Horizon Europe is the European Union (EU) funding programme for the period 2021 – 2027, which targets the sectors of research and innovation. The programme’s budget is around € 95.5 billion, of which € 5.4 billion is from NextGenerationEU to stimulate recovery and strengthen the EU’s resilience in the future, and € 4.5 billion is additional aid.
Projects outcomes will enable achieving the expected impacts of the destination by increasing access to primary raw materials and secondary raw materials, in particular critical raw materials for EU industrial value chains and strategic sectors.
This topic is focused on technologies for extraction and processing of critical raw materials.
The actions in this call should also be pursued with a view on developments in the call “HORIZON-CL4-2023/2024-RESILIENCE-01-02: Innovative technologies for sustainable and decarbonised extraction” in terms of industrial viability, safety and environmental impacts.
Actions are expected to develop and demonstrate extraction and processing technologies to facilitate exploitation of the primary raw critical raw materials (minerals and metals only) for the EU to strengthen the EU supply chains.
Actions have to collaborate with Canada or Ukraine, following the strategic partnership on raw materials established in 2021 between the EU and Canada and with Ukraine. The consortia should contain raw materials industry from at least one of the partner countries and raw materials users from the EU. Technology should be demonstrated on the resources of the partner country.
Actions should envisage clustering activities with other relevant selected projects for cross-projects co-operation, consultations and joint activities on cross-cutting issues and share of results as well as participating in joint meetings and communication events. To this end proposals should foresee a dedicated work package and/or task, and earmark the appropriate resources accordingly. Actions should facilitate the market uptake of solutions developed through industrially- and user-driven multidisciplinary consortia covering the relevant value chain and should consider standardisation aspects when relevant.
Proposals submitted under this topic should include a business case and exploitation strategy, as outlined in the introduction to this Destination.
70%
Expected EU contribution per project: €7.50 million
To ensure a balanced portfolio covering the partners from the two partner countries mentioned in the scope below, grants will be awarded to applications in order of ranking but also to at least one project per each partner country, provided that the applications attain all thresholds.
If projects use satellite-based earth observation, positioning, navigation and/or related timing data and services, beneficiaries must make use of Copernicus and/or Galileo/EGNOS (other data and services may additionally be used).
To increase EU resilience in raw materials supply chains and thus reduce the serious risks to the Union’s strategic assets, economic and societal interests, autonomy, and security associated with the current EU reliance on a few third countries for critical raw materials, by increasing sustainable and responsible sourcing of primary and secondary raw materials necessary to enable the green and digital transition and in alignment with the Communication (2020) 474 on Critical Raw Materials Resilience, participation in this topic is limited to legal entities established in Member States, associated countries, OECD countries, African Union Member States*, MERCOSUR, CARIFORUM, Andean Community and countries with which the EU has concluded strategic partnerships on raw materials. The choice of these countries was made taking into consideration the development of strategic international partnerships on raw materials and avoidance of reinforcing existing over-dependencies, as well as the importance of involving partners committed to pursuing open trade in such materials.
Proposals including legal entities which are not established in the countries that fall under the criteria above will be ineligible.
Any activity aimed at deploying subliminal techniques beyond a person’s consciousness, exploiting any of the vulnerabilities of a specific group of persons and at using emotion recognition systems will be ineligible.
* “African Union member states” includes countries whose membership has been temporarily suspended.
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Contact Persons:
Dr Angelos Ntantos
Scientific Officer
Telephone: +357 22 205 033
Email: antantos@research.org.cy
Mr George Christou
Scientific Officer
Telephone: +357 22 205 030
Email: gchristou@research.org.cy