LEADER 2030 - Learnings for European Autonomy to Deliver Europe's Rail in 2030

Worth €700,000 and lasting 30 months, it stems from the experience gained by DITECFER during the COVID-19 crisis in supporting the European Commission in “rebuilding interrupted supply chains” for the supply of parts/materials between European territories.

Back in 2014, 50% of the components needed for the European railway supply chain came from outside the continent, and this percentage has continued to grow over the years. Then came COVID-19 and all the other crises of varying nature and duration (blockade of Chinese ports, disruption of the Suez Canal, war in Ukraine, skyrocketing energy costs, etc.), which impacted global supply chains and taught the European industrial system about its vulnerability. Climate change is also playing its part in this area, as the increasingly catastrophic events affecting South-East Asia – where almost all of certain types of production are located – are impacting the availability of chips, other components and raw materials because factories are flooded or mines are collapsing. The European Commission, in reviewing its industrial policy in 2021, has included resilience and autonomy as one of its cornerstones and has begun to invest heavily in launching industrial alliances in all areas that are key to European industry: from critical raw materials to batteries; from hydrogen to plastics; from processors and semiconductors to industrial data, edge and cloud. Not only that: to guarantee access to rare earths, which are essential for an increasing number of applications, the European Commission has launched a policy of trade agreements with non-EU countries other than China that are rich in these resources, in order to guarantee access to them.

This is the complex challenge that the LEADER 2030 project will have to address, analysing the disruptions experienced by the entire railway supply chain and other comparable supply chains in recent years; analysing in detail the innovations expected from Europe’s Rail programme in 2030, in order to define the necessary raw materials and components, both tangible and intangible, for each of them; analysing their actual availability in 2030 in the necessary quantities, also considering the “competition” for access to raw materials and components from other industrial supply chains: see the case of chips, batteries, etc., which are necessary for many other applications; defining policy recommendations and industrial actions necessary to ensure the availability of what is needed where gaps are found, as expected: this may involve the opening of new mines in Europe, the signing of new trade agreements between the EU and new supplier countries, the push towards circularity policies for the recovery and reuse of materials and components in Europe, etc.

Alongside ERCI, the project partners include Germany’s GKZ, the cluster representing the European mining industry; Railenium, the French railway research and innovation centre; Teknopark Istanbul, the Turkish technology centre and incubator specialising in technology-intensive sectors such as aerospace and defence, in addition to railways, with which the project will seek to measure any differences in terms of resilience during the recent crises in global supply chains.

Information on the project can be found on the website: LEADER 2030
LinkedIn: LEADER 2030 | LinkedIn