Project description
Producing European rare earth elements
The EU relies entirely on Chinese imports for rare earth elements (REE), crucial for manufacturing highly energy-efficient motors for electric mobility and renewable energy technologies. The EU-funded SUPREEMO project aims to establish a pre-commercial value chain for REE production in Europe. It will focus on developing sustainable, cost-effective and safe processing, refining and rare earth permanent magnet production technologies. The project will use primary resources from one major EU site: the Fen deposit in Norway. Initially, partners will optimise standalone technologies. Subsequently, they will determine optimum processing parameters, validating them through piloting activities. Additionally, SUPREEMO will develop a plan to attract more investors.
Objective
SUPREEMO aims to establish the first pre-commercial Rare Earth Elements (REEs) production value chain (TRL7) using European (EU) primary resources as feedstock, developing sustainable, cost-competitive processing, refining and Rare Earth (RE) Permanent Magnet (PM) production technologies in a responsible way complying with local and international safety regulations. This will contribute in securing REE materials supply for the EU industry and strategic sectors which depends 100 % on Chinese imports. The largest end-user of REEs is the PMs industry, that contain neodymium, praseodymium, and dysprosium as key elements to produce high energy-efficient motors, which are vital for electric mobility and renewable energy technologies. SUPREEMO will exploit the European primary resources from two major EU sites: Fen deposit Norway (largest carbonatite deposit in EU) with >200 Mtonne grading 1.2-1.5 % Total Rare Earth Oxides and secondly, exploring extraction technologies related to deposits from uranium extraction in the Czech Republic, technologies which is also intended for implementation in direct extraction during uranium beneficiation related to nuclear energy supply chains. SUPREEMO will capitalise on technologies demonstrated in previous projects to develop innovative, environmentally friendly, socially and economically sustainable REEs processing technologies. During phase 1, the partners will optimise the stand alone technologies to elucidate the final integrated process flowsheet with the best processing parameters in phase 2, guided by LCA and LCCA. This will be validated at the piloting activities in phase 3. Finally, the production of 50-100 kg of REO at similar cost to commercial value from Chinese production will be demonstrated at TRL7 by processing ~ 10 tonnes of ores, and the production of Rare Earth Alloy for the manufacturing of 50 kg PMs. Results will be communicated and disseminated to key stakeholders and a concrete first business plan will be set to attract more investors and stimulate a competitive, resilient and sustainable REEs production value chain ready for full-scale deployment in the EU market.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
- social scienceseconomics and businesseconomicsproduction economics
- social sciencespolitical sciencesgovernment systems
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Programme(s)
Call for proposal
(opens in new window) HORIZON-CL4-2023-RESILIENCE-01
See other projects for this callFunding Scheme
HORIZON-IA - HORIZON Innovation ActionsCoordinator
7034 Trondheim
Norway