03 September 2026 — GR4FITE3 has joined forces with four sister projects in the Cluster Hub "Materials for Batteries". Here is what the paper is about, and why it is worth your time.
Europe knows how to do battery research. Across dozens of EU-funded projects, laboratories are producing genuine technical progress on the materials that power electric vehicles, store renewable energy and keep our grids stable.
The harder question is whether Europe can test, demonstrate, finance and deploy those results quickly enough to matter. Too often, a technology that works beautifully in a research setting stalls on the road to industrial scale.
That gap between promise and production is the subject of a new paper GR4FITE3 has contributed to, together with sister projects in the Cluster Hub “Materials for Batteries”.
A shared reflection from five projects working across the value chain
The paper, Considerations for R&I Priorities in Europe’s Battery Raw Materials Chains, brings together insights from five Horizon Europe projects — BATRAW, LiCORNE, GR4FITE3, RELiEF and MaaSiveTwin — working on the mining, processing and recycling of battery raw materials. Coordinated through the Cluster Hub, it draws on a survey of cluster members, desk research on the latest EU legislation and policy documents, and exchanges with stakeholders active across the battery value chain.
The paper reflects the direct, on-the-ground experience of projects that have run into the same walls — and it offers practical observations to feed the dialogue between EU institutions, industry and the research community.
Real progress, practical obstacles
The context has rarely been more demanding. Energy costs remain higher in Europe than in competing regions, supply chains are exposed to geopolitical shocks, and industrial competition is intensifying. At the same time, a wave of EU legislation — the Critical Raw Materials Act, the Net-Zero Industry Act, the Battery Regulation and the more recent Battery Booster Strategy — has reshaped what R&I is expected to deliver, placing security, sustainability and competitiveness at the centre of the agenda.
Against that backdrop, the paper is honest about where the friction lies. Technologies are ready, or close to ready, but scaling them up runs into limited pilot and demonstration infrastructure, difficulties moving from laboratory to industrial scale, insufficient finance for first-of-a-kind plants, fragmented funding programmes and regulatory uncertainty.
The authors set out ten distinct challenges of this kind, and pair each one with concrete actions suggested by the projects and stakeholders themselves. You will find those in the paper.
What GR4FITE3 brings to the table
Our own contribution comes straight from the heart of what GR4FITE3 is trying to do: build graphite resilience for lithium-ion battery anodes through a sustainable, European, end-to-end supply chain — from responsibly mined natural graphite to fully engineered, high-density anodes and finished cells.
That journey has taught us where the pressure points really are: “Academic research delivers high-energy-density results at coin-cell level, but scaling to gigafactory production often fails.” Behind that sentence sit two of the main barriers: limited access to pilot, demonstration and scale-up infrastructure, and Europe’s continued dependence on critical raw materials and the capacity to process them.
Why read it
If you work anywhere along the battery value chain, this paper offers a candid, evidence-based picture of what is slowing Europe down, and a set of grounded ideas for speeding it up. It turns hard-won project experience into something the wider community can build on.
Download the paper and read the full analysis on the Cluster Hub “Materials for Batteries” website.
