International Cooperation on Innovative Materials for Energy Workshop

The Mission Innovation / Materials for Energy representatives have the pleasure to invite at a workshop hosted by the European Commission on 19 April 2024 from 10.00h – 16.00h.

The workshop will be held both remotely and physically in Brussels.

In both cases you are kindly requested to register in advance
https://ec.europa.eu/eusurvey/runner/MImaterialsforenergy

Objectives of the workshop

As the world transitions to a net-zero carbon economy, the availability of critical raw materials becomes paramount to the successful shift to a green and digital future. Weaning our economy off fossil fuels and switching to a clean energy future is a metal and mineral-intensive undertaking, which involves an unprecedented increase in demand for the materials and for most planet resources, including water.

However, traditional materials science research and resulting technology deployment typically requires long time horizons, often 10 to 20 years – due to long cash- & capital-intensive development periods in combination with technology and commercialization risk. Meanwhile, new trends in the development of advanced materials, beyond the integration of Industry 4.0, including artificial intelligence (AI), high performance computing, and smart robotic automation in so-called “Materials Acceleration Platforms” (MAPs) or “self-driving labs” (SDLs), are rapidly speeding up the process and changing the way new materials for diverse applications are discovered. Collaboration in AI and data sharing for advanced materials is leading to technical innovations that improve the life cycle, cost, sustainability, and performance of the materials needed to transform entire economies.

This workshop is the first of a series of two which aim at mobilising public and private relevant stakeholders to explore the advanced materials needed to be developed for the green and digital transition, and the ground-breaking Materials Acceleration Platforms that will enable this, considering critical raw materials issues and the recent proposals of the European Commission on industrial policy, critical raw materials and on advanced materials. Supported by Mission Innovation, it will focus on research and innovation on innovative/advanced materials for energy and aims at finding ways to incentivize policy makers and financial institutions to increase support to materials initiatives. Mining, availability and increasing efficiency of current critical materials are excluded from the scope of the workshops.

This first workshop will specifically take stock of the state of play and look at main domains where international cooperation will be needed to accelerate the development of advanced materials for green and digital transition. It will include a part on flanking measures, like infrastructures needs for characterisation, modelling, or testing, with an aim to list urgent areas for investment. The event will also seek to highlight possible joint work with the other parts of MI.

Foreseen follow up

The outcomes of this first workshop will be reported at the Mission Innovation Annual Gathering in May 2024. The second workshop (late June 2024) will explore how proposals issued in the first workshop could be developed in MI to address materials issues, integrating aspects of materials sustainability, circularity, and substitution into the materials development process from the beginning – including for materials challenges faced by the MI Missions and innovation communities. It will develop further the preliminary analysis of funding needs and political support needed to develop joint communities of researchers, materials developers, and clean energy investors – resulting in a draft MI Materials for Energy Action Plan.

The outcomes of the two workshops and of the discussion in the Senior Official Meeting will lead to a MI materials for Energy Action Plan, to be reported and discussed at the September 2024 Ministerial event.

See the programme here.