Europe stands at a point where policy ambition finally exceeds industrial capacity. With ReSourceEU, the European Union has moved from abstract sustainability rhetoric toward measurable industrial objectives: 10 percent of strategic raw materials extracted within the EU, 40 percent processed inside the bloc, and 25 percent recycled, all by 2030. The numbers are clean. The path to reach them is not. Europe does not lack regulations, environmental frameworks or financing mechanisms. It lacks the physical industrial system that can convert policy into throughput. What the continent faces is not a shortage of feasibility studies, strategy papers or roadmaps. It faces a shortage of processing plants, metallurgical expertise, engineering hours, design offices, supply-chain depth, and near-shore manufacturing corridors that can support the expansion of strategic metals at industrial scale.
To understand whether ReSourceEU is realistic, one must separate the ambition from the execution and move beyond political doctrine to the physical architecture of metals processing. The critical question is whether Europe can mobilize sufficient engineering, processing capacity and supply-chain resilience fast enough to convert raw feedstock into the refined materials needed for electrification, defence, batteries, magnets, wind turbines and semiconductors. And even deeper than that lies another question: whether Europe has understood that its competitive advantage will not come from attempting to replicate Australia, Canada or China, but from building a distributed industrial network across its own single market and its near-neighbour engineering ecosystems. In that network, Serbia is primed to become a front-end engineering, design and industrialisation hub of strategic relevance.
This insight examines the metals landscape under ReSourceEU, the geographic clusters of processing that exist or are emerging across Europe, and the structural bottlenecks around engineering capacity, electricity cost, and logistics throughput. It also explains why the Western Balkans, and Serbia in particular, are becoming indispensable for the EU’s processing ambitions: not as extraction centres, but as engineering and design corridors that allow European metals processing projects to move from pilot to industrial scale. ReSourceEU will not succeed because it sets targets. It will succeed if Europe builds the engineering base to deliver them.
Europe’s metals strategy must be understood metals-by-metal because each supply chain has different pressures, bottlenecks and scaling requirements. Lithium remains the flagship material for European industrial policy. Europe is attempting to develop hard-rock extraction in Portugal, geothermal brines in Germany and France, and clay-based resources across the Balkans. But extraction is not the bottleneck. Processing is. The production of battery-grade lithium hydroxide or carbonate requires sophisticated chemical engineering, hydrometallurgical reactors, sorbent systems, crystallisation equipment, and highly reliable process control. Most European lithium projects are in FEED or early EPC stages, lacking the metallurgical depth and operational redundancies found in China or Australia. For ReSourceEU’s 40 percent processing target to be credible, Europe must ensure not only the construction of processing plants but the engineering ecosystems required to commission, operate, debottleneck and expand them. That is where near-shore engineering networks such as Serbia come in, offering the FEED capacity, metallurgical design competence and cost-effective design-to-fabrication workflows that allow processing plants to move from concept to commercial reality.
Nickel occupies a different place. Europe has limited nickel extraction and almost no domestic class-I refining at scale. The main European asset is Finland’s refining base, which provides a foundation but cannot on its own guarantee diversification or supply independence. Europe needs additional nickel sulphate and precursor capacity if it intends to anchor an EV battery industry with predictable feedstock. But nickel processing is electricity-intensive, capital-intensive and operationally complex. High European electricity prices threaten the competitiveness of this segment. This makes two things clear: processing clusters must be located in regions with viable energy-cost structures or secured long-term PPAs, and design partners must find ways to lower opex and optimise plant layouts. Near-shore engineering, digitalisation, and advanced process control—areas where Serbia already provides competitive talent—are essential to make EU nickel plants economically viable.
Copper presents a different challenge. Europe has solid smelting capacity in Bulgaria, Poland, Germany and Sweden, but faces feedstock constraints and competition from global refiners. What Europe lacks is not so much smelting capacity but the next layer: specialised refining lines, recycling loops for high-grade scrap, and alloy production that links directly into industrial supply chains. ReSourceEU’s recycling targets require an enormous expansion of secondary metallurgy, and the engineering needed to retrofit existing plants or construct new ones will exceed the capacity of Western Europe’s engineering firms. Outsourcing complex design, automation and mechanical integration tasks to Serbia allows smelters and refiners to accelerate redesign and capacity expansion without crippling cost structures.
