Europe cannot mine its way to strategic autonomy

Lithium in Portugal, rare earths in Sweden, cobalt from the DRC — the collision between industrial need, environmental resistance, and geopolitical dependency

By VastBlue Editorial · 2026-03-26 · 22 min read

Series: Reindustrialising Europe · Episode 6

Europe cannot mine its way to strategic autonomy

The Hole in the Strategy

In March 2023, the European Commission published the Critical Raw Materials Act with the solemn urgency of a government that has just discovered it has been building its house on a foundation it does not own. The legislation identified thirty-four materials deemed critical to the European economy — lithium, cobalt, nickel, manganese, rare earth elements, gallium, germanium, silicon metal, and others — and set targets that were admirably specific: by 2030, at least ten per cent of the EU's annual consumption of strategic raw materials should be extracted within Europe, at least forty per cent should be processed within Europe, and at least twenty-five per cent should come from recycling. The Act was accompanied by the language of geopolitical awakening. Europe, the Commission declared, could not remain dependent on a handful of third countries — overwhelmingly China — for the materials that underpin its green transition, its digital transformation, and its defence capabilities.

The diagnosis was correct. The prescription was ambitious. And the geological, political, and social realities that stand between the prescription and its fulfilment are formidable enough to make even the most optimistic industrial planner pause.

98% EU dependency on China for rare earth elements — China controls the mining, processing, and refining of rare earths that are essential for permanent magnets in electric vehicles, wind turbines, and defence systems. Europe has the geology. It does not have the infrastructure, the permits, or — in many places — the political consent.

Consider the arithmetic of dependency. Europe currently imports ninety-eight per cent of its rare earth elements from China. It imports almost all of its lithium — the element at the heart of every battery in every electric vehicle the continent plans to manufacture — from Australia and Chile, with processing overwhelmingly concentrated in China. The cobalt that European battery manufacturers need comes primarily from the Democratic Republic of Congo, where approximately seventy per cent of global production is mined under conditions that range from industrial-scale operations controlled by Chinese-owned companies to artisanal mining sites where child labour has been documented by Amnesty International and the International Labour Organization. The nickel comes from Indonesia and Russia. The manganese from South Africa and Gabon. The gallium and germanium — critical for semiconductors and fibre optics — from China, which in 2023 imposed export restrictions on both materials in a move that the European semiconductor industry treated as a warning shot.

Europe, in other words, has designed an industrial strategy for the twenty-first century that depends entirely on materials it neither mines nor processes. The green transition requires electric vehicles, which require batteries, which require lithium, cobalt, nickel, and manganese. Wind turbines require permanent magnets, which require neodymium and dysprosium. Solar panels require silicon, silver, and tellurium. Defence systems require rare earths, tungsten, and titanium. Every pillar of European strategic autonomy rests on a supply chain that begins in a mine Europe does not control, passes through a refinery Europe does not operate, and arrives in Europe subject to the trade policies of governments whose geopolitical interests do not necessarily align with Europe's own.

The Portuguese Lithium Dilemma

Portugal has lithium. This is a geological fact that has been known for decades and has become geopolitically significant only in the last ten years, as lithium's role as the essential element in lithium-ion batteries has transformed it from an industrial commodity into a strategic resource. Portugal's lithium deposits are concentrated in the north of the country — in the districts of Guarda, Viseu, Vila Real, and Braganca — in the granite-rich terrain of the Iberian Massif. The Portuguese Geological Survey estimates that the country holds approximately sixty thousand tonnes of lithium oxide equivalent, making it one of the largest known lithium reserves in Europe, though modest by global standards compared to the salt flats of Chile's Atacama Desert or the hard-rock deposits of Western Australia.

The most advanced project is the Barroso mine, near the village of Covas do Barroso in the Tras-os-Montes region. Savannah Resources, a London-listed mining company, has been seeking to develop an open-pit lithium mine at the site since 2017. The deposit is commercially significant — an estimated twenty-seven million tonnes of ore grading at 1.06 per cent lithium oxide, which would make it one of the largest spodumene lithium mines in Western Europe. Savannah's environmental impact assessment was submitted to the Portuguese Environment Agency in 2022, initiating a permitting process that has become a case study in the collision between European strategic ambitions and European democratic realities.

