Europe’s Lithium Rush Leaves Mineral-rich Communities in the Dark

• by Bernardo Álvarez-Villar, Natalie Donback and Nejra Kravić
• A shorter version of this story was originally published on Climate Home News.

MADRID and BARCELONA, Spain, and SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina — On a sunny day, Eduardo Mostazo stands atop La Montaña, a small mountain that provides green space to the 95,000 inhabitants of Cáceres. He points up towards the clear sky. “That’s a black vulture,” says the 42-year-old mountain guide. “They come here to nest.” Mostazo was born and raised in Cáceres, a small city in southwest Spain close to the Portuguese border, a region often referred to as “Empty Spain” due to its struggle with depopulation.

From La Montaña, Mostazo gazes over at the Mediterranean dehesa, a landscape where green patches of pasture are dotted by oak and olive trees. “There’s an artisanal cheesemaker right there,” he says, pointing towards the underlying valley, which hides a buried treasure: lithium.

On this land, the mining company Extremadura New Energies (ENE) — a subsidiary of Australian Infinity Lithium — wants to build a lithium mine and processing plant.

The proposed mine would be located near Llanos de Cáceres y Sierra de Fuentes, a Special Protection Area for Birds (ZEPA) and a Special Area of Conservation (ZEC) within the Natura 2000 network, areas under European and national conservation frameworks.

Mostazo and other local activists who formed the Platform to Save the Mountain fear that the proposed mine could contaminate water sources and the landscape on which so many local jobs in tourism and agriculture — including artisanal cheesemaking and olive oil production — depend.

Their struggle to protect the pristine environment highlights a growing challenge for Europe, as the continent races to extract minerals like lithium that are critical to the clean energy transition, instead of relying on imports from China and other emerging economies. Yet, while bureaucrats in European capitals are under pressure to secure supplies on their own soil, communities where the resources are located question whether they will benefit.

“We sacrifice depopulated areas for the benefit of cities like Madrid and Barcelona, so that they can have clean centers with their electric cars… we’ve become a sacrifice zone,” says Inés Chaves, who is also part of the Platform to Save the Mountain.

ENE has promised to create 1,500 local jobs during the mine’s construction and 700 jobs over 26 years of operation.

Nonetheless, locals worry that a mine could damage today’s economic mainstays of tourism and agriculture.

“There is no talk of alternatives,” says Mostazo. “When a proposal comes from a big company with lots of millions, there’s the impression that the politicians don’t really investigate [the impacts]. They go blind from the promise.”

Breaking Europe’s mineral dependence 

As part of its efforts to boost clean energy and electrification, the European Commission wants to reduce its dependence on Chinese-produced minerals by ensuring that at least 10 percent of critical raw materials — such as lithium, copper and nickel — are extracted within Europe by 2030.

The International Energy Agency estimates that the global demand for lithium — a key component in electric car batteries — could increase by up to 42 times by 2040 from 2020 levels. Currently, the EU imports four-fifths of its extracted lithium and 100 percent of its processed lithium, the latter mostly coming from Chile but also from China and Argentina.

According to Santos Barrios, professor of crystallography and mineralogy at the University of Salamanca, Europe’s mineral dependency “is a very big problem” because the materials come from countries that often lack social and environmental protections.

“[The EU] imports lithium from other places where it is much cheaper to extract than here, but at the cost of losing many things along the way,” he says, referring to the lack of labor rights and environmental restoration guarantees in the African and Latin American countries from which Europe imports minerals.

To accelerate progress toward its 2030 deadline, in March the European Commission approved 47 strategic mining projects, granting easier access to EU funding and fast-tracked permitting processes. Spain, alongside Finland, is the European country with the highest number of strategic projects involving mineral extraction.

ENE applied but was not selected due to delays in the permitting process. Its application for a licence is still sitting with the regional government, which has requested more detailed information on the project. The company is still hopeful that their projects will pass once that additional information is delivered. 

Civil society left in the dark on strategic projects

Just 40 kilometers (about 25 miles) to the north, in Cañaveral, many locals were alarmed to learn that a nearby mining project — Las Navas, led by the company Lithium Iberia — had been selected as one of the EU’s strategic projects.