Rare earths represent the most politically charged metal group. Europe has deposits in Sweden and Greenland, processing ambitions in Estonia and Norway, and magnet projects across Germany and France. But what it lacks is separation capacity. Rare-earth separation plants demand multi-stage chemical circuits, complex solvent extraction (SX) systems, and a high density of chemical engineering expertise. The operational workforce is scarce. The design workforce is scarcer. Europe cannot build rare-earth independence without building the engineering infrastructure behind it. This means creating a distributed network of FEED centres capable of supporting SX, ion-exchange, precipitation and calcination flowsheets. Serbia already holds a strategic advantage here: its engineering universities, metallurgical knowledge base, and growing private design offices can support rare-earth processing design and commissioning at a fraction of Western European cost, without compromising quality. Several analysts and sources, including reporting across euromining.news, highlight how Europe’s rare-earth ambitions depend heavily on engineering depth rather than raw-resource availability.
The question, then, is where Europe will physically place the processing clusters necessary to fulfil ReSourceEU. Scandinavia has emerged as the natural cluster for battery metals and magnet materials. Finland and Sweden host extraction, processing projects, and a strong tradition in metallurgy, technical universities and industrial workforce. They also have relatively stable electricity prices and access to renewable power. These factors make them ideal for energy-intensive metals such as nickel and cobalt sulphates, precursor materials, and rare-earth separation. But the speed at which they can scale is limited by engineering availability. Even in Scandinavia, EPC firms are stretched.
Central Europe offers a different profile. Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Hungary have strong industrial bases and automotive supply chains, making them logical locations for copper refining, battery component manufacturing and recycling. They are geographically well positioned, with logistics corridors linking ports, factories and distribution zones. However, electricity pricing volatility and competition for engineering talent present barriers. This is where near-shore support, especially from Serbia, becomes crucial: forming a broader Central European-Western Balkan industrial corridor where heavy processing occurs in the EU, while engineering, detail design, software, automation integration and some equipment fabrication occurs just outside the EU at highly competitive cost and speed.
Southern Europe—Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece—plays a different role. Their geological potential makes them relevant for extraction, particularly lithium and copper. Their processing potential depends heavily on electricity costs and logistics infrastructure. Portugal’s lithium processing projects struggle with the same constraint: electricity prices and permitting complexity. The region is attractive but requires external engineering reinforcement to accelerate project pipelines. Once again, outsourcing FEED and detail engineering to lower-cost, high-skill hubs becomes a strategic advantage rather than an operational detail.
The Balkans present an interesting case. While extraction potential exists—Serbia, Bosnia and North Macedonia hold reserves of copper, lead, zinc, gold and potential critical metals—the geopolitical dynamics around extraction mean that the region’s most stable and scalable contribution to ReSourceEU lies not in mining but in engineering, fabrication, operations support and near-sourcing. Serbia in particular is evolving into a processing engineering corridor: its metallurgical institutes, mechanical design offices, electrical integration firms, and software development sector provide a complete engineering ecosystem. This capacity can be mobilised to support EU processing projects from early technical studies through FEED, equipment procurement, QA/QC, digital commissioning and operational optimisation. With platforms such as clarion.engineer, the engineering outsourcing model becomes structured and bankable, offering European processing developers a predictable interface for scaling design tasks.
Another cluster emerges along logistics routes connecting Southeastern Europe to the EU. Ports on the Adriatic—Bar, Rijeka, Koper—offer entry points for raw materials originating from Africa, Turkey, the Middle East and Central Asia. These flows can feed European processing hubs at competitive cost, provided inland logistics corridors are efficient. Electricity, again, becomes central: processing plants require predictable energy pricing, and inland logistics require modernised rail electrification and intermodal hubs. Raw materials can enter through SEE routes more efficiently than through northern European ports for many feedstocks, making the Balkans not only an engineering corridor but also a logistics corridor for upstream material movement.
To assess the realism of ReSourceEU, one must examine the execution bottlenecks. The first bottleneck is engineering capacity. Europe does not have enough process engineers, chemists, metallurgists, mechanical designers or EPC project managers to simultaneously build dozens of processing plants. The continent’s engineering base is world-class but insufficient in volume. Without near-sourcing, Europe cannot deliver the pipeline. This is why Serbia’s role is structurally important: it offers an under-utilised engineering population that can expand rapidly, absorb project loads, and feed EU facilities with high-level design, process modelling, equipment integration and digitalisation expertise.
The second bottleneck is electricity cost. Metals processing is not marginally energy-intensive; it is structurally energy-intensive. Lithium conversion, nickel refining, copper electrorefining, rare-earth separation, manganese sulphate production, and aluminium smelting all depend on electricity as the main variable cost. Europe’s electricity prices remain volatile and high compared with competing global jurisdictions. Long-term PPAs with renewable producers can mitigate the problem, but they require grid-access certainty and stable regulatory frameworks. Even then, electricity will remain a structural disadvantage unless engineering optimises processes to lower consumption. Here again, Serbia’s engineering talent becomes relevant: process simulation, heat-integration optimisation, and automation design can materially reduce a plant’s energy consumption profile.