The opposition was immediate, organised, and deeply rooted in local identity. Covas do Barroso is not an abstraction on a geological survey map. It is a community of approximately one thousand residents whose families have farmed the surrounding hills for generations using communal land management practices — the baldios system — that predates the Portuguese nation-state. The village's economy depends on smallholder agriculture, forestry, and increasingly on rural tourism. The proposed mine would occupy approximately five hundred and forty hectares, including open-pit excavation, processing facilities, and waste storage areas. Residents formed a citizens' association — Associacao Unidos em Defesa de Covas do Barroso — and mounted a campaign that combined local protest with sophisticated media outreach, scientific critique of the environmental impact assessment, and alliance-building with national and European environmental organisations.

Their arguments were not anti-industrial in the crude sense that mining industry advocates sometimes characterise local opposition. They were specific, technical, and grounded in legitimate environmental concerns. The proposed open-pit mine would operate in a watershed that feeds the Rabagao River, which supplies drinking water to downstream communities. Lithium extraction from hard rock produces significant quantities of processing waste — tailings — that contain residual chemicals including sulphuric acid. The environmental impact assessment acknowledged that the mine would generate approximately three hundred and sixty thousand tonnes of waste rock annually, to be stored in engineered containment facilities on site. The residents' association, supported by hydrogeologists from Portuguese universities, argued that the containment facilities posed an unacceptable long-term risk to groundwater quality in a region where aquifer contamination would be effectively irreversible.

The Portuguese Environment Agency issued an unfavourable assessment of Savannah's initial environmental impact study in January 2023, citing insufficient data on water management, biodiversity impacts, and waste disposal. Savannah was required to submit a revised assessment addressing over a hundred specific technical deficiencies. The company submitted its revised documentation in late 2023, and as of early 2026, the permitting process remains unresolved. The total timeline from initial exploration licence to potential production — if the mine is ultimately approved — will be approximately twelve to fifteen years. This is not an anomaly. It is the European average for mining permits.

12-15 years Average time from exploration licence to mine production in Europe — Compared to 2-3 years in some Australian jurisdictions and 5-7 years in parts of Canada. The European permitting timeline is not primarily a result of geological complexity. It is a product of democratic process, environmental law, and cumulative judicial review.

The Barroso mine, if approved, would produce an estimated sixty thousand tonnes of spodumene concentrate per year. This sounds significant until you calculate what it means for European lithium needs. A single electric vehicle battery requires approximately eight to twelve kilograms of lithium. Europe plans to manufacture enough batteries by 2030 to equip roughly four million electric vehicles per year — a target that requires approximately forty to fifty thousand tonnes of lithium carbonate equivalent annually. The Barroso mine, at full production, would supply approximately five per cent of this demand. Five per cent. One mine, twelve years to permit, fierce local opposition, genuine environmental risks — and the output covers five per cent of European demand for a single application of a single critical material.

Sweden's Rare Earth Awakening

On 12 January 2023, LKAB — the Swedish state-owned mining company that has been extracting iron ore from the mountains of northern Sweden since 1890 — announced the discovery of what it described as the largest known deposit of rare earth elements in Europe. The deposit, located at the Per Geijer ore body near the city of Kiruna, was estimated to contain over one million tonnes of rare earth oxides. The announcement made global headlines. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who happened to be visiting Sweden at the time, described it as a potential game-changer for European strategic autonomy.

The reality behind the headline is more complicated — and more instructive — than the announcement suggested. The Per Geijer deposit has been known to geologists since the 1960s. What LKAB announced was not a discovery in the geological sense but a reassessment of the deposit's commercial viability in light of the dramatically changed geopolitical context. Rare earths were previously too cheap and too readily available from Chinese sources to justify the cost of extraction in northern Sweden. China's tightening of export controls, combined with the European Commission's escalating rhetoric about strategic autonomy, had changed the economic calculation — at least on paper.

