The European Union is focusing on Latin America and Africa to diversify suppliers of raw materials considered critical for the energy transition, such as some minerals, a European official said Tuesday.
Cristina Lobillo, director of the Working Group of the European Union (EU) Energy Platform, who spoke at a conference on energy in Madrid organized by the ESADE business school, said that in relation to “critical minerals” such as lithium, cobalt or magnesium, Europe cannot “repeat the same mistake” of extreme dependence on a single supplier, as happened with Russian gas.
“We need a European plan for the industry,” said Cristina Lobillo, who recalled that Europe’s dependence on China in relation to some of these minerals is 98%, although they exist all over the planet, including in EU countries.
What the EU is doing, he said, is working to “ensure the proper functioning” of supply chains and developing cooperation with third countries.
“In particular, now, we are focusing on Africa and Latin America,” said Cristina Lobillo who, in this sense, described as “very important” the first summit in eight years between the EU and the Community of Latin American States. Caribbean (CELAC), scheduled for mid-July in Brussels.
Minerals such as lithium are considered essential to achieve the so-called “energy transition” from world economies dependent on fossil fuels to less polluting production and consumption systems based on renewable sources.
Present at the same conference, the Vice President of the European Investment Bank (EIB), Ricardo Mourinho Félix, argued that the EU must understand “that the concept of strategic autonomy must be, and can only be, a project of open strategic autonomy”. , that is, diversify the sources of supply, be it energy, essential raw materials or fundamental equipment” to move in this direction.
“Europe must first and foremost look at itself and at the different parts of the world and know how it can define open strategic autonomy. Thinking that we can produce everything in Europe is not only unrealistic, but depending on ourselves is not much better than depending on of one economic bloc or another,” he told reporters.
The EIB has unlocked “very important financing in this area”, said Moutinho Félix, who stressed that this support ranges from projects directly related to the production of renewable energy to others focused on energy efficiency, which has “a very important and which is often a bit neglected”.
“What we have to do is not just produce green energy, it is to use energy better so that we do not need to produce as much energy and therefore we do not need to use critical raw materials as much,” he said. saying.
Mourinho Félix also highlighted the recycling aspect and the importance of developing the capacity to recycle materials, in order to replace the current “extractive model” of resources.
“The worst mistake we can make is moving from the extractive model of fossil fuels to the extractive model of critical materials for new technologies, which is still an extractive model from the point of view of energy production, but also sustainable in exploitation. of natural resources, which are limited,” he said.
Source: TSF