The third bottleneck is permitting and public acceptance. While ReSourceEU includes accelerated permitting frameworks, local resistance to industrial facilities remains significant. Processing plants require land, water, energy, chemical handling systems and waste management. The engineering challenge is to design plants that minimise environmental footprint, operate safely, and create predictable community benefits. European EPC firms are stretched thin, leaving gaps that near-shore engineering offices can fill by providing FEED-level environmental and safety design work at scale.
The fourth bottleneck lies in supply chain fragmentation. The equipment required for processing plants—from reactors and crystallisers to filters, pumps, automation racks and SX mixer-settlers—must be sourced from a mix of European and global vendors. Europe needs to rebuild some equipment manufacturing capacity and complement it with near-shore fabrication from the Balkans and Central Europe. Serbia’s fabrication sector, with welding, machining, steel structures and electrical panel assembly, allows equipment packages to be produced at competitive cost and delivered into EU markets rapidly.
The question now becomes whether ReSourceEU is realistic given these constraints. From a political standpoint, the plan is bold and necessary. From an industrial standpoint, it is achievable only if Europe recognises that engineering capacity is as strategic as raw materials. The EU cannot assume that ReSourceEU will self-execute because targets exist. The targets must be underpinned by a continental engineering architecture. Serbia sits at the centre of that architecture.
Serbia’s near-sourcing advantage is not theoretical. It is structural. The country has engineering universities that still produce large cohorts of mechanical, electrical and metallurgical engineers. Its labour cost is significantly lower than Western Europe’s, yet the technical ability is high. Its industrial culture is strong in machine-building, mining support services and heavy industry. Its IT and automation sectors integrate easily into process industries. Most importantly, Serbian engineering firms and platforms like clarion.engineer operate within a European business culture, making them ideal for high-trust, high-complexity outsourcing.
A well-designed near-sourcing model allows European processing plants to execute FEED and detail design 30–40 percent cheaper than in Western Europe, while maintaining quality and accelerating project schedules. It also creates an industrial corridor where EU projects rely on Serbian engineering offices for continuous operations support, remote monitoring, optimisation and troubleshooting. In this model, the EU focuses on processing plants, permitting, financing and policy, while Serbia provides the design horsepower that scales the system.
The final and perhaps most overlooked element is logistics. Raw materials must reach processing plants efficiently, and finished materials must flow into downstream European industries. Southeastern European transport corridors—linking Adriatic ports with Central European manufacturing—remain underutilised. The cost of delivering feedstock into EU processing hubs can be significantly reduced by routing materials through SEE flows rather than congested northern ports. This is especially relevant for African and Middle Eastern raw materials, as highlighted in several analyses across euromining.news. If logistics costs fall, processing competitiveness improves, and the economic case for scaling European capacity strengthens.
ReSourceEU is not unrealistic. It is simply incomplete. It provides the policy framework but not the engineering infrastructure. For the plan to succeed, Europe must embrace a distributed industrial model where processing is anchored inside the EU, while engineering, fabrication and operational support extend seamlessly into the Western Balkans. Serbia’s role as a near-shore engineering hub becomes a strategic necessity rather than an optional outsourcing opportunity. The continent must treat engineering as a scarce resource and allocate it accordingly. If Europe builds processing plants without building an engineering ecosystem, the system collapses. If it builds both, ReSourceEU becomes not only realistic but transformative.
The difference will lie in execution. Europe must think like an industrial power, not a regulatory power. It must build processing hubs where energy is affordable, logistics are efficient and communities accept industrial activity. It must build engineering corridors where talent is abundant, cost structures are manageable and integration with EU standards is seamless. And it must understand that the Western Balkans—especially Serbia—are not peripheral to this strategy. They are central to its feasibility.
Europe does not lack raw-material policies. Europe lacks raw-material capacities. ReSourceEU can work, but only if the continent embraces the engineering partnerships and near-shore ecosystems required to turn policy ambition into industrial throughput. If it does, a new European industrial network emerges: Scandinavian metallurgy, Central European manufacturing, Adriatic logistics, and Serbian engineering powering the design, optimisation and scaling of strategic processing. This is the architecture of a credible European raw-materials strategy. This is how ambition becomes reality.
Elevated by clarion.engineer