A citizens’ group opposing the mine — worried about the potential impact on water sources and nature — sent a letter to the president of the European Parliament alongside 200 other organizations, sounding the alarm around the lack of transparency and asking for access to project documentation, including the environmental impact assessment and the methodology being used to evaluate applications.

The European Commission has previously denied requests, citing it as sensitive business information, says Julio César Pintos Cubo from the green group Ecologistas en Acción.

Others, such as Friends of the Earth Europe, argue that the strategic projects under the EU’s Critical Raw Materials Act lack transparency and have failed to engage civil society, as neither the Commission nor EU member states has granted access to the project documentation.

“EU law must not be weakened to benefit poorly regulated companies — something that is unfortunately common in the mining sector — while the administration abandons transparency, water and environmental regulations, aligning itself with the mining lobby,” says Pintos.

A Commission spokesperson from the Directorate-General for Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship says the strategic minerals projects had been assessed by independent experts who were asked to evaluate — among other criteria — whether these projects can be “implemented sustainably.”

However, many of the large mining projects presented to the European Commission are in areas with ecological value where endangered species are already under threat and where mining would have a large impact on biodiversity, says Lindsey Wuisan, who leads resource justice campaigns at Friends of the Earth Europe. “The use of toxic chemicals often contaminates soil and bodies of water, posing risks to flora and fauna as well as human health,” she adds.

As highlighted in a recent position paper by Friends of the Earth Europe, despite all promises of landscape restoration and impact mitigation, most impacts are irreversible and lead to a permanent decline in biodiversity, including protected and endangered species.

Lack of “democratic accountability” threatens success

The lack of transparency and local stakeholder participation in the selection of the EU’s strategic projects could also have negative impacts on their implementation, experts warn.

“There will be opposition because the European Union is taking these decisions in Brussels following an accelerated procedure for new projects. There has been no deep consultation and there is a lot of pressure to achieve these objectives,” says Marco Siddi, a researcher with the Finnish Institute of International Affairs, adding that “there is opposition because these are high-impact mining projects.”

According to the Commission spokesperson, EU governments and local authorities are the ones who have the main responsibility for implementing these projects, including carrying out consultations with locals in accordance with national rules. 

Yet, in the areas in question, some residents feel their concerns have not been taken into account. They worry that the rush for minerals will only benefit European cities and investors while leaving behind polluted water and thousands of tons of mining waste.

Companies, for their part, have promised in most cases to minimize their impact on the local environment and to contribute to rural development.

According to ENE’s CEO Ramón Jiménez Serrano, the mine — which would also host a nearby processing plant — would only use treated wastewater and therefore wouldn’t impact local water supplies, but the company’s application for a permit with the local water authority was denied.

However, experts like Steve Emerman, a former geophysics professor turned mining consultant, warn that there is no precedent for modern, industrial mines that have been operated and closed without environmental contamination. 

Community concerns over corporate sustainability plans

On a cold and windy afternoon, 150 kilometers (93 miles) north of Cáceres, the local cultural center in Ciudad Rodrigo, a town in the region of Salamanca, fills up for an information session on the impact of a proposed lithium mining project.

More than 100 people from nearby villages — including the local priest — have gathered into the packed room. The project, led by another Australian mining company, Energy Transitions Minerals, is still in its early phases, but just as in Cáceres, there is growing concern about how it could affect the region’s landscape and traditional jobs.

Increasingly, foreign-owned companies — many lacking previous experience with mining — are jumping onto Europe’s critical minerals bandwagon. Many are what Emerman calls “junior mining companies,” recent ventures that lack the financial and technical capacity to actually extract the materials from the ground. “They just want to get the permit, then they will sell it to someone who can carry out the project,” he says.

Locals fear this could also be the case in Bosnia and Herzegovina, an EU candidate country, where the lithium rush has reached the small northeastern town of Lopare.

In 2023, the Swiss-owned junior mining company ARCORE AG announced that it had struck “gold” in the densely forested area of rolling hills.

The company claims the region holds around 1.5 metric tons of lithium and other critical raw materials like magnesium, potassium and boron, enough to sustain mining operations for 65 years. It is currently awaiting approval of a concession agreement from the Republika Srpska entity, one of the country's two administrative units.

