GeoERA raw materials to support Europe’s resilience on raw materials

Europe’s vision to be a climate neutral economy by 2050 has ushered in the energy transition. Carbon-neutral energy supply is based on raw materials from which energy-critical elements for rechargeable batteries like cobalt, graphite, lithium and rare earth elements can be purified. In addition to direct energy generation, other future-oriented, environmentally friendly key technologies needed for digitisation and mobility can only be engineered by using raw materials (European Commission 2019).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

GeoERA´s contribution towards resilience in Europe’s raw materials supply chains

The well-being of society and the interdependencies of national economies depend heavily on reliably functioning supply chains as the COVID-19 pandemic proved this long-known statement in everyone's daily life. None of the supply chains can do without the mostly mineral raw materials. The United Nations sees raw materials as the key component for achieving all 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

European mineral intelligence – collecting, harmonizing and sharing data on European raw materials

The major share of raw materials needed to sustain our present lifestyle and even more importantly, required for the crucial green transition, are sourced outside Europe. The European Commission aims to enhance Europe's resilience and strengthen domestic sourcing. Although Europe has a long tradition of mining and extractive activities, it is acknowledged that there are several challenges to achieve European sourcing of certain raw materials such as the critical raw materials. A basic prerequisite to enable access to domestic raw materials is information on raw material occurrences, current and past mining activities, resources and reserves. The Geological Survey organizations (GSOs) of Europe play a key role in generating, compiling, gathering and storing the most up-to-date information as well as long-term data series on raw materials at national and regional levels. Over the last decade, the GSOs have joined forces and taken essential steps to harmonize and share data on raw materials. The results of this co-operation are illustrated as interactive maps on the European Geological Data Infrastructure (EGDI). This paper describes the data compiled in co-operation between the GSOs, and analyses the strengths and weaknesses of, as well as opportunities for and threats towards, the data

GeoERA Raw Materials Monograph : the past and the future

ABSTRACT: GeoERA Minerals projects have produced data aimed at supporting Europe’s minerals sector and to assist the European Commission to realise its goals for raw materials. Data has been compiled on mineral occurrences and mineral provinces across Europe, in particular, areas with potential to host Critical Raw Materials. Anecdotal evidence from the minerals sector provides an indication of the likelihood of exploration leading to mine development. For every 1,000 mineral showings examined, only 100 may receive further exploration work and of those 100, only 10 may warrant more detailed sampling either through trenching, drilling or other means and of those 10 only 1 may proceed to an evaluation through a full feasibility study which itself has only 50% chance of being positive. Following this, any project for which a mine proposal is made must undergo a full evaluation and permitting by authorities including full public consultation. The proposal may or may not pass this scrutiny. In terms of a schedule, the generally accepted minimum time frame from discovery to production is 10 years and usually much more, up to 20 years.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Groundwater protection in Denmark and the role of water supply companies

Denmark has a decentralised water supply structure with about 2500 water supply companies. Until recently, about 150 of these, especially the larger ones, were owned by local authorities; the rest are private, all run on an independent and not-for-profit basis. Recently, a new law, the Water Sector Law (Miljøministeriet 2009), was implemented. Its purpose is to privatise the water supply sector (although, as hitherto, into not-for-profit corporations), and statutory duties are separated from operations in order to make the supply of drinking water to consumers as efficient as possible. An important element of the Water Sector Law is the introduction of a new regulatory body, the Utility Secretariat. The role of this new institution under the Danish Competition and Consumer Authority is to enforce price ceilings on drinking water, based on a selection of benchmark parameters

