For decades, the global mining world was structured around a familiar gravitational pull. Early capital was raised in Toronto. Explorers shaped narratives on the TSX-V. Retail investors provided liquidity. Brokers amplified excitement. When projects matured, strategic investors and majors entered the frame. Frankfurt, Stuttgart and European exchanges stood on the margins of this ecosystem. Companies...
For more than three decades, Europe behaved as if mining were something that happened somewhere else. It chose to outsource risk, outsource geology, outsource environmental impact and outsource political exposure, while importing processed materials and industrial metals embedded in supply chains controlled by others. It believed that economic integration, financial power and technological sophistication would...
Europe often frames its industrial vulnerability as a resource scarcity issue. Political speeches emphasise “access” to lithium, rare earths, nickel, copper or manganese. Strategy papers discuss upstream partnerships, minerals diplomacy and securing ore supply. But the defining constraint of Europe’s industrial future is not whether materials exist in the world. It is whether Europe controls...
Europe’s core industrial economies are increasingly constrained. High and volatile energy prices, dense regulatory frameworks, urban saturation, community resistance to new heavy industrial assets and long political cycles make it progressively harder for Western and Northern European states to host the industrial expansion Europe claims to need. At the same time, the continent demands more...
Europe’s core industrial economies are increasingly constrained. High and volatile energy prices, dense regulatory frameworks, urban saturation, community resistance to new heavy industrial assets and long political cycles make it progressively harder for Western and Northern European states to host the industrial expansion Europe claims to need. At the same time, the continent demands more...
Energy markets are often analysed as abstractions: prices, curves, spreads, marginal costs. Infrastructure appears in these models as a constraint, a background condition that occasionally matters during outages or extreme events. In Europe’s integrated energy system, this framing is no longer sufficient. Infrastructure is not a passive backdrop. It is an active force that shapes...
South-East Europe does not sit on the periphery of Europe’s energy system. It sits at its edge in a different sense: the edge where constraints bind first, where volatility appears earliest, and where systemic assumptions are tested under real operating conditions rather than in models. The region is not an exception to Europe’s energy transition....
Energy trading was once about exploiting inefficiencies. Price differences across regions, fuels, or time horizons were treated as opportunities for arbitrage. Volatility was episodic, correlations were imperfect, and diversification across markets offered protection. In that world, successful trading meant predicting price direction more accurately than competitors and executing efficiently. In Europe’s current energy system, that...
For decades, energy economics was built around capacity. Installed megawatts, pipeline diameters, storage volumes, and reserve margins were treated as the primary indicators of system strength. If capacity exceeded peak demand with an adequate buffer, stability was assumed. Prices might fluctuate, but the system was fundamentally secure. That logic no longer holds. In today’s European...
For much of the past two decades, oil was treated as a declining force in Europe’s electricity story. As power generation moved away from fuel oil and toward gas, nuclear, and renewables, oil was conceptually pushed to the margins of energy analysis. It remained central to transport and geopolitics, but increasingly absent from discussions about...