Environmental lawyer and activist Azra Berbić thinks it is likely that another company with more resources and funding will purchase the agreement and implement the mining operations. “We've seen this story before. This is why the local communities are so worried… they fear the agreement will be sold to a company like Rio Tinto,” she says.

Rio Tinto, which literally means “Stained River”, a British-Australian conglomerate and one of the world’s largest mining companies, has faced backlash over its environmental and labor practices, including in neighboring Serbia, where a proposed lithium mine worth $2.4 billion (about 2 billion euros) ignited mass protests in 2024. Given Lopare's geographical proximity and geomorphological similarity to the Jadar region, Serbia's mining fallout is fueling local fears.

A billboard in the middle of Lopare, a joint effort between several local activist organizations, reads, “Foreign profit, our downfall. It's time for collective resistance.”

Andrijana Pekić, a Lopare native and founder of the Guardians of Majevica (Čuvari Majevice), a local environmental organization, says she is concerned about how a lithium mine would harm her rural community of about 15,000 people, where residents primarily rely on agriculture, beekeeping and milk production.

“We don't have many resources at our disposal. Information is being hidden from us. But we are prepared to fight back,” says Tomislav Simikić, a Lopare native and truck driver who spoke to us by phone as he parked his truck near the Slovenia-Croatia border.

Simikić takes issue with what he sees as ARCORE AG's lack of transparency, saying residents are being left out of the conversation, particularly regarding the potential environmental impacts of a lithium mine. Many fear that the proposed 25-square-kilometer (nearly 10-square-mile) mining area could contaminate local water sources, pollute the air, cause deforestation and degrade the soil.

For geologist Santos Barrios, transparency and dialogue with the community is important when opening a mine. He believes that all opinions should be heard and that the social and environmental impact of the mine should be minimized. However, given the urgency of sourcing lithium and other critical materials, the researcher thinks that “not everything should be left in the hands of the people who live in a village or an environmental group. That's why we have people who are in charge of seeing that the law is complied with. The last word has to be left to qualified personnel.”

In the meantime, companies are trying to reassure residents by promising the least damaging mining possible through use of advanced techniques and clean energy. In Cáceres, ENE has said it will use 100 percent renewables, although CEO Jiménez admits that not all of the required above-ground machinery has been invented in electric form yet.

In Salamanca, the Energy Transition Minerals spokesman, Jorge Gil Mediavilla, has said that “although less money will be earned, the company has agreed to renounce open-cast mining in order to carry out small, highly concentrated underground mining operations.”

Yet, some experts question the project’s viability. “I doubt that it could be profitable,” says Antonio Areas, a veteran mining entrepreneur from the area. And according to geologist Antonio Aretxabala, it would be the first underground lithium mine in the world.

While critical minerals are needed to decarbonize the transport sector and propel the EU towards its net-zero goals, rural communities living close to lithium reserves fear that large-scale mining operations will change the landscapes on which they have always relied. Places like La Montaña, for example, are home to several vulnerable species.

On a clear winter day, Mostazo, a bird-watching aficionado, points to a few circling above. He’s worried that contamination from the mine and its processing plant could leak into the streams and puddles where birds such as the threatened Spanish imperial eagle drink. The region is home to only 48 specimens of the magnificent birds. “All the different species that exist here demonstrate the environmental quality of this area,” says Mostazo. 

Also in Ciudad Rodrigo, the association ASENAVIS (Asociación para el Espacio Natural y la Vida Silvestre), a wilderness and wildlife association, tries to raise awareness about how a lithium mine could harm birds and aquifers in the area. At the same time, political representatives and big media are promoting the mining boom as a way to revive the regional economy.

But locals do not want their region to be devastated. As the priest says at the neighborhood meeting, “Since we live in a remote, unpopulated area with few services, at least let us live in peace.”

Top image: The valley of Valdeflores sits on top of Europe's second-largest hardrock lithium deposit, Cáceres, Spain, Dec 10, 2024 (Natalie Donback).

Editor’s Note: This story is part of the series “An Extractive Transition,” which offers a preview of the magazine we have in mind. It was produced as part of the first edition of the Magmatic School of Environmental Journalism.