Building a European JOGMEC: The Case for an Autonomous, Market-Facing EU Critical Raw Materials Centre 

EIES contribution to the European Commission's public consultation on the EU Critical Raw Materials Centre.

The European Critical Raw Materials Centre should be an autonomous European body or public-private partnership with its own legal personality outside the European Commission, capitalised through a blend of European Union (EU), member states’ and private money, and run by professionals.

The Centre should produce centralised market intelligence across materials value chains. The Centre should also be able to act to mitigate supply chain and market risks.

The Centre should be inspired by, but not blindly copy, Japan’s approach. It should have a lean, highly skilled in-house team with genuine experience in mining and metals equity and debt, hedging, logistics and commodity trading.

EIES recommends that the Centre be designed from inception to reduce its dependence on annual EU budget appropriations by monetising the market functions the Commission already proposes to give it.

Of the options on the table, an executive agency attached to the Commission should be excluded: it cannot raise capital, cannot take commercial risk, and cannot pay for market talent.

EIES recommends launching a European Minerals Investment Network (E-MIN) in the interim, to assess Europe’s needs across critical raw materials and direct public and private funds towards a pipeline of strategic projects.