A personal invitation from the MINEX Forum Secretariat ahead of the 10th MINEX Europe Mining & Exploration Forum, Trim, Ireland, 28–30 October 2026.
I attend a lot of conferences on mining and critical raw materials. You probably do too. And if you have sat through as many of them as I have over the past 20+ years, you will have noticed a pattern: the diagnosis of Europe’s critical raw materials predicament has become a genre unto itself. Permitting is too slow. Capital is too shy. China is too dominant. Public consent is too fragile. Energy is too expensive. The Critical Raw Materials Act is too regulatory, or not regulatory enough, or the wrong kind of regulatory. Everyone leaves the room nodding gravely. Almost everyone leaves with no exit.
We are not convening the 10th MINEX Europe Forum to run that programme again.
We are looking for speakers with the expertise, the operating experience and – frankly – the imagination to move the conversation past the lament. If your contribution is a well-referenced argument that European mining is finished, that Brussels has broken the sector, or that the whole enterprise is a lost cause, we thank you in advance and respectfully suggest you will find a warmer welcome elsewhere. What we want at the MINEX Europe is people who can answer the harder question: what actually works, and how do we scale it?
The policy clock is ticking
On 3 December 2025, the Commission published the RESourceEU Action Plan, its acceleration package for the CRMA. At its centre sits a proposal for a European Critical Raw Materials Centre — a body with a genuinely operational mandate: developing systemic intelligence on primary and secondary CRM markets, monitoring strategic projects across their lifecycle, facilitating strategic stockpiles in coordination with Member States and industry, and undertaking joint purchasing and demand-supply matching for European buyers.
On 19 May 2026, the Commission opened a call for evidence and public consultation on the Centre, running until 29 July 2026. It named four policy options it will assess:
- Facilitating access to public funding and private investment for CRM projects.
- Strengthening the market position of European companies in global markets.
- Supporting industry in mitigating the impact of supply chain disruptions.
- Improving access to CRM market intelligence.
By the time we meet in Trim on 28 October, the consultation will have closed, and the Commission will be turning submissions into a legislative proposal. That is a live window. The Forum is a chance for the sector to articulate — on the record, in the room — what it actually needs from those four options rather than what it fears from them.
A few inconvenient truths we think are worth remembering
Before we get to the questions, a corrective for the doom-and-gloom reflex. The story of European mining is not the story it is often told to be.
European mining is, on a per-tonne basis, among the safest and least environmentally impactful in the world. Fatality and severe-injury rates in EU jurisdictions are an order of magnitude below those in most extraction hubs across Asia, Africa and parts of Latin America — a function of stringent occupational health and safety law, digital underground monitoring, and heavy automation.
Nordic and Iberian operations run on grids roughly 30% less carbon-intensive than the OECD mining benchmark, thanks to nuclear, hydro and wind. The EU's Best Available Techniques regime forces water, dust and effluent standards that most jurisdictions do not attempt. Extractive waste volumes remain a legitimate and unresolved challenge — we will not pretend otherwise — but the per-unit environmental performance of European operations is, by international comparison, exceptional.
And the prize is real. Europe is the world's second-largest consumer market, with annual household expenditure of roughly USD 9.6 trillion — larger than China's, and served by consumers with more than double the per-capita purchasing power of their Chinese counterparts.
That is not a marginal detail. It is the strategic case for reindustrialisation. Batteries, magnets, semiconductors, defence platforms, medical devices and clean-energy hardware are all built on critical raw materials — and they are all sold, in disproportionate measure, into European wallets. Bringing the value chain closer to that demand is the jobs argument, the tax-base argument and the sovereignty argument in a single package.
That is the ground we want us all to stand on. From there, the questions get harder.
The questions we want the Forum to answer
If you have credible, evidence-backed thinking on any of the following, we want you on the podium at the MINEX Europe in Ireland.
On the arithmetic. Eurometaux estimates Europe needs at least ten new mines, fifteen new processing facilities and fifteen recycling plants for strategic materials by 2030. Euromines puts the mining figure at 20–30 projects. No new mine has opened in the EU in fifteen years.
What is the credible pathway from that starting position to those numbers — not in slogans, but in project pipelines, permit timelines and capital structures?
On the CRM Centre itself. If the Commission proposes it in the second half of 2026, what should it actually do first?
Joint purchasing for which materials, on what terms? Strategic stockpiles held by whom, financed how, released under what triggers? Market intelligence at what granularity — and who inside the Centre has the mandate and the skills to interpret it?
We would rather debate this now, with the operators and off-takers in the room, than read the trade press about it in 2027.
On the mid-stream. Europe frequently has the rock, and increasingly has the gigafactory, but too often loses the value in between.
What does a European precursor-and-conversion industry look like when it is actually built, financed and offtake-secured? Who is doing it?
On China. The relationship is neither a partnership of equals nor a confrontation Europe can win by decoupling alone.
What does a mature, honest European strategy toward Chinese capital, Chinese technology and Chinese processing capacity look like — one that neither denies the dependency nor pretends it can be legislated away in five years?
On capital. Strategic project designation is a badge. It is not a cheque.
Where is the equity, the mezzanine, the offtake-linked debt and the blended public-private structure that actually gets a European lithium refinery or a rare-earth separation plant to financial close? Who has done it, and what can the rest of us learn?
On social licence. The safest mining regime in the world still struggles to get consent from the communities living above the orebody.
What is genuinely working — in Sweden, in Portugal, in Spain, in Ireland — to build durable local agreement rather than merely legal compliance?
On the recycling promise. 25% of strategic materials from secondary sources by 2030.
What does the honest scale-up curve look like, and where are the bottlenecks nobody wants to name at the industry breakfast?
What we are offering
A room of roughly 200 + senior participants from around 150 organisations across European and Global mining, downstream industry, finance and policy.
Bring evidence. Bring the operating scars. Bring a proposal that a colleague from another part of the value chain could act on the Monday after. Leave the funeral oration at home.
Presentation options and speaker registration are available on the website. To secure the current rate, please apply before 15 September 2026.