We have known about these deposits for decades. What has changed is not the geology. What has changed is the geopolitics. The minerals have always been there. The question is whether Europe is willing to pay the price — in money, in time, and in environmental trade-offs — to get them out of the ground.

Jan Mostrom, former CEO of LKAB

LKAB's own timeline for the Per Geijer project illustrates the gap between announcement and extraction. The company estimates that it will take ten to fifteen years from the initial exploration phase to achieve commercial production of rare earth elements from the deposit. This timeline assumes that the environmental permitting process — which in Sweden involves consultation with indigenous Sami communities whose reindeer herding rights are constitutionally protected — proceeds without significant delays or legal challenges. Given that LKAB is simultaneously managing the most complex urban relocation in modern European history — the ongoing displacement of the city of Kiruna itself, which is being moved three kilometres eastward because its foundations are subsiding into the underground iron ore mine beneath it — the assumption of smooth permitting is optimistic.

The technical challenges are equally significant. Rare earth elements are not rare in the geological sense — they are relatively abundant in the Earth's crust. What makes them difficult is that they rarely occur in concentrated deposits and are chemically difficult to separate from each other and from the host rock. The Per Geijer deposit is an apatite-iron ore body in which the rare earths are embedded in the crystal structure of phosphate minerals. Extracting them requires a complex hydrometallurgical process involving acid leaching, solvent extraction, and multiple stages of separation and purification. This processing chain — which converts raw ore into the individual separated rare earth oxides that industry actually needs — is the real bottleneck in the rare earth supply chain. China dominates global rare earth processing not because it has the most ore but because it has invested decades in building the processing infrastructure, the technical expertise, and the integrated supply chain from mine to magnet that no other country or region has replicated at scale.

>1 million tonnes Rare earth oxides in the LKAB Per Geijer deposit — The largest known rare earth deposit in Europe. But the deposit will not produce separated rare earth oxides until the mid-2030s at the earliest, and Europe currently has zero commercial-scale rare earth separation facilities.

Europe currently has no commercial-scale rare earth separation facility. None. The entire processing chain from concentrate to separated oxide — the chain that converts a pile of mineral-bearing rock into the neodymium, praseodymium, and dysprosium that go into the permanent magnets inside an electric vehicle motor — exists in China, and to a much lesser extent in Myanmar, Vietnam, and Malaysia. Even if LKAB extracts rare earth concentrate from Per Geijer on schedule, Europe would need to build an entirely new industrial capability — separation, refining, alloying, and magnet manufacturing — to convert that concentrate into usable materials. This is not a matter of purchasing equipment and hiring staff. Rare earth processing involves handling radioactive thorium and uranium that naturally co-occur with rare earth minerals, managing large volumes of acidic and radioactive waste streams, and operating chemical processes that require deep specialist expertise. Building this capability from scratch will take years, cost billions, and face the same permitting challenges as the mines themselves.

The Cobalt Question and the Ethics of Dependency

The Democratic Republic of Congo produces approximately seventy per cent of the world's cobalt. This concentration of supply in a single country — one characterised by chronic political instability, armed conflict, inadequate regulatory oversight, and well-documented human rights abuses in the mining sector — poses a moral and strategic problem for Europe that no amount of Critical Raw Materials legislation can resolve. European battery manufacturers need cobalt. They need it in quantities that are growing exponentially as electric vehicle production scales up. And the primary source of that cobalt is a supply chain that begins in conditions that European consumers, if they saw them, would find unconscionable.

The Congolese cobalt supply chain has two tiers. The first consists of large-scale industrial mines operated primarily by companies with Chinese ownership — CMOC Group, China Molybdenum Co., operates the Tenke Fungurume mine, one of the world's largest copper-cobalt operations, acquired from Freeport-McMoRan in 2016. Glencore, the Swiss-headquartered trading giant, operates the Mutanda and Kamoto mines. These industrial operations produce the majority of Congolese cobalt output and operate under formal environmental and labour standards, though compliance with those standards has been the subject of legal proceedings in multiple jurisdictions. The second tier consists of artisanal and small-scale mining — ASM — in which an estimated two hundred thousand to two hundred and fifty thousand individual miners, including children, work in hand-dug tunnels and open pits without safety equipment, structural support, or environmental controls. Amnesty International's 2016 report "This Is What We Die For" documented the presence of children as young as seven working in cobalt mining operations in the Katanga region, and subsequent investigations have confirmed that artisanal cobalt continues to enter the formal supply chain through aggregation points where industrial and artisanal production is mixed.

