycle?
In the past, the most industrialized and advanced regions also generally saw an abundance of coal. Today the same could be associated, in part, with lithium, used in all kinds of new technologies. For the electric or hybrid car (battery electric cars account for over 80% of registrations in Norway in 2022, for example; in Germany or France they are around 15%; in Spain 3%). Or given the war in Ukraine and the growing importance of drones in it, for the field of security and defense.
Both require critical minerals. Countries like Portugal are already in the top ten of world lithium producers. But it is for now the exception. And a sign: resources are known to be abundant along the border between Portugal and Spain.
Says Bertrand: “European geological surveys have been working on this issue for the last decade and more. There are difficult points such as the large amount of rather old data that needs to be updated or completed. In any case, based on the geology and available data, some areas are known to be very promising, such as the Variscan orogeny belt in the Ibero-Armorican arc, the French Massif Central, the Bohemian Massif for lithium, or in Feno-Scandinavia for rare earths.” .
It hardly explodes.
There are, it is recited, important lithium mineralizations located in Galicia, Castilla y León and Extremadura, and despite the fact that there are no active mines for its extraction, in recent years exploration projects have been carried out “with estimates of very important reserves . If we used our own mining resources, with the electric car and battery factories that are already in operation, we could establish the entire value chain of electric mobility in the country”, says Timón.
But it doesn’t explode.
In fact, Sweden recently announced to great fanfare that it had located “the largest deposit of rare metals in Europe.” Sweden has frozen Nora Kärr, a deposit containing heavy rare earths vital to the green energy transition, for a decade.
The critical raw materials law announced by Ursula von der Leyen in her State of the European Union address in September last year is a good example of progress.
Although very little by little.
Because the citizen rejection of these projects does not change either – as seen in Cáceres, where they intend to exploit a mine rich in lithium, although it is still a project still in question. It is already known: mining is one of the most aggressive industrial activities with the natural environment and impact by using other resources in parallel such as diesel, a source of CO2. And Spain, like the rest of the EU member countries, has legislation guaranteeing the exploitation of mineral deposits.
“In the past there have been very bad practices and therefore it is understood that they do not want to exploit in the territory. It is the effect not in my backyard. Probably doing it in Europe means greater environmental and social control”, quotes Alicia Valero, considered one of the greatest European experts in critical materials and a researcher at the University of Zaragoza. “But not wanting mining projects is being strategically myopic since rural areas are not being developed; it does not provide better paying jobs and therefore increases the standard of living in rural areas; the snowball effect of all this means that education and the well-being of public health ultimately suffer”, says Daniel P. S. de Oliveira, head of the mining and geology unit of the Portuguese National Energy and Geology Laboratory. .
The market, however, also rules.
The International Energy Agency estimates that in 2040 compared to 2020 we will need seven times more rare earth elements, 21 times more cobalt, 42 times more lithium. Dilemma: The average time it takes to open a new mine is over 15 years.
“Deposits change their status depending on the prices of raw materials. The relatively poor can become profitable if there is a significant increase in commodity prices and therefore cross-border deposits can be important depending on the element of interest, size and return to investors. Of course, some may be strategically important, in which case the government could step in. But it is highly unlikely,” Oliveira details. In addition, Valero continues, “even if the deposits are exploited in Europe and even those of the world, at the current rate of consumption there are not enough minerals to supply an unbridled demand. Europe will not achieve sovereignty. You can mitigate it by exploiting your resources and trying to recycle them, but even so, it’s impossible. And this is for the entire planet.”
The needs are already…
For now almost nothing is touched.
The debate continues.
