We live in a mineral-based world. It has been said that “if you can’t grow it, you have to mine it”. Indeed, virtually everything we use on a daily basis is manufactured from the Earth’s mineral resources. Mineral raw materials provide us with our basic needs – energy, infrastructure, transportation, technology and more.
In EGS this topic is dealt with in the Mineral Resources Expert Group.
A number of European and regional projects have been carried out during the last decades in order to address mineral resources related issues. GeoERA substantially increased the knowledge about Mineral Resources.
GeoERA Projects:
- MINTELL4EU (Mineral Intelligence for Europe)
- FRAME (Forecasting and Assessing Europe’s Strategic Raw Materials needs)
- MINDeSEA (Seabed Mineral Deposits in European Seas: Metallogeny and Geological Potential for Strategic and Critical Raw Materials)
- EuroLithos (European Ornamental stone resources)
Other Mineral Resources projects
- RESEERVE (Mineral Potential of the Eastern and South-Eastern Europe Region)
- ORAMA (Optimising data collection for Primary and Secondary raw materials)
- SCRREEN and SCRREEN 2 (Solutions for Critical Raw Materials – a European Expert Network)
- Minerals4EU (Minerals Intelligence Network for Europe)
- EURare (Development of a sustainable exploitation scheme for Europe’s Rare Earth ore deposits)
- ProSUM (Prospecting Secondary Raw Materials in the Urban mine and Mining wastes)
- ProMine (Nano-particle products from new mineral resources in Europe)
- MICA (Mineral Intelligence Capacity Analysis)
- Geo-Cradle (Coordinating and integRating state-of-the-art Earth Observation Activities in the regions of North Africa, Middle East, and Balkans and Developing Links with GEO related initiatives towards GEOSS)