Europe's response has been to pursue three parallel strategies, none of which is sufficient independently and all of which face significant limitations. The first is demand reduction — developing battery chemistries that use less cobalt or eliminate it entirely. Lithium iron phosphate batteries, which contain no cobalt, have gained significant market share in China and are beginning to enter the European market. But LFP batteries have lower energy density than nickel-cobalt-manganese formulations, making them less suitable for the premium and long-range vehicle segments where European automakers generate their margins. The second strategy is recycling — recovering cobalt from end-of-life batteries. The EU Battery Regulation mandates that by 2031, batteries placed on the European market must contain at least sixteen per cent recycled cobalt. But the stock of batteries available for recycling is limited by the fact that electric vehicle adoption began at scale only in the last five years, and battery lifespans of eight to fifteen years mean that the recycling feedstock will not reach meaningful volumes until the mid-2030s. The third strategy is supply diversification — sourcing cobalt from countries other than the DRC, including Australia, Canada, Morocco, and potentially deep-sea mining. Each alternative is more expensive, less geologically concentrated, or both.

The honest assessment is that Europe will remain dependent on Congolese cobalt for at least the next decade, and probably longer. This dependency is not a failure of policy. It is a consequence of geology. Cobalt deposits of the grade and scale found in the Katanga Copperbelt simply do not exist elsewhere on the planet in commercially viable concentrations. The Critical Raw Materials Act can set targets for domestic extraction and processing. It cannot change where the Earth chose to deposit its minerals. And Europe's own cobalt resources — small deposits in Finland, France, and Germany — amount to less than one per cent of global reserves. Even at maximum extraction, European cobalt mines could supply only a fraction of what a single gigafactory consumes in a year.

The Processing Gap: Where Strategy Meets Chemistry

Even if Europe could solve its mining challenges overnight — permitting every proposed lithium, rare earth, nickel, and cobalt mine on the continent tomorrow — it would still face a problem that is arguably more intractable than extraction itself: processing. The critical raw materials supply chain has three stages — mining, processing, and manufacturing — and Europe's weakness is most acute at the middle stage. Processing is where ore becomes material. It is where lithium-bearing spodumene becomes battery-grade lithium carbonate or lithium hydroxide. It is where rare earth concentrate becomes the separated oxides that magnet manufacturers require. It is where nickel laterite becomes nickel sulphate suitable for battery cathode production. And it is, overwhelmingly, where China's dominance is most entrenched.

Finland offers the most advanced example of European processing ambition. The country hosts the Terrafame nickel-cobalt mine in Sotkamo, which produces nickel and cobalt sulphates using a bio-heap leaching process — a technology that is less energy-intensive and generates fewer emissions than conventional smelting but is also slower and more capital-intensive. Keliber, now majority-owned by South African miner Sibanye-Stillwater, is building Europe's first integrated lithium hydroxide production facility in the Kaustinen region of central Finland, with first production planned for 2026. The Finnish government has actively positioned the country as a hub for battery materials processing, leveraging its mining expertise, relatively streamlined permitting processes, and abundant clean energy from nuclear and hydroelectric sources. But Finland alone cannot fill the processing gap for a continent of 450 million people. The scale of investment required to replicate China's processing infrastructure across Europe is measured in tens of billions of euros and decades of construction.

