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Proposed EU safety rules for regulating chemicals could derail the development of a domestic critical minerals sector key to the energy transition and increase dependence on China, industry groups have said.
The intervention by the bodies — whose members include miners Anglo American, Rio Tinto and Vale as well as trading house Glencore — comes as the EU is revising its Reach chemicals regulations to improve safety and protect the environment.
The European Commission is expected to formally propose new rules later this year, after shelving a previous plan as the proposed phasing out of some harmful substances and microplastics faced a backlash.
In a letter to commission president Ursula von der Leyen, bodies representing cobalt, lithium, nickel and graphite companies said the rules went too far and would discourage investment, causing Europe to fall further behind in the race to develop domestic minerals supply chains.
According to the letter, sent on Monday and seen by the Financial Times, it would be costly for the mining industry to comply with the rules.
“The raw materials industry is still facing a wall of unachievable regulation and uncertainty,” the groups said, urging von der Leyen to reconsider elements of the rules or risk “further deindustrialisation, job losses, and increased dependence on third-country market supply chains”.
The stand-off comes as western nations are racing to break their dependence on China for critical minerals used in batteries for electric vehicles, energy and technology. The EU has a 2030 target to meet 10 per cent of its extraction needs, 40 per cent of processing and 25 per cent of recycling domestically.
Access to the minerals is also crucial to Europe’s defence industry, especially since Russia invaded Ukraine and as US President Donald Trump has said the region should shoulder a bigger burden for its security.
Supply chains for such metals are dominated by China, which will be hard to change because developing new mining and metals processing projects can take a decade or longer, and is often challenged by environmentalists.
In their letter, the Cobalt Institute, Nickel Institute, International Lithium Association and the European Advanced Carbon and Graphite Materials Association, said the proposed environmental standards for nickel were “far more stringent than current scientific evidence supports”.
They said tight limits on permitted exposure to cobalt in work places “could seriously endanger Europe’s industry”, while safety rules for lithium had caused “concern across the battery and raw materials value chain”. A lack of “coherence” between policies and regulations would increase the risk of investing in Europe, they said.
While EU officials have acknowledged that their targets for European production and processing of critical minerals are ambitious, they argue that they are the best way to kick-start the industry. Brussels in March chose 47 EU-based processing and mining projects that would enjoy streamlined permitting and access to finance.
The commission has said it would “ensure that the EU can fully meet its extraction, processing and recycling 2030 benchmarks for lithium and cobalt, while making substantial progress for graphite, nickel and manganese”.
It is yet to respond to the bodies’ letter, which warned that the bloc could be “further away” from its minerals targets in 2030 than it currently is.
The commission has tended to take a “very conservative approach to a range of chemicals rules” and this was a “major source of pain” for the industry, said Mike Blakeney, head of government and public affairs at the Cobalt Institute.
