Charting the road to the green energy transition: Airborne electromagnetics for raw material exploration.

Critical raw materials (CRMs) are fundamental to the EU industrial value chains and strategic sectors, particularly with regard to the green energy transition. Currently, the domestic supply of primary CRMs is below 3% for many important commodities. To secure its raw materials autonomy, the EU is boosting the exploration and production of CRMs, also through the financing of research projects within the Horizon Europe framework. This is for instance the case of the SEMACRET, a just-funded Horizon Europe project based on "Sustainable exploration for orthomagmatic (critical) raw materials in the EU: charting the road to the green energy transition". Within SEMACRET, airborne electromagnetic (AEM) surveys will be conducted in Portugal, Czech Republic and Finland, to refine the knowledge of the ore deposits. In fact, the AEM method allows for imaging the electrical properties of the ground down to several hundreds of meters. In particular, electrical conduction and polarization properties of the ore bodies are informative of the ore composition, and can be proxies for the presence of critical raw materials. Examples of exploration AEM surveys will be shown from all around the world.