Shallow groundwater quality in Latvia and Denmark

Experience and results from the Danish groundwater monitoring programme that has been carried out systematically since 1990, have been used in a co-operative project between Latvia and Denmark. The main objective of the project was to obtain more detailed knowledge of the shallow Latvian groundwater, to optimise the Latvian groundwater monitoring programme and to support the implementation of European legislation such as the Water Framework Directive, the Nitrate Directive and the Groundwater Directive in Latvia. Comprehensive summaries describing the methodology of groundwater quality monitoring as well as the major results from the Danish groundwater monitoring network can be found in GEUS (2005) and Stockmarr (2005). Until recently only few data on Latvian groundwater quality were available, but in a project running from 2003 to 2006, 800 samples from groundwater, springs and drains have been analysed for a large number of components resulting in a comprehensive overview of the status of Latvian groundwater (Fig. 1; Gosk et al. 2006). The project Agricultural influence on groundwater in Latvia was carried out by the State Geological Survey of Latvia and the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS) and was supported by the Danish Environmental Protection Agency within the framework of the DANCEE programme (Danish Co-operation for Environment in Eastern Europe). As a spin-off of the project this paper compares groundwater quality in the two countries

From science to practice in implementing the European Union’s Water Framework Directive

The Water Framework Directive (WFD) of the European Union aims to achieve a ‘good’ status for all inland and coastal waters by the year 2015 (EC 2000). The directive defines how this should be achieved through the establishment of environmental objectives and ecological targets. Successful implementation of the WFD requires integration into already existing national legislation and a sound combination of issues on technical feasibility, scientific knowledge and socio-economic aspects requiring intensive stakeholder involvement. This calls for appropriate tools such as models to support management of technical and social aspects of different phases of the implementation (Rekolainen et al. 2003; Quevauviller et al. 2005). It is therefore necessary to provide an overview of already existing methods and tools and develop new ones. Research programmes funded by the European Commission (EC) often address issues of current interest for practitioners, such as the Fifth Framework Programme, where a number of research projects to support the practical implementation of the WFD were initiated under the theme ‘Energy, Environment and Sustainable Development’. The funding part (the Directorate-General for Research, DG Research) and the responsible authority for the WFD at European level (Directorate-General of Environment) saw the need to cluster these research projects and related activities, and initiated the Harmoni-CA project, a socalled ‘Concerted Action’ (i.e. Harmonised Modelling Tools for Integrated River Basin Management). The objectives of this paper are (a) to briefly describe the overall purpose of the Harmoni-CA project and some of its overarching outputs, and (b) to further illustrate how the implementation of the WFD can be enhanced by combining monitoring and modelling disciplines and by bringing practitioners and researchers together

Nitrate reduction in geologically heterogeneous catchments:a framework for assessing the scale of predictive capability of hydrological models

International audienceIn order to fulfil the requirements of the EU Water Framework Directive nitrate load from agricultural areas to surface water in Denmark needs to be reduced by about 40%. The regulations imposed until now have been uniform, i.e. the same restrictions for all areas independent of the subsurface conditions. Studies have shown that on a national basis about 2/3 of the nitrate leaching from the root zone is reduced naturally, through denitrification, in the subsurface before reaching the streams. Therefore, it is more cost-effective to identify robust areas, where nitrate leaching through the root zone is reduced in the saturated zone before reaching the streams, and vulnerable areas, where no subsurface reduction takes place, and then only impose regulations/restrictions on the vulnerable areas. Distributed hydrological models can make predictions at grid scale, i.e. at much smaller scale than the entire catchment. However, as distributed models often do not include local scale hydrogeological heterogeneities, they are typically not able to make accurate predictions at scales smaller than they are calibrated. We present a framework for assessing nitrate reduction in the subsurface and for assessing at which spatial scales modelling tools have predictive capabilities. A new instrument has been developed for airborne geophysical measurements, Mini-SkyTEM, dedicated to identifying geological structures and heterogeneities with horizontal and lateral resolutions of 30-50 m and 2 in, respectively, in the upper 30 m. The geological heterogeneity and uncertainty are further analysed by use of the geostatistical software TProGS by generating stochastic geological realisations that are soft conditioned against the geophysical data. Finally, the flow paths within the catchment are simulated by use of the MIKE SHE hydrological modelling system for each of the geological models generated by TProGS and the prediction uncertainty is characterised by the variance between the predictions of the different models. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved