Froth flotation is arguably the most important mineral separation technique. By making use of differences in surface properties between minerals, valuable particles are concentrated in large tanks by attaching to bubbles, which form a froth phase that overflows as a mineral-rich concentrate. However, current flotation technologies do not work adequately for fine particles, below 20 µm in size. This is a serious challenge at present limiting the exploitation of deposits and proper recycling of end of life products containing Critical Raw Materials (CRM). This FineFuture project will advance the fundamental understanding of fine particle flotation phenomena, which will lead to the development of ground-breaking technological solutions. This will not only help unlock new CRM deposits but also contribute to increase the resource and energy efficiency of current operations where the fines are lost to tailings. FineFuture will also enable proper reprocessing of old tailings deposits and be technology-transferred to other raw material particle-based processes within the circular economy, thus leading the way in the sustainable use of resources. For the EU industry the ability to float fine particles will be fundamental in securing access to raw materials in the future, yet to date there is no large scale collaborative effort to achieve this. The FineFuture consortium brings together an industry- and user-driven multidisciplinary team with the skills and experience required to tackle the challenging objectives set up for this project. Through a first of its kind research approach, the consortium’s combined expertise in science, engineering and industrial practice will allow a robust and knowledge-based development of innovative fine particle flotation technologies. This project will thus help boosting EU technologies for sustainable raw material processing in Europe and abroad, contributing to energy- and resource-efficient processing in benefit of the future generations.

NEXGEN-SIMS will be focusing on scale-up of promising technologies and demonstrating their potential at several large scale mining pilots, which will provide the mining industry the necessary means of addressing the future challenges in sustainable mining while at the same time NEXGEN-SIMS will be creating incitements and lowering the risk for investments associated with upgrading, retrofitting and replacing existing investments with carbon neutral technologies as well as introduction of new innovative solutions based on industrial IoT. Many fears that introduction of new and radical production systems (in our case, digitalization in combination with carbon-neutral mining systems) are associated with high investment costs that will make the European mining industry less competitive even though the facts clearly indicates the complete opposite. With NEXGEN-SIMS we intend to demonstrate that utilization of innovative solutions based on new implementations of cost-efficient connectivity can enable better monitoring, analytics, optimization and process control (primarily for the mining fleets), and that connectivity can enable introduction of new and improved optimization and automatization strategies of the unit operations associated with the material handling processes by means of carbon-neutral mining systems. The estimated potential with NEXGEN-SIMS in terms of increased productivity is large and has been estimated to be as high as 40%, which will contribute considerably to securing the existing raw materials production in Europe as well as securing the future supply and lead to unlocking of substantial reserves of new or of today unexploited resources.

The continuous effort and increased demand of the raw materials are directing the mining companies to excavate minerals at greater depths. This trend is challenging the current mining operations and the existing traditional technologies towards the objective to retain profitability, while achieving the latest Green Deal environmental vision and securing human workers safety. A key enabler, to address these challenges and to foster a sustainable development of the mining industry, is the development and deployment of innovative technologies for resource efficient extraction of the EU’s raw materials, as well as near mine exploration of critical raw materials in currently non-extracted ore bodies in existing or abandoned ones. PERSEPHONE is aiming to address these challenges by developing of the pioneering technologies for pushing the limits of EU mining industry and embodiment of autonomous and integrated near mine exploration capability to access deep deposits of critical raw materials through hard-to-reach deep and abandoned mines. The overall concept and vision of PERSEPHONE will be achieved by reducing the size of mining machines currently adapted to the human scale and embedding autonomy for risk-aware navigation and full digitalization of the extraction process by digital twin creation and key enabling technologies validation at TRL 5. Additionally, PERSEPHONE is introducing completely novel approaches in online near mine exploration core analysis and overall integration of related data analytics to the mine expansion. Thus, PERSEPHONE allows to foster green transition by reducing the cost and waste generated from deep-mining operations and foster the vision of zero human presence in highly hazardous areas. These will allow to achieve PERSEPHONE’s overall goal to digitalize and automate extraction value chain by creation of new concepts of energy-efficient autonomous drilling machines with advanced perception capabilities for navigation, face drilling, and core extraction, which will enable data-driven digital twin creation and geological modelling for further enhanced decision support and optimal extraction planning.

New environmental, economic and societal requirements in the EU’s transition to a low-carbon and digital economy call for innovative methods, technologies and techniques to be developed and applied in mineral exploration. To unlock the CRM potential in Europe, AGEMERA will conduct local state-of-art geological and geophysical surveys over a total of ~4,700 km2 in order to detailly map CRM resources in 6 EU countries and 1 third country (Zambia). The geophysical field trial surveys will demonstrate three novel non-invasive survey methods (at up to a TRL5) based on remote sensing and related data analysis: 1) passive seismic methods, 2) multi-sensing drone system combining magnetic, radiometric and electromagnetic sensing, and 3) muon-based multidetector density detection system. The project will use data from open-access databases (e.g., European Geological Data Infrastructure, EGDI), the data collected from the field by project geoscientists, and various geophysical survey methods to refine and improve the genetic mineral system models of the various deposit types known to contain lithium, cobalt, molybdenum, vanadium, PGMs, niobium, tantalum, bauxite and REE. The project will introduce the existing guidance for the application of UNFC for mineral resources to the partner countries through stakeholders, courses and public events. The project will survey citizens in the project countries, create a CRM educational package targeting schools and universities, publish an online CRM serious game, organise public events, as well as online news flashes, with the aim to reach 5,000,000 citizens by 2030. The project will create an open-access SoftGIS analysis and database on people’s social, cultural, environmental and economic concerns related to mining and mineral exploration. These data enable the creation of socio-economic potential maps to be used in parallel with the geological potential maps, consequently ensuring a basis for socially accepted and sustainable mining.

The DISIRE project has been inspired by the real existing needs of multiple industrial sectors, including the world leading industrial partners in the non-ferrous, ferrous, chemical and steel industries that are highly connected and already affiliated with the SPIRE PPP and its objectives. The overall clear and measurable objective of the DISIRE project is to evolve the existing industrial processes by advancing the Sustainable Process Industry through an overall Resource and Energy efficiency by the technological breakthroughs and concepts of the DISIRE technological platform in the field of Industrial Process Control (IPC). With the DISIRE project the properties of the raw materials or product flows will be dramatically integrated by their transformation in a unique inline measuring system that will extend the level of knowledge and awareness of the internal dynamics of the undergoing processes taking place during transformation or integration of raw materials in the next levels of production. In this approach, the Integrated Process Control system, instead of having external experts to tune the overall processes, based on the DISIRE concept will enable the self reconfiguration of all the production lines by the produced products itself. Specific DISIRE Process Analyzer Technology (PAT) will be able to define quality and performance requirements, that for the first time in the process industry will be able to be directly applied on the physical properties of the developed products and thus enabling the overall online and product specific reconfiguration of the control system. In this way, the whole production can be fully integrated in a holistic approach from the raw materials to the end product, allowing the multiple process reconfigurations and an optimal operation based on the product’s properties that can be generalized in a whole product production cycle being spanned in multiple cross-sectorial processes.