Assessing the Critical Raw Materials potential in Europe to support the energy transition.

The energy transition imposes to Europe the crucial challenge of securing a sustainable supply of critical raw materials (CRMs). The European Union's Critical Raw Materials Act represents a strategic response to this challenge, aiming to strengthen Europe's supply chain resilience and reduce dependence on foreign imports for materials essential to green technologies. Assessing Europe's domestic potential for CRMs is fundamental to achieving the Act's objectives of securing 10% of the EU's annual consumption through domestic extraction by 2030. This evaluation becomes particularly vital as demand for these materials is projected to surge with the widespread adoption of renewable energy technologies, electric vehicles, and energy storage systems.

In this context, European geological survey organizations (GSOs) play a key role, at national to EU levels. The EU-funded GSEU – Geological Service for Europe project, coordinated by EuroGeoSurveys, an international organization that brings together Europeans GSOs, aims at providing harmonized pan-European geoscientific data and expertise to support policy and decision making. The Raw Materials team, coordinated by BRGM, the French geological survey organization, has compiled a harmonized dataset of CRM deposits in Europe, controlled and updated by all national data providers, based on the 2023 CRM list of the European Commission. This dataset allows to assess and map the geological potential for CRM in Europe, globaly, per country and per commodity.

In addition to a harmonized and updated knowledge on the geological potential in Europe, mineral prospectivity mapping (MPM) plays a pivotal role by identifying areas with high potential for the discovery of new CRM deposits. Based on the harmonized dataset of CRM deposits in Europe produced by the GSEU Raw Materials team, the 1 to 1.5M lithostratigraphic and structural maps of Europe and a new data driven MPM method combining the DBA (Disc Based Association) data aggregation approach and Random Forest regression, we have produced pan-European prospectivity maps for a selection of CRM (Co, Cu, Li, Ni, Mg, Mn, Nb, Ni, Sb, Ta, V, W). These maps provide crucial information to both industry stakeholders and policymakers. They reduce exploration risks and costs by highlighting promising areas for detailed investigation, and they enable informed decisions about land use, environmental protection and resource management strategies.

In this presentation, we briefly describe the CRM deposits dataset compiled by the GSEU Raw Materials team, the maps and potential assessments for CRM in Europe, and the pan-European mineral prospectivity maps for selected critical commodities. We also briefly present the methodologies that were used to develop these products and discuss future developments of this work.