The European Commission has selected on Tuesday the first 47 strategic projects to “promote the capacities of strategic raw materials” in Europe, of which especially in Extremadura and Andalucía. With these privileged projects, which will benefit from accelerated processes and “favorable” financing conditions, Brussels seeks to boost the extraction and processing of minerals such as lithium, cobalt or Nickel.
These are fundamental materials for the production of electric cars batteries, the impulse of renewable energies or the defense industry that the union now seeks to reinforce and accelerate, but on which the twenty -seven have excessive external dependence, especially China. Something that, with the increasingly unstable international geopolitical panorama, the EU wants to correct now.
“Europe is currently depending on third countries for many of the critical materials that you need most. We have to increase our own production, diversify our external supply and make collapses,” said the vice president of the Commission for Prosperity and Industrial Strategy, Stéphane Séjourné.
“We must extract more and open more mines in Europe, and we must also transform more and recycle equally more,” said EU’s pending task for.
The first 47 projects now identified, of 170 presented within the framework of the Critical Matters Law approved a little less than a year ago, seek to guarantee the supply of critical materials, a “milestone of European sovereignty as an industrial power,” said French.
Three of the selected projects in Spain are in Extremadura: it is the Aguablanca project in Monesterio (Badajoz), the only one in Spain that extracts nickel, in addition to copper; The lithium sustainable mining project of the Lithium Iberia company in Las Navas (Cáceres) and the P6 Metals project of Iberian Resources Spain based in Almoharín, also in Cáceres. They are joined by the circular project of copper extraction, based in Huelva; the copper mine Las Cruces (Seville); The Doade Lithium mine in Galicia, and the Wolframium mine El Moto in Ciudad Real.
Except for the Aguablanca project, which is a reserve in favor of the State, the processing of Spanish projects is in the hands of the Autonomous Communities, which are those that have the competences in environmental mining and evaluation.
In total, the 47 selected projects are in 13 Member States: in addition to Spain, it is Belgium, France, Italy, Germany, Estonia, Czech Republic, Greece, Sweden, Finland, Portugal, Poland and Romania.
