The European Union's Critical Raw Materials Act, adopted in 2024, set a clear ambition: by 2030, Europe should be capable of extracting, processing, and recycling a significant share of its own strategic materials domestically. Lithium, cobalt, rare earth elements, and a range of other critical inputs to the green and digital transitions — materials that Europe currently imports almost entirely from a small number of countries — are to become part of a more resilient, sovereign supply chain.
It is an ambitious and necessary policy goal. It also comes with a problem that is far less discussed than the investment figures and geological surveys: Europe does not have enough trained people to do it.
A Structural Skills Deficit
The raw materials sector is not facing a temporary talent shortage of the kind that can be resolved with a few recruitment drives. It is facing a structural deficit that has been building for decades. As older industrial facilities wound down across Western Europe and extractive industries consolidated or relocated, the pipeline of skilled engineers and technicians in separation technologies, hydrometallurgy, and related fields narrowed considerably.
The result is that Europe's ambitions in critical raw materials are running ahead of its human capital. You cannot build a domestic lithium refinery — or scale up the electrodialysis capacity needed for advanced water treatment and brine processing — without the engineers who know how to operate it.
Why Conventional Training Cannot Scale Fast Enough
The traditional route to producing a competent process engineer in this field is long and resource-intensive. University programmes provide theoretical foundations, but hands-on industrial exposure depends on placements, internships, and apprenticeships that are increasingly difficult to arrange at scale. Facilities are not training grounds. Operational teams are not teaching staff. And the cost of mistakes in live industrial environments — financial, safety-related, and reputational — creates powerful disincentives to letting inexperienced personnel near complex process equipment.
Scaling up a skilled workforce at the speed Europe's raw materials strategy requires is simply not possible if we rely exclusively on the pathways that produced the current generation of engineers. New tools are needed.
Immersive Training as a Strategic Response
This is the context in which EDventure was developed. Funded by EIT Raw Materials — the European body whose mandate is explicitly to strengthen Europe's raw materials knowledge and innovation ecosystem — EDventure represents a direct response to the skills deficit in one of the sector's most critical process technologies.
Electrodialysis sits at the intersection of water treatment, brine management, and mineral recovery. It is a technology whose applications are expanding rapidly as Europe pursues both circular economy goals and critical mineral independence. It is also a technology that is genuinely difficult to train on using conventional methods, for exactly the reasons described above.
By delivering an industrial-scale, fully interactive VR simulation of an electrodialysis facility, EDventure enables universities and industrial operators to train engineers and technicians at a scale, speed, and cost that physical facilities cannot match. A student in Warsaw, a process engineer in Košice, and a technician onboarding at a Belgian water treatment plant can all access the same high-fidelity simulation — and all of them can make mistakes, observe consequences, and learn from them without any of those mistakes touching a real system.
Education as Infrastructure
The EU's raw materials strategy rightly focuses on geology, investment, and supply chain architecture. But human capital is infrastructure too. The engineers who will operate the facilities that Europe is planning to build in the next decade need to be in training now — not when the facilities are ready and the skills gap becomes a crisis rather than a challenge.
