Commission Decision recognising 47 critical raw material projects in the EU as Strategic Projects under the Critical Raw Materials Act

The Commission's first list of Strategic Projects under Regulation (EU) 2024/1252: 47 extraction, processing, recycling and substitution projects in 13 Member States, selected from 122 complete applications against the Act's criteria (contribution to supply security, technical feasibility, sustainable implementation, cross-border benefits). Recognition brings coordinated support from the Commission, Member States and financial institutions on access to finance and off-takers, and permit-granting capped at 27 months for extraction and 15 months for other projects. Among the projects represented in SMPT are five rare-earth projects for magnets, eleven naming battery-grade graphite, four of those also naming cobalt and battery-grade nickel, two tungsten projects, one gallium project, two germanium projects, and KELIBER LITHIUM, an integrated extraction-and-processing project for battery-grade lithium. The Commission puts the 47 projects' expected capital investment at €22.5 billion; that is project cost, not EU money, and is not recorded as capital.

The EU's main project-level instrument is recognition, not money: the designation changes permitting and access to finance, and any funding that follows is a separate decision. Its rare-earth projects process, separate and recycle rare earths for magnets, the activities whose Chinese technology Announcement No. 62 placed under export licence in October 2025 before its suspension.