Moving toward green transition, EU backs mining in Balkans

“This decision required courage, but it was made at the right moment,” Scholz reportedly said during his visit. Calling the mine an “important European project,” he said it would help the EU “remain sovereign in a changing world” and “not be dependent on others.”

For Europe, the Jadar mine is a touchstone of larger and sometimes conflicting goals.

The EU wants to build a cleaner and climate-friendly society. Amid deglobalization and geopolitical uncertainty, it also wants to bolster its economy by building up its industrial capacity. Is it even possible to do both at once?

EU officials think so. Pitching Europeans on a new mine in Jadar, supporters say that even if new mines cause more pollution, it will still ultimately benefit the continent by helping Europeans move away from fossil fuels.

Critics, on the other hand, say massive new mining projects are inherently bad for the environment. If the Jadar mine opens, it would become one of the first lithium mines anywhere in the world to be situated near a populated agricultural area. 

Serbian researchers say exploratory drilling by Rio Tinto has already caused environmental damage, with high levels of boron, arsenic and lithium detected downstream. In a study published in July in Scientific Reports, an open-access journal run by the publishers of Nature magazine, they listed a whole slate of negative consequences, including from wastewater, noise, air and light pollution, depletion of groundwater and damage to land, livestock and communities. Rio Tinto has demanded that the journal retract the article, claiming the study was full of errors.

Fowler, the Oxford Analytica expert, said that historically, lithium mines have proven environmentally damaging.

“All the current plans are pretty environmentally unfriendly,” she said. “There's always going to be this trade-off between keeping costs low and keeping the environmental impact as low as possible.”

Under its $2.5 billion plans, Rio Tinto wants to build roughly 125 miles of tunnel to extract jadarite deposits, which lie around 1,200 feet under farmland near the Jadar River. 

The company would then process the ore at a 543-acre above-ground facility, placing waste in an adjacent landfill. 

Near term, the company says the deposit would provide Europe with about 90% of its lithium needs. It has purchased 50 out of 52 properties on the proposed industrial site and resettled those households, the company said. It expects to hire about 2,100 people during construction and provide work for about 1,300 people once the mine is open.     

In public statements, Rio Tinto has argued the Jadar mine will be essential for Europe's green transition and that it will be operated at high environmental standards. 

In June, the company tried to rebut criticisms with the release of a draft environmental impact study. It said the project had been “subjected to an extensive disinformation campaign that has used defamatory fake news to baselessly claim that Rio Tinto and the Jadar Project will have destructive, negative impacts on the environment and people’s health.”

Rio Tinto said its environmental studies “comprehensively debunk such false claims.” 

“The Jadar project will be subject to stringent environmental requirements in compliance with Serbian and EU regulations,” David Outhwaite, a company spokesman, said in an email.

But the company has a troubling track record, including in Papua New Guinea, where it’s currently facing a class action from thousands of residents, who say a former copper mine there caused “environmental destruction and profound loss and suffering.” (The mine ceased operations in 1989, during the country’s brutal civil war, when rebels took it over and shut it down.)

Back in Jadar, it remains to be seen whether a mine will ultimately be dug. “A new wave of protests around Serbia against the project seems to be even more robust,” said Jernej Letnar Černič, a law professor at Slovenia’s New University who has followed the demonstrations.

Serbian President Vučić is a pragmatist by nature, and he could be forced to scuttle the project if opposition to the mine begins to threaten his political future, the professor said in an email. “If protests continue regularly, they will shake the political situation in Serbia.”

Anger over the mine is fierce, with many Serbs accusing Europe of selfishly exploiting the Balkans and turning it into a sacrifice zone.  

“This is what most people think, that Serbia and the whole Western Balkan region will become a new sacrifice zone for the green transition of someone else,” said Predrag Momčilović with the Center for Green Politics in Belgrade. “They see it as some kind of new colonial project.” 

“With an average salary today of 800 euros [$888 a month] in Serbia, people are realizing they will not drive these new electric cars and it will be for the benefit of the German car industry,” he added.  

Mine supporters argue that as Serbia pursues EU membership, it is adopting EU rules and laws, including those designed to safeguard the environment. 

The stakes over Jadar are high: If Serbia allows the mine to proceed, that could pave the way for even more mines. Conversely, a win for environmentalists in Serbia could galvanize mining opponents across the Balkans.

