The continuous effort and increased demand of the raw materials are directing the mining companies to excavate minerals at greater depths. This trend is challenging the current mining operations and the existing traditional technologies towards the objective to retain profitability, while achieving the latest Green Deal environmental vision and securing human workers safety. A key enabler, to address these challenges and to foster a sustainable development of the mining industry, is the development and deployment of innovative technologies for resource efficient extraction of the EU’s raw materials, as well as near mine exploration of critical raw materials in currently non-extracted ore bodies in existing or abandoned ones. PERSEPHONE is aiming to address these challenges by developing of the pioneering technologies for pushing the limits of EU mining industry and embodiment of autonomous and integrated near mine exploration capability to access deep deposits of critical raw materials through hard-to-reach deep and abandoned mines. The overall concept and vision of PERSEPHONE will be achieved by reducing the size of mining machines currently adapted to the human scale and embedding autonomy for risk-aware navigation and full digitalization of the extraction process by digital twin creation and key enabling technologies validation at TRL 5. Additionally, PERSEPHONE is introducing completely novel approaches in online near mine exploration core analysis and overall integration of related data analytics to the mine expansion. Thus, PERSEPHONE allows to foster green transition by reducing the cost and waste generated from deep-mining operations and foster the vision of zero human presence in highly hazardous areas. These will allow to achieve PERSEPHONE’s overall goal to digitalize and automate extraction value chain by creation of new concepts of energy-efficient autonomous drilling machines with advanced perception capabilities for navigation, face drilling, and core extraction, which will enable data-driven digital twin creation and geological modelling for further enhanced decision support and optimal extraction planning.

The INTMET approach represents a unique technological breakthrough to overcome the limitations related to difficult low grade and complex ores to achieve high efficient recovery of valuable metals (Cu, Zn, Pb, Ag) and CRM (Co, In, Sb). Main objective of INTMET is applying on-site mine-to-metal hydroprocessing of the produced concentrates enhancing substantially raw materials efficiency thanks to increase Cu+Zn+Pb recovery over 60% vs. existing selective flotation. 3 innovative hydrometallurgical processes (atmospheric, pressure and bioleaching), and novel more effective metals extraction techniques (e.g. Cu/Zn-SX-EW, chloride media, MSA, etc) will be developed and tested at relevant environment aiming to maximise metal recovery yield and minimising energy consumption and environmental footprint. Additionally secondary materials like tailings and metallurgical wastes will be tested as well for metals recovery and sulphur valorisation. The technical, environmental and economic feasibility of the entire approaches will be evaluated to ensure a real business solution of the integrated INTMET process. INTMET will be economically viable thanks to diversification of products (Cu, Zn, Pb), high-profitable solution (producing commodities not concentrates), with lower operation and environmental costs (on-site hydroprocessing will avoid transport to smelters) and allowing mine-life extension developing a new business-model concept based on high efficient recovery of complex ores that will ensure EU mining industry competitiveness and employment. INTMET is fully aligned with EIP-RM validated in the PolymetOre Commitment where most of INTMET partners take part on and the market up-take solutions are guaranteed by an exploitation from industrially-driven consortia composed by 3 Mines, 2 SMEs (AGQ -waste&water tech provider; MINPOL -policy & exploitation expert), 2 tech providers (OUTOTEC and TR) and 5 complementary RTD´s with expertise in leaching and recovery metals processing

NEXGEN-SIMS will be focusing on scale-up of promising technologies and demonstrating their potential at several large scale mining pilots, which will provide the mining industry the necessary means of addressing the future challenges in sustainable mining while at the same time NEXGEN-SIMS will be creating incitements and lowering the risk for investments associated with upgrading, retrofitting and replacing existing investments with carbon neutral technologies as well as introduction of new innovative solutions based on industrial IoT. Many fears that introduction of new and radical production systems (in our case, digitalization in combination with carbon-neutral mining systems) are associated with high investment costs that will make the European mining industry less competitive even though the facts clearly indicates the complete opposite. With NEXGEN-SIMS we intend to demonstrate that utilization of innovative solutions based on new implementations of cost-efficient connectivity can enable better monitoring, analytics, optimization and process control (primarily for the mining fleets), and that connectivity can enable introduction of new and improved optimization and automatization strategies of the unit operations associated with the material handling processes by means of carbon-neutral mining systems. The estimated potential with NEXGEN-SIMS in terms of increased productivity is large and has been estimated to be as high as 40%, which will contribute considerably to securing the existing raw materials production in Europe as well as securing the future supply and lead to unlocking of substantial reserves of new or of today unexploited resources.

The EU imports 80% of its industrial raw materials making European supply chains highly vulnerable to disruption and threatening the EU's ability to manufacture raw material-intensive technologies, such as electric cars, wind turbines, and ICT hardware, that are essential to the green and digital transformations. Europe possesses significant mineral potential but development is limited by the lack of sustainable, low-impact exploration methods and by social opposition to mineral projects. With VECTOR we will generate new knowledge to overcome these technical and social barriers, unlocking Europe's raw material potential and improving the resilience of EU raw materials supply chains. Overcoming issues will require major changes of the business models in the extractives industry and to integrate a more human-centred approach. The VECTOR project is based on the premise that a prerequisite to any sustainable human activity is to minimize the environmental and social costs and include all the stakeholders in the decision making processes around this. VECTOR's overall objective is to deliver evidence-based and accessible knowledge that integrates the scientific and social pathways to successful mineral exploration and mining. The first pillar of our approach is a geological prospectivity toolkit based on an entirely new workflow using machine learning-based integration of less invasive geological, geochemical and geophysical measurements. The workflow will be validated in three European sedimentary basins and will be transferable worldwide. The second pillar is a social acceptance procedure that identifies, for the first time, the values that the European public invokes when deciding about mineral development. This will result in a Social Acceptance index and a new body of knowledge that reflects diverse values-based perspectives. The third pillar is an integrated toolkit consisting of a unique, distributed, multimodal, self-learning, and interactive platform that will consider both geological exploration potential and socio-economic factors to yield a data-driven, quantitative and integrative assessment of regions more suitable for exploration and, eventually, mining. The results will be freely available via an engaging, web-based interface designed to support evidence-based decision making and the UNFC and UNRMS.

The DISIRE project has been inspired by the real existing needs of multiple industrial sectors, including the world leading industrial partners in the non-ferrous, ferrous, chemical and steel industries that are highly connected and already affiliated with the SPIRE PPP and its objectives. The overall clear and measurable objective of the DISIRE project is to evolve the existing industrial processes by advancing the Sustainable Process Industry through an overall Resource and Energy efficiency by the technological breakthroughs and concepts of the DISIRE technological platform in the field of Industrial Process Control (IPC). With the DISIRE project the properties of the raw materials or product flows will be dramatically integrated by their transformation in a unique inline measuring system that will extend the level of knowledge and awareness of the internal dynamics of the undergoing processes taking place during transformation or integration of raw materials in the next levels of production. In this approach, the Integrated Process Control system, instead of having external experts to tune the overall processes, based on the DISIRE concept will enable the self reconfiguration of all the production lines by the produced products itself. Specific DISIRE Process Analyzer Technology (PAT) will be able to define quality and performance requirements, that for the first time in the process industry will be able to be directly applied on the physical properties of the developed products and thus enabling the overall online and product specific reconfiguration of the control system. In this way, the whole production can be fully integrated in a holistic approach from the raw materials to the end product, allowing the multiple process reconfigurations and an optimal operation based on the product’s properties that can be generalized in a whole product production cycle being spanned in multiple cross-sectorial processes.