The fundamental difficulty is that mineral processing is environmentally intensive. It involves large quantities of chemicals — sulphuric acid, hydrochloric acid, organic solvents. It generates significant waste streams, some of which are radioactive in the case of rare earth processing. It requires enormous quantities of water. And it operates at margins that are thin enough to make the additional environmental compliance costs imposed by European regulation a genuine competitive disadvantage relative to processors in China, Indonesia, or Malaysia, where environmental standards are less stringent and enforcement is more permissive. This is the uncomfortable reality that the Critical Raw Materials Act does not address directly: Europe wants the output of mineral processing without accepting the environmental costs of mineral processing on European soil. The legislation sets targets for processing capacity but does not resolve the contradiction between those targets and the environmental standards that make building processing facilities in Europe slower, more expensive, and more politically contested than building them in jurisdictions with weaker environmental governance.

The Democratic Geography Problem

The deepest challenge facing European critical minerals strategy is not geological, technical, or financial. It is democratic. Europe is a collection of democracies in which citizens have legal standing to challenge industrial projects, environmental organisations have the resources and expertise to litigate, and local governments can delay or block projects that national governments support. These are not weaknesses. They are features of democratic governance that Europeans have fought for and that distinguish European societies from the authoritarian regimes that currently dominate critical mineral supply chains. But they create a structural tension with the speed and scale of industrial development that strategic autonomy requires.

The Critical Raw Materials Act attempts to address this tension by establishing "strategic projects" — mining and processing projects deemed essential to European supply security — and mandating accelerated permitting timelines. Strategic mining projects are to receive permits within twenty-four months. Strategic processing projects within twelve months. These timelines are unprecedented in European mining regulation. They are also, in the assessment of mining industry executives, environmental lawyers, and permitting authorities alike, almost certainly unachievable under existing administrative and judicial frameworks. The twenty-four-month target assumes that environmental impact assessments can be completed, public consultations conducted, administrative decisions made, and any resulting judicial challenges resolved within two years. In practice, a single judicial review of a mining permit in a European court can take twelve to eighteen months. Multiple rounds of judicial review — which are routine for contested mining projects — can extend the process by years.

You cannot accelerate permitting without either reducing environmental standards, limiting citizens' access to justice, or both. Europe is not willing to do either. And so the gap between strategic ambition and permitting reality will persist — not as a bug in the system, but as a feature of democracy doing exactly what democracy is supposed to do.

European mining industry analysis

Serbia offers a cautionary tale. Rio Tinto's proposed Jadar lithium-boron mine in the Jadar Valley near Loznica was positioned as the largest greenfield lithium project in Europe. The deposit, discovered in 2004, contains an estimated 58 million tonnes of ore with a novel lithium-boron mineral — jadarite — that was literally new to science. Rio Tinto invested over $450 million in exploration and feasibility studies. The project was endorsed at the highest levels of both the Serbian government and the European Commission. In January 2022, the Serbian government revoked the project's licences after sustained mass protests by citizens concerned about water contamination, agricultural land loss, and the social impacts of large-scale mining in a rural region. The Serbian Constitutional Court reinstated the licences in 2024, but the project remains politically toxic and operationally uncertain. The Jadar experience demonstrated that even in a candidate EU member state with a government sympathetic to foreign investment, democratic opposition can halt a project that Brussels considers strategically essential.

The pattern repeats across the continent. In Spain, the San Jose lithium mine in Caceres faces opposition from residents and heritage organisations concerned about impacts on the UNESCO-listed old town. In Finland, the Sokli phosphate-rare earth project in Lapland has been contested by Sami reindeer herders whose land rights are protected under Finnish and international law. In Greece, Eldorado Gold's Skouries copper-gold project in Halkidiki endured over a decade of legal battles and violent protests before receiving revised permits. In France, the Imerys lithium project in the Allier region has faced sustained opposition from local farming communities and environmental groups despite French government declarations of strategic importance. In each case, the dynamic is the same: a mineral deposit that European industrial strategy identifies as critical, a local community that identifies the same land as home, and a democratic system that gives both claims legal standing. The result is not gridlock — projects do eventually advance — but a pace of development that is fundamentally incompatible with the urgency that policymakers express in Brussels and national capitals.

