3 SESSION BRIEF
This session, held on 21 October 2025 in Lisbon at the MINEX Europe Forum, focused on the critical challenges and innovative solutions essential for securing Europe’s battery material supply chains, particularly for lithium. The overarching theme was Europe’s need to transition from geopolitical dependency and regulatory uncertainty to a robust, competitive, and sustainable domestic ecosystem for critical minerals.
Global and Strategic Context (Part 1)
The first part of the session provided a high-level overview of the global supply and demand dynamics, regulatory hurdles, and regional opportunities.
- Global Critical Minerals Outlook 2025 (Eric Buisson, IEA):
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- Demand: Lithium demand rose by nearly 30% in 2025, significantly outpacing the 10% annual growth seen in the 2010s. Other battery minerals (cobalt, nickel, graphite, rare earths) grew by 6-8%.
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- Supply Concentration: Despite rapid supply growth, the critical minerals market is becoming more concentrated. The market share of the top three producing countries for key minerals rose from 82% in 2020 to 86% in 2024.Approximately 90% of the additional growth came from the top supplier (mostly China, except for Indonesia in nickel).
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- Security Risks: Significant supply gaps remain for lithium and copper. Disruptions from the top supplier would create a high level of imbalance for the rest of the world.
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- Technology & ESG: The rise of LFP batteries (from 20% to ~50% of the market since 2020) does not fully mitigate supply risks, as LFP manufacturing capacity is highly concentrated. ESG performance, particularly on social indicators, has plateaued, though environmental indicators like GHG emissions and water use have shown some improvement.
- Lithium: Demand and Challenges (Astrid Karamira, ILiA):
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- Unprecedented Demand: Global lithium demand is forecasted to quadruple or quintuple by 2040, driven primarily by electrification, with 90% of lithium currently used in batteries.
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- Regulatory Inconsistency: Europe’s regulatory environment is characterised as “constantly inconsistent,” creating challenges for market competitiveness.
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- Classification Challenge: The proposal by the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) to classify lithium salts as Category 1A (highly toxic) is a major concern for the industry, as it lacks global scientific consensus and would pose significant operational hurdles in Europe.
- Regional Opportunity & Project Delivery:
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- Portugal and Iberia (Prof. Alexandre Lima, University of Porto – FCUP): The Iberian Peninsula holds significant potential for magmatic and hydrothermal lithium deposits, especially in the relatively unpopulated inland areas. However, the time from discovery to first production is extremely long, illustrated by the Barroso project, which took 40 years from initial discovery (1987) to projected battery-grade production (2027). The delay in the promised Portuguese lithium auction since 2018 highlights a gap between political ambition and regulatory execution, with risk-averse politicians preferring to delay decisions.
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- Project Delivery (Sam Houston, Strategist Solutions): Successful project delivery requires addressing a misalignment between company ambition and capability, particularly in junior and mid-tier companies. It necessitates early integration of ESG (not just a tick-box exercise), building credibility with communities and regulators through transparency, and adopting an empathetic, patient approach to project development in sensitive European environments.
Project-Level Innovation and Implementation (Part 2)
The second part focused on specific innovative European mining projects and operational challenges.
- Water Management (David Hoekstra, SRK Consulting (UK)):
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- The Kings Mountain legacy lithium mine in North Carolina, USA, serves as a case study for integrated mine planning, particularly water stewardship.
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- Early integration of surface and mine water management was key to optimising the design, leading to the selection of filtered tailings (smaller footprint, less water storage) and a plan to beneficially transfer waste rock to an adjacent aggregate quarry. This approach, while still in permitting, aims to meet the higher environmental and social expectations set by standards like IRMA.
- Strategic Domestic Projects:
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- Romano Mine, Portugal (Jorge Costa Oliveira, Lusorecursos): This hard-rock lithium project is classified as an EU Strategic Project and is designed as an industrial venture, focusing on the entire value chain from mine to product (lithium hydroxide), as the economics do not support only producing concentrate.5 Major obstacles include slow national bureaucracy and a general lack of knowledge among decision-makers regarding the critical importance of mastering the chemical processing/refining component (upstream). The speaker also raised concerns about potential price manipulation by monopolistic entities, making European projects difficult to finance.
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- Beauvoir Deposit (Jurgen Fuijkschot, Imerys): Located in France, Project Emili is developing resources estimated at 360 million tonnes (Indicated and Inferred) of lithium contained within lepidolite (lithium mica). The project is undertaking extensive geoscientific work to create a detailed model for processing this unique mineral source, which will necessitate the establishment of new European processing capacity.
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- Geothermal Lithium in Alsace, France (Romain Millot, Lithium de France): This project focuses on non-conventional geothermal brine extraction in the Upper Rhine Graben. The concept uses a closed loop system to simultaneously generate heat energy and recover lithium from the hot deep brine using Direct Lithium Extraction (DLE) technology. The goal is to produce 27,000 tonnes of lithium carbonate equivalent (LCE) per year by 2028, representing about one-third of France’s projected lithium demand.
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- Balakivka Graphite Deposit, Ukraine (Vita Khizhniak, BGV Group Management): Recognising graphite’s critical role (up to 90% of anode material is processed in China), this project aims to support the EU supply chain. With a total resource of 45 million tons (NI 43-101), the project plans a two-stage development: a concentrator plant by 2028 and subsequent production of 19,000 tons per year of spherical purified graphite (SPG) for anodes, aiming for high quality and adherence to EU standards.
Industry Skills Gap (Part 3)
A final point highlighted the severe skills shortage facing the industry. There is a need for robust, modern training programmes and active promotion to engage younger generations in the fields of geology, process engineering, and integrated project management, ensuring future capability to deliver these complex ventures.
Conclusion
The session underscored that while Europe possesses significant geological resources and is driving forward innovative domestic projects in both hard-rock and non-conventional lithium extraction (geothermal, clay, mica), its ambitions are repeatedly threatened by external market concentration and internal regulatory/political hesitancy. The urgent need is not merely for primary production, but for large-scale investment in midstream chemical processing and refining to achieve genuine strategic autonomy.