The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and the EU launched a joint facility to provide equity investments for the exploration of critical and strategic raw materials, aiming to mobilize up to €100 million in investments, the bank announced on Thursday.
'The EBRD is providing €25 million and this will be matched by the EU's contribution from the Horizon Europe Programme under the InvestEU umbrella. The facility aims to mobilize a further €50 million,' the EBRD said in a statement.
The project will leverage the EBRD's mining expertise to invest in early-stage projects across EU member states including Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Sloven, as well as in Albania, Armenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Kosovo, Moldova, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia, Tunisia, Türkiye and Ukraine.
Rare earth elements consist of a group of 17 chemical elements and are indispensable elements for new technologies like batteries for electric vehicles (EVs).
China supplies over 61% of the world's rare earth elements and holds roughly two-thirds of scarce metals and minerals globally, according to Statista, a German online data gathering and visualization platform.
Türkiye has already made headway in this sector with the establishment of a Rare Earth Elements Research Institute in 2020 to examine the potential of critical minerals.
A discovery in 2022 of the world's second-largest rare earth element reserve in the central province of Eskisehir accelerated this sector's development in Türkiye, with the country now ready to build an industrial facility in Eskisehir to process 570,000 tonnes of rare earth elements on an annual basis.
By Handan Kazanci
Anadolu Agency
energy@aa.com.tr