GREENPEG invited 20 undergraduate and MSc students of energy engineering and social sciences to learn about value chains in the mining and energy industries during a one-week excursion through North-West Spain and Portugal in September 2022. These are students whose training does not normally deal with the topic of securing raw materials.
The aim was to raise awareness of the relevance of raw materials (not only metals but also aggregates and industrial minerals) and the role they play in society, in particular to manage the major challenges of our time such as the energy transition and climate protection as well as the development of advanced technologies. The one-week bus tour included the Mitruku Wave Energy Converter in the Bay of Biscay, Aldeadávila Hydropower Plant in the Province of Salamanca, as well as the Arañuelo solar farm for the energy sector and Saloro´s Barruecopardo tungsten mine and the Gonçalo Li-Pegmatite quarry in the Guarda district in Portugal for the mining sector.
The Iberian Peninsula has rich deposits of raw materials for the energy transition, but their extraction is also the subject of a lively debate among those affected. In order to better understand the positions of both sides, GREENPEG invited several representatives from both sides including associations, research, mining developers and politics to a Round Table at the University of Salamanca. On the agenda were nine questions that dealt with the challenges of sourcing the energy transition, implementing the European GREEN DEAL, but also the socio-economic challenges and user conflicts in this regard. Each question was followed by a poll of all participants for their views. Find out more about the Focus Group Meeting Spain in our December Newsletter Special and on Youtube.
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While on tour with her collegues and 16 students from five European countries as part of the GREENPEG Focus Group Meeting Spain our project manager Carla Pueyo Lloret was interviewed by “Hoy por Hoy Provincial Cáceres of the radion station Cadena SER. Carla explains the aim and objective of the Focus Group Meeting and the special relevance of raw materials that contribute to Spain´s ambitious investments in renewable energies. Listen to Carla on the radio in the following link: Hoy por Hoy Provincial Cáceres
The International Clustering Workshop aims to stimulate new inter-regional clustering activities and project ideas among the participants, with a focus on raw materials value chain. The workshop is led by the H2020 MINE.THE.GAP project which consists of 9 experienced clusters across Europe. The clusters will be the guiding hand through the process. In addition, the co-organiser H2020 GREENPEG project will provide support by sharing their innovative technologies for exploration and potential follow up research ideas. Companies, research institutes and other relevant actors in the raw materials sector are welcome to bring your ideas over and join the discussion. The workshop also provides a great opportunities to network with people interested in solving problems through innovation. The workshop is a physical meeting held in English. It is free of charge to all those who wish to attend. More information will be soon updated on the MINE.THE.GAP website. If you have further questions, please
GREENPEG coordinator Axel Müller met The QuartzCorp (TQC) management including Thomas Guillaume (CEO), Benny Hallam (VP), Robert Kvamme, Christian Hadley and Oscar Nijs at Drag in northern Norway, to discuss the latest developments of pegmatite-deposit-adjusted exploration tools and preliminary exploration results related to the Tysfjord GREENPEG demonstration site. TQC is one of the major stakeholders of the GREENPEG project.
Among the discussed topics was the chemical quartz quality of Tysfjord pegmatites. Regional quartz chemistry mapping in the frame of GREENPEG revealed that the quartz chemistry of Tysfjord pegmatites is surprisingly consistent regionally being of very high chemical quality. These results increased the total volume of inferred quartz resources. Since spring 2022, TQC is upscaling mining at the Håkonhals pegmatite mine due to strong increasing demands of the specific quartz quality of the Tysfjord pegmatites. Thus, the news about increased resources was highly appreciated by TQC.
At the same day, QC organized the annual “dugnadsdag” (volunteer day) to support the Drag community by improving the village’s public facilities. This year, about 30 TQC employees together with other volunteers from Drag painted the kindergarten, fixed the lights of the village’s football field, repaired hiking tracks, among other things. This annual TQC volunteer day is very much appreciated by the local community because results can be seen immediately and increases the public acceptance of TQC.
The 2022 Living Planet Symposium organised by European Space Agency (ESA) took place on 23–27 May 2022 in Bonn, Germany with record-breaking numbers of more than 5000 participants. The event joined representatives from space agencies and international organisations and corporations, business and enterprise leaders, and world-class scientists from across the world. They have all come together to discuss how Earth observation can contribute to science and society, namely its role in advancing the comprehension of our planet and how it is being affected by climate change. With 240 science sessions, the symposium covered distinct thematic areas from Earth’s core, cryosphere, land and atmosphere.
The GREENPEG project participated with a Poster Presentation on Wednesday, the dedicated Climate Day, showing how the project results are essential for sustainable natural resources and energy, namely for the exploration of LCT pegmatites that are considered a major source of critical raw materials for the energy transition. Moreover, the work presented by the GREENPEG team, entitled “Exploiting Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 data for province scale exploration: the GREENPEG project case studies”, highlighted the collaboration and integration of different instruments, namely between the Copernicus Sentinel Series. The work was very well received by either geoscientists or by data analysts and software developers, all recognizing the importance of the use of satellites as a non-invasive tool of the exploration chain.
The part of the IFU GmbH within the GREENPEG project is the geophysical surveying and drone-based data acquisition. In the first period of the project, IFU focused on developing, setting up and testing the hardware for ground-and drone-based hyperspectral data acquisition. This includes the heavy-duty drone system and the acousto-optical monochromator for hyperspectral imaging. See video of drone-base data acquisition here.
MINE.THE.GAP is an INNOSUP project which provides direct funding to SMEs as an innovation support. Its main instrument is open calls which can be seen as miniature H2020 open calls with far less bureaucracy for a grant up to 50.000€ per beneficiary. Through the open calls, MINE.THE.GAP brings SMEs from the raw materials sector together with companies that have solutions for a more digital, greener, and circular raw materials value chain.
Its second open call will be launched on 10 January 2022. As with reference to the composition of the GREENPEG consortium companies from Germany, Portugal and Spain are eligible to apply, we see this as a funding opportunity for those GREENPEG partners originating from these countries. In addition, as MINE.THE.GAP funds R&I projects at TRL 6-8, we regarded this as a clustering opportunity for GREENPEG. Therefore, this Info-Webinar is jointly held by MINE.THE.GAP and GREENPEG together with AXELERA (chemical cluster from France), IDiA (digital cluster from Spain) and ETPSMR (European Technology Platform on Sustainable Mineral Resources).
Here you can find the agenda for more information.
If you would like to participate, please register for the Info-Webinar here. If you encounter any troubles, please contact Mrs. Meng-Chun Lee (mengchun.lee@gkz-ev.de) for registration.
Looking forward to seeing you at the Info-Webinar!
GREENPEG project has been selected to participate in the EU Innovation Radar, an initiative to collect structured data about the innovation profile of EU funded projects and their outputs. The Innovation Radar is a European Commission initiative to identify high potential innovations and innovators in EU-funded research and innovation projects. The goal of this is to identify high-potential innovators and innovations; their specific ‘go to market’ needs; and, provide targeted recommendations. The aim is ultimately to encourage and support innovators in getting their innovations 'out of the lab' and into (or at least closer to) the market. You can find more information on this initiative in this link. The Innovation Radar is a complementary tool to the Horizon Results Platform. GREENPEG innovations in terms of technology development are seen in the introduction of the first EU certified helicopter nose stinger for district and prospect scale exploration, the piezoelectric seismometer as the only geophysical method which addresses the piezoelectric effect as a petrophysical characteristic to detect buried quartz-rich ore bodies, which commonly have indistinct low magnetic and radiogenic responses, and new drone-borne hyperspectral imaging tools for mapping small scale deposits.