The second meeting of H2020 TARANTULA consortium is held in Seville

On the fifth month of the project, the consortium of H2020 TARANTULA (GA Nº 821159) met in Seville to share the first advances in the different work packages. IDENER team hosted us in the city. TARANTULA kicked off last June at the TECNALIA facilities in San Sebastián, being TECNALIA the coordinator and leader of the project. Since then, we have made progress at a good pace with our tasks, which are primarily oriented to exploitation of results and clustering activities.

The role of ICAMCyL within the project is relevant in two fundamental tasks: the study of the distribution of by-products containing tungsten (W), niobium (Nb) and tantalum (Ta) in European primary production, including the analysis of the relevant regulatory framework for the future valorisation of these resources and, secondly, the identification of potential suppliers, processing companies, final users and other stakeholders in the value chain of these raw materials, with the aim to engage them in the project and thus maximise the impact of the results.

In the last few months, we have carried out an exhaustive analysis of the global value chains of interest for these elements under study (W, Ni and Ta), including both primary and secondary raw materials. The result of this hard work is a large database of more than 600 actors that include:

• Global companies in the tungsten, niobium and tantalum value chains, from research and exploration to processing, manufacturing and trading enterprises.
• Clusters and other professional associations in the raw materials, mining and metallurgy global sectors.
• Regional, national and international institutions within the EU.
• Members of civil society such as NGOs, universities, unions, citizen associations, etc.
• Research groups and technology centres dedicated to raw materials, mining and metallurgy worldwide.

In addition, we currently work on a database of European projects, both past and ongoing, connected somehow to TARANTULA’s goals. By connecting these projects with TARANTULA main tasks we aim to maximise the impact not only of TARANTULA but also of these other projects in terms of their contributions in the fields of social acceptance of mining, new sustainable processing techniques, supply chains, circular economy and substitution of critical raw materials.

ICAMCyL's participation in this project reinforces our role as a reference centre for the recovery of raw materials with high technological interest, contributing to our central goal of promoting sustainable mining practices, valorising the wealth of our subsoil and the industrial and urban waste in which lie a good part of the critical raw materials key for Europe's future competitiveness.

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The European TARANTULA project is funded by the Horizon 2020 program of the European Commission.
Grant agreement ID: 821159.
Program H2020-EU.3.5.3. - Ensuring the sustainable supply of non-energy and non-agricultural raw materials
Topic CE-SC5-06-2018 - New technologies for the enhanced recovery of by-products
Call for proposal H2020-SC5-2018-2
Funding Scheme RIA - Research and Innovation action