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First, the bank should establish, within its structure, a dedicated “Sustainable Critical Raw Materials Task Force”, focusing exclusively on facilitating projects along the entire critical raw materials value chain.
These raw minerals are the basic elements we need to make the products that drive the twin green and digital transitions, like batteries, electric motors, electrolysers, and photovoltaics.
Simply put, without critical raw materials, there will be no Green Deal, no future technology development in Europe.
Yet the EU currently supplies only 1% of its own needs for key battery raw materials, such as lithium, cobalt and nickel. Some 98% of our rare earths come from China.
As you probably know, I was very much involved in the diversification of gas supplies to Europe. And I know how difficult this task still is.
But our dependency on imports of critical raw materials is much higher than it ever was for fossil fuels.
And it is increasingly difficult to secure supplies of raw materials for our economy, as projects in third countries are subject to fierce international competition.
We have seen over the last couple of years that everything can be weaponised, from data to energy to CRMs. We have to overcome that, while new projects in Europe struggle to attract financing.
So I think it is imperative to create this task force, to bring together experts from across the EIB Group, including EIB Global, to cater for the different kinds of funding instruments that would be involved.
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Source: European Commission
Speaker: Maroš Šefčovič, Executive Vice-President of the European Commission for the European Green Deal and Vice-President of the European Commission for Interinstitutional Relations
Format: Speech
China Policy Research 