“The Jadar mine project will undeniably be a litmus test for other such projects in Serbia and the wider region,” said Mak Kasapovic, a Western Balkans expert at Oxford Analytica.

Since Serbia loosened permit requirements in 2015, mining companies from Australia, Canada and China have begun a flurry of exploration. 

The Serbian government aims to have numerous new mines open within the next decade. Around 2,190 square miles — roughly 8% of Serbian territory — is currently under exploration, according to the Heinrich Böll Foundation, a think tank affiliated with Germany's Green party.

“There are significant reserves of copper, nickel, lithium and bauxite, among others — all considered 'critical raw materials' by the EU — in the Western Balkans,” Kasapovic said in an email. “The governments in the Western Balkans have certainly moved to exploit that fact, with Serbia leading the efforts with its Jadar mine project.”

It's a similar story in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia’s neighbor and another non-EU member. Here as well, global giants have set up subsidiaries and laid the groundwork for new mines, the Heinrich Böll Foundation found. 

In 2018, Mineco, a British company, reopened a long-shuttered lead mine in Olovo. The company also runs the nearby Gross lead and zinc mine. Another British company, Adriatic Minerals, is also developing a silver mine in Vareš.

Just last year, Swiss company Arcore announced the discovery of major mineral deposits in the Lopare region near Jadar. Those deposits contain lithium carbonate, magnesium, potassium and boron. 

Around three decades after many socialist-era mines shut down, critics fear this new mining boom will open another dirty chapter in the region's troubled and war-torn history.

“Mining was necessary because the country was devastated after World War II; all the mining was used to rebuild the country,” Momčilović said. Miners, he said, were celebrated in Yugoslavia with miners appearing on banknotes and posters. 

Today, though, people in the Balkans are more aware of mining’s environmental damage, and they don’t see many advantages, he said. 

“People remember that it was at least state-owned, and it was for the benefit of the state,” he said of Soviet-era mining projects. “Now, it's big foreign companies which would come and extract some minerals, and people know that it will not be for their benefits.” 

During a recent trip to Albania, Courthouse News saw firsthand mining’s toll in the Balkans.

It came at the end of one of the only roads leading into the Albanian Alps — a rugged and inhospitable wilderness ominously known as the Accursed Mountains.

After snaking for miles along a narrow and breathtaking highway over the fjord-like Drin River valley, a closed mine — its shafts ringed off by high fences — unexpectedly appeared. Later, near the Lake Koman reservoir, the surrounding mountain flanks appeared shaved off, their beauty defaced by mining and construction projects. Ironically, this is where tourists board ferries for tours up one of Europe’s most scenic waterways.

For centuries, miners have dug the Dinaric Alps for the range’s rich mineral veins. Throughout much of modern Europe’s history, precious metals like gold, iron, silver, copper, lead, tin bronze have been extracted from these mounts, then hauled away west to European capitals or east to equip the Ottoman Empire’s modernizing armies.

The end of communism and the eruption of the Balkan Wars in the 1990s saw many mines close down. The question many are asking is whether mining should become a part of the region's economic future.

For the good of both the Balkans and Europe in general, critics say the answer is a clear no. “Clean lithium mining seems hard to find worldwide, and there is little trust in the Serbian capabilities to grant any minimum standards,” said Katja Giebel, a Western Balkans specialist at the Heinrich Böll Foundation.

By backing the Jadar project, Giebel worries the EU is giving legitimacy to Vučić’s authoritarian government, under which press freedom, judicial independence and other democratic norms are under attack. “It seems foremost a project of commodity diplomacy in Serbia,” Giebel said in an email. “I think the EU is paying a very high price for access to lithium — namely, to keep silent about Serbia's critical steps backwards in terms of democratization.”

For Kasapovic, the Jadar project has echoes of the Balkan’s past, when the region’s minerals were used to supply European and Ottoman powers.

“I think the parallels with the current situation are clear” as “demand for critical materials is growing across the EU,” he said. Domestic production can’t meet that demand, and so “once again, Europe has to turn to the Balkans.”

The big question, he said, is whether Balkan nations “want to reprise their roles as resource colonies for short-term gain, or whether they are ready to invest into a more sustainable future.”

“I'm afraid that the former may be the case,” he said.

Courthouse News reporter Cain Burdeau is based in the European Union.

Follow @cainburdeau

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