Kiruna: Europe’s scramble to secure the metals behind its green and digital transitions is gathering pace, with a growing roster of flagship projects meant to loosen China’s grip on critical raw materials. Under its Critical Raw Materials Act, the EU has now designated some 60 strategic projects, combining 47 inside the bloc with 13 in partner countries abroad, spanning the extraction, processing, recycling and substitution of the materials that modern industry cannot do without. The law set deliberately stretching targets. By 2030, the EU wants to mine 10 percent of its annual consumption of strategic raw materials, process 40 percent and source a quarter from recycling, while ensuring no single third country supplies more than 65 percent of any key material. Those benchmarks amount to an admission of how dependent Europe has become, particularly on China, for the lithium, rare earths and other inputs essential to batteries, magnets and microchips. The strategic projects are the law’s main instrument. Designation brings faster permitting, easier access to finance and coordinated support, advantages designed to overcome the long lead times and heavy capital costs that have deterred mining and refining investment in Europe. A second call for applications closed in January 2026, and member states face a November deadline to set out the penalties that will enforce the regime. Yet ambition and reality still sit uneasily together. Opening a mine or building a processing plant in Europe can take a decade and runs into local opposition, environmental concerns and costs far above those of competitors. Recycling, for all its promise, cannot yet supply materials at the scale required, and substitution remains largely experimental. The projects are necessary but not sufficient, and the 2030 targets look demanding against that backdrop. The geopolitical logic, however, is hard to dispute. Recent disruptions to global supply chains have shown how exposed Europe is when a dominant supplier restricts exports, and the drive for resilience has only intensified. Even partial progress toward the benchmarks would reduce that vulnerability and give the bloc more room to manoeuvre in an era of resource competition. The flagship projects, then, are a bet that Europe can build a raw-materials base worthy of its industrial ambitions before the decade is out. Whether the permits, the money and the public acceptance arrive fast enough is the open question. The targets are set; the harder work of digging, refining and recycling has only just begun.