Environmental campaigners and community groups are suing the European Commission over its decision to designate a controversial lithium mine in Portugal as “strategic” to secure the minerals it needs for the energy transition.

They argue that the Barroso mine, intended to supply lithium to the EV battery industry, poses serious environmental, social and safety risks and that the EU’s executive arm failed to properly assess the project’s sustainability. They filed the case at the European Court of Justice on Thursday.

A spokesperson for the EU Commission said it could not comment on the case as legal proceedings have now started.

The mine is one of 47 mineral projects, which the Commission labelled as “strategic“ to shore up the bloc’s reserves of energy transition minerals, granting them preferential treatment for gaining permits and easier access to EU funding.

London-listed Savannah Resources is planning to dig four open pit mines in the northern Barroso region to extract lithium from Europe’s largest known deposit. The company says it will extract enough lithium every year to produce around half a million batteries for electric vehicles.

However, local groups have staunchly opposed the mining project, citing concerns over waste management and water use as well as the impact of the mine on traditional agriculture in the area.

Savannah Resources did not respond to a request for comment at the time of publication.

EU Commission rejected NGOs’ concerns

The lawsuit comes weeks after the Commission rejected requests by green groups to review the status of 16 controversial projects on its strategic list, including the Barroso mine, despite environmental concerns expressed by NGOs and local communities. The Commission found their concerns to be “unfounded” and argued that member states were responsible for ensuring that the projects comply with EU environmental laws.

Environmental NGO ClientEarth and the United Association for the Defense of Covas do Barroso (UDCB), which filed the case, argue that the Commission overlooked gaps in the assessment of the mine’s environmental impacts, including risks to protected species and the safety of a planned facility to store mining waste.

They are asking the court to quash the Commission’s decision to keep the project on its strategic list and to clarify its obligations to ensure that projects on the list follow sustainable mining practices.

“We are going to court because the Commission’s decision undermines fundamental EU legal principles,” they said in a statement.

“Labelling a project ‘strategic’ and in the public interest while turning a blind eye to well-documented risks to water, ecosystems, human health and local livelihoods is simply unacceptable. The energy transition must be based on law, science and justice – not political shortcuts that turn rural regions into sacrifice zones,” they added.

EU seeks to shore up access to minerals

Under the EU’s Critical Raw Materials Act, the Commission identified a host of mining projects that could boost the bloc’s access to the minerals it needs to manufacture clean energy and other advanced technologies, as well as reduce its dependence on supplies from China.

The law allows the Commission to designate mineral projects as strategic if they meet a series of criteria, including that the project “would be implemented sustainably” and monitor, prevent and minimise environmental and adverse social impacts.

The status does not constitute an approval for the project and developers still need to obtain the necessary permits from the relevant national or regional authorities.

Earlier this week, the European Court of Auditors found that many projects designated as strategic remain at an early stage of development and will struggle to meaningfully contribute to securing mineral supplies for the EU by 2030.

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Green groups sue EU over inclusion of Portuguese lithium mine on priority list

The US is urging countries to form a critical mineral trading bloc to shore up access to resources that are pivotal to manufacturing energy, digital and advanced technologies and technologies, and to reduce the world’s dependence on China for mineral supplies.

Washington says this mineral club would provide countries with a tariff-free trade zone to buy and sell critical minerals with guaranteed minimum prices, helping them compete with Chinese producers and create more resilient supply chains.

China dominates global mineral refining capacity for 19 of 20 key minerals needed to manufacture clean energy technologies and advanced digital infrastructure.

“The Trump administration is proposing a concrete mechanism to return the global critical minerals market to a healthier, more competitive state,” US Vice President JD Vance told government representatives from 54 countries and the European Union attending the first US-hosted critical minerals ministerial meeting on Wednesday.

Large economies like India, Japan, France, Germany and the UK as well as resource-rich emerging and developing economies such as Argentina, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Zambia were represented at the event in Washington DC.

“We want to eliminate th[e] problem of people flooding into our markets with cheap critical minerals to undercut our domestic manufacturers,” Vance said, without naming China.

“We want members to form a trading bloc among allies and partners, one that guarantees American access to American industrial might, while also expanding production across the entire zone. The benefits will be immediate and durable,” he added.

“In the end, it’s all in the US interest of course,” Bryan Bille, a principal at Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, told Climate Home News. “At the same time, the Trump Administration realises that international cooperation is needed to address these challenges.”

“America needs you”

“It feels like ‘thank you for coming, America needs your help’,” Patrick Schröder, a senior research fellow at Chatham House, said of the meeting.

“The US now have realised they cannot solve their critical minerals problem just on their own. To really reduce dependence on China, they need this bigger group of countries,” he said.

There is potential for a mineral trading club to become useful to diversify supply chains and support mineral production in developing countries “but it can’t be all about supplying the US with minerals,” Schröder told Climate Home News.

On Wednesday, the US signed 11 bilateral critical minerals agreements with Argentina, the Cook Islands, Ecuador, Guinea, Morocco, Paraguay, Peru, the Philippines, the UAE and Uzbekistan. This comes on top of 10 other deals signed in the past five months, including with Australia, Japan, South Korea, Saudi Arabia and Thailand. The EU and the US have committed to conclude a deal within the next 30 days. The US government says the deals will form the basis for global collaboration.

Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum told a conference on Tuesday that “there is strong interest from another 20 countries” to sign similar deals.

The US also announced the creation of the Forum on Resource Geostrategic Engagement (FORGE), which will succeed the Minerals Security Partnership and enable member countries to collaborate on mineral policy and projects. It will be chaired by South Korea until June.

Prioritising cleantech

US officials emphasised the growing need for minerals to power artificial intelligence, data centres and the digital economy but made no reference to the booming demand from cleantech industries manufacturing batteries, heat pumps, solar panels and wind turbines.

For Schröder, Europe could play a role in shaping the initiative by prioritising cleantech industries.

Any price-floor mechanism “should also be linked to ensuring that mining and processing is done to the highest possible environmental standards” and support efforts to improve supply chain traceability, he said.

The Trump administration argues that setting a minimum price for minerals will help create a stable environment to attract long-term capital into new mining projects.

But how this will work in practice remains unclear and complex. Prices vary for each mineral, each stage of the value chain and across different countries. “All of that needs to be discussed and agreed,” said Schröder, warning that a trading club could easily become “a cartel” and risk breaching World Trade Organisation