This is the best summary I could come up with:

Deep inside a former East German town lies the first fruits of the EU’s grand plan to “de-risk” and wean itself off dependency on imports for the green revolution.

There is now a race across Europe to both mine the silver-white soft metal and manufacture its refined form, lithium hydroxide – the key ingredient in the batteries that power electric cars, robot vacuum cleaners and mobile phones.

The EU is in a hurry, having come to the late realisation that it is over-reliant on China for a host of critical raw materials, 16 of which are now listed by Brussels as priorities in a new industrial strategy designed to protect the bloc’s economy and achieve the ambitious goal of reducing net greenhouse gas emissions by at least 55% by 2030.

Concern is so great that the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, has launched an anti-subsidy investigation into Chinese imports, amid fears that big manufacturers including Volkswagen and BMW will have trouble matching the supply of electric cars from China.

Rare-earth materials were once found in abundance in the US, Europe and Japan, but investors in these regions retreated from mining, which was seen as a dirty and expensive industry, handing a huge market to China, which set about buying the world’s stock to become the global hub it is today.

Before a trip to Latin America to tie down deals on raw material production, Von der Leyen told reporters that the EU had “a 97% dependency where lithium is concerned on China”.

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