What Honest Strategy Looks Like

The title of this episode states a conclusion: Europe cannot mine its way to strategic autonomy. This is not pessimism. It is arithmetic. The combined output of every proposed European mining project for lithium, rare earths, cobalt, nickel, and other critical materials — if all of them are approved, financed, constructed, and brought to production on their most optimistic timelines — would meet a fraction of projected European demand by 2030 and a meaningful but still insufficient share by 2035. The permitting timelines are too long, the geological endowment too modest relative to demand, the environmental trade-offs too real, and the democratic constraints too fundamental to overcome through legislation alone.

This does not mean that European mining is pointless. It means that domestic extraction should be understood as one component of a diversified strategy, not the strategy itself. The more honest framework recognises five parallel tracks, each necessary and none sufficient. First, domestic extraction where geologically and socially viable — Portugal's lithium, Sweden's rare earths, Finland's nickel — pursued with genuine engagement with affected communities and realistic timelines that acknowledge, rather than legislate away, democratic process. Second, strategic partnerships with resource-rich democracies — Australia, Canada, Chile, and potentially Namibia, Argentina, and Kazakhstan — that provide supply diversification without the geopolitical risks of Chinese dependency. The EU has signed critical raw materials partnerships with Australia, Canada, Ukraine, and several others, but these agreements remain at the memorandum-of-understanding stage and have not yet generated significant material flows.

Third, recycling at scale — building the urban mining infrastructure that can recover critical materials from end-of-life batteries, electronics, and industrial waste. This is a long-term strategy whose payoff increases over time as the stock of recyclable products grows, but it cannot replace primary extraction in the near term. Fourth, substitution and demand reduction — investing in battery chemistries that use less cobalt, motor designs that use fewer rare earths, and manufacturing processes that reduce material intensity across the board. Fifth, strategic stockpiling — maintaining reserves of the most supply-vulnerable materials to buffer against short-term disruptions, as Japan has done since 1983 through its Jogmec strategic stockpile programme and as the United States does through its Defense Logistics Agency.

The deepest lesson of Europe's critical minerals challenge is not about mining permits or processing capacity. It is about the relationship between democratic governance and industrial speed. Authoritarian systems can open mines, build processing plants, and impose industrial development on communities without their consent. Democratic systems cannot. This is not a competitive disadvantage to be overcome. It is a constraint to be respected and worked within. The challenge for European industrial strategy is to achieve supply security not by mimicking authoritarian speed but by leveraging democratic strengths — scientific rigour, regulatory predictability, investor confidence, and social licence built through genuine engagement rather than imposition.

Europe will not mine its way to strategic autonomy. But it can build a materials strategy that is honest about what domestic extraction can and cannot deliver, diversified enough to withstand geopolitical disruption, and grounded in the democratic values that make European governance worth defending. The alternative — performative legislation that sets targets Europe cannot meet, announcements that confuse discovery with production, and timelines that collapse the decade-long reality of mine development into the three-year rhythm of political cycles — serves no one. Not the communities that will host the mines. Not the industries that need the materials. And not the continent that is trying, with admirable ambition and insufficient honesty, to rebuild its industrial future on foundations it does not yet control.

Sources

  1. European Commission — Critical Raw Materials Act — https://single-market-economy.ec.europa.eu/sectors/raw-materials/areas-specific-interest/critical-raw-materials/critical-raw-materials-act_en
  2. LKAB — Per Geijer rare earth deposit announcement — https://lkab.com/en/press/europes-largest-deposit-of-rare-earth-elements-is-located-in-the-kiruna-area/
  3. Savannah Resources — Barroso Lithium Project — https://www.savannahresources.com/projects/mina-do-barroso-lithium/
  4. Amnesty International — "This Is What We Die For" (2016) — https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/afr62/3183/2016/en/
  5. EU Battery Regulation (2023/1542) — https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2023/1542/oj
  6. IEA — The Role of Critical Minerals in Clean Energy Transitions — https://www.iea.org/reports/the-role-of-critical-minerals-in-clean-energy-transitions
  7. European Court of Auditors — EU Critical Raw Materials (2023) — https://www.eca.europa.eu/en/publications/SR-2023-18
  8. Reuters — Serbia revokes Rio Tinto lithium licences — https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/serbia-revoke-rio-tintos-lithium-exploration-licences-pm-says-2022-01-20/