Europe's raw material shortages threaten EV decarbonisation goals

Euractiv

09-07-2025

The European Union's ambitious targets for decarbonising its transport sector are increasingly threatened by a looming shortage of critical raw materials necessary for electric vehicle batteries, particularly cobalt, lithium and nickel.
Despite significant policy efforts, recent reports have underscored the gravity of raw material constraints and highlighted Europe's risk of falling behind global competitors in EV manufacturing.
Julia Poliscanova, Senior Director for Vehicles and E-mobility Supply Chains at the green transport NGO T&E, warned at a recent Euractiv event that though there was building attention on this issue in Brussels a few years ago, that focus seems to have been lost since publication of the Critical Raw Materials Act.
'Two years later, we have the act, but I think we lost some of this zeal and ambition,' she said. 'Maybe it's the change of the Commission, but the momentum is no longer there, and it would be good to get it back.'
'Generally, as we go toward all aspects of the energy transition – be it renewables, be it green hydrogen, be it electric vehicles – the cleantech behind it relies on some of those critical minerals,' she noted.
She said that more mining is needed, but it needs to be done strategically.
'I think everyone understands that, but then some people jump on that to say, well, this is also bad because we'll have more mining. But actually, the largest mining today is coal, then iron and then gold. So these critical materials that we need are different from the mining elements we've had in the past. And we require less [than those other mined substances], not more, we just need to focus.'
Europe doesn't have enough
Mark Mistry, Director of Public Policy and Sustainability at the Nickel Institute, an industry association, agreed. He pointed out there are three pillars of the Critical Raw Materials Act: increased mining, increased recycling, and making imports more strategic.
'We need to make sure we're supplied with raw materials, given the fact that in some cases, if I take the example of nickel, we will not be able to satisfy the growing demand, especially for EV batteries, with the nickel that we can mine or recycle in the European Union.'
Speaking at the event, Daniel Cios, the raw materials policy officer at the European Commission, said that the EU executive still views this as a critical issue. 'We haven't lost any energy in the Commission, we're devoted as much as we were before or even more with the hard work of implementing the act and selecting the strategic projects,' he said.
There has been a 'learning by doing' experience with the first round of strategic projects, which the act enables to get special funding and permitting procedures because the minerals they're mining are critical.
'We see actually after the first projects were selected that they get a lot of attention in the media, in the discussions with the governments of those countries and third countries, and many companies came to us and said they got a lot more interest from financial institutions, off-takers and suppliers after being selected,' he said. 'So we see this has really changed the discussion around raw materials projects. This is a very tangible result.'
Poliscanova said she views the strategic projects as being one of the most important parts of the act. 'The critical raw materials act as agreed is a really great framework,' she said.
'I was in a meeting last year in Canada, which is a mining jurisdiction, and people from the Canadian government were saying Julia, we would love the strategic projects in the act, that's such a great requirement, we're going to repeat something like that. Strategic projects is really the way to go. And permitting is a great compromise where we're going faster, but we're not compromising on environmental safeguards.'
Environmental concerns
However, there have been concerns raised about whether the easier permitting and financing procedures given to these strategic projects could lead to environmental damage from new mining activities, where the materials could have been obtained instead through recycling or imports.
Benedetta Scuderi, an Italian Green MEP who sits on the European Parliament's industry committee, said at the event that we need a balance going forward.
'It's important that we make the circular economy sector more competitive in terms of being able to substitute some of the needs that we have for critical raw materials,' she said.
Scuderi warned that 'even if we increase the access to critical raw materials, we have a problem in actually manufacturing [the cars].' The core issue lies in the cost disparity: 'We are struggling to add capacity or compete with batteries coming from third countries like China when the cost of batteries there is around 50% less than the cost in Europe.'
Europe's battery manufacturing industry is under mounting pressure as it struggles to compete with significantly cheaper imports from China, raising concerns over the bloc's ability to sustain a domestic supply chain for electric vehicles.
This price gap is proving detrimental to the viability of European battery producers. 'This is making our battery industry incapable of surviving,' she added, underscoring the urgency for a comprehensive strategy to bolster the sector.
The call is not only for increased production but also for a systemic approach to stimulate internal demand and competitiveness.
'We need to look at the whole battery chain, how to increase internal demand and make it competitive without negatively impacting end-user prices,' she said. The goal, she stressed, is to ensure consumers are not forced to 'pay more for European batteries' while still encouraging the use of 'those that are more sustainable and better sourced.'
Good signs on the horizon
Sara Matthieu, another Green MEP on the committee from Belgium who was involved in the act's negotiations in the parliament, said at the event that there are good signs so far that the act is working.
'We can see from what the Commission has published that for Lithium, for instance, if all projects go ahead as planned, we would reach the recycling benchmark, and even 80% of self-sufficiency when it comes to extraction.'
'When you look at cobalt, we would actually surpass the recycling benchmark but not for extraction and processing. And on rare earths, there's only good news for processing. So it's quite a mixed picture, and in any case, these are the best-case scenarios; it could occur that not all of these projects make it.'
'We also need to focus on demand management,' she added. 'There's been a lot of focus on extraction. Yes, we will need more, but the question for me is really how much and what kind of impact is that going to have?'
Matthieu remarked, 'For mobility, for instance, if you invest in public transport and shared e-mobility, that could really drastically moderate the increase in demand. The act actually contains a clause to develop a clause for demand moderation, so I'm wondering if the Commission has actually worked on that yet.'
Complicated geopolitics
The speakers at the event also discussed the complicated geopolitical situation which makes the EU's dependence on third countries for raw materials imports precarious.
The 2024 Draghi Report, commissioned by the European Commission, paints a stark picture of Europe's supply chain vulnerabilities.
It emphasised that Europe's reliance on imported raw materials exposes its EV industry to significant risks, including price volatility, supply disruptions, and geopolitical dependencies. The report highlights that current European domestic extraction and processing capacities for critical minerals are insufficient to meet the growing demand projected for the coming decades.
'China has a competitive advantage simply out of the fact that these days China is one of the most mature markets when it comes to EV batteries, so there are the amounts available to recycle,' noted Mistry.
'What we need to make sure is that the materials that we put on the market here in Europe stay within the EU and are available for European recycling facilities. We see within our member companies that they start preparing or they're already active in recycling.'
The Competitiveness Compass put forward by the European Commission earlier this year reported that Europe is starting to lag behind emerging global hubs on EV manufacturing, particularly China, the United States, and parts of Latin America, and that part of the reason is those countries have heavily invested in raw material processing and battery manufacturing capacity.
The competitiveness gap could lead to increased import reliance, stranded investments, and diminished economic benefits from the EV supply chain, the compass warned.
[Edited By Brian Maguire | Euractiv's Advocacy Lab ]