Inevitably, Europe shows a growing and accelerating consumption of mineral commodities, which at the moment the question whether supply to meet demand is adequate or not cannot be answered with any certainty because secure supply is a matter of knowing the resources and the ability to exploit them with respect to sustainability. Non-energy minerals underpin our modern economy and are essential for manufacturing and renewable “green” energy supply technologies. Many critical and strategic minerals and metals may be collected through recycling of mining related waste materials. However, even with the important contribution from recycling, it will still be necessary to extract them from primary mineral deposits, focusing on applying new technologies for deep exploration and mining, turning low-grade ores to exploitable resources and reducing generation of mining wastes and large tailings by converting them to exploitable resources.
The FRAME project (Forecasting and Assessing Europe’s Strategic Raw Materials Needs) was designed to research the critical and strategic raw materials in Europe, in scenarios as described above, by employing sound strategies and a partner base spread far and wide amongst those that have some of these raw materials. Through successful teamwork, there was the expertise and knowledge base to provide a significant innovative contribution towards knowing more about the potential primary deposits, predict new target areas/deposits and recognize the potential in secondary deposits. FRAME was made up of eight work Packages (WP) designed to collect, extract and disseminate strategic and critical mineral data to fill existing knowledge gaps in this field.
Project facts:
Project duration: 1 July 2018 – 31 October 2021.
Project Lead: Daniel Oliveira, National Laboratory of Energy and Geology, Portugal (LNEG).
Project page on GeoERA website: https://geoera.eu/projects/frame2/
Project’s own website.
GIS viewer for FRAME results
Through this viewer the results of the FRAME project are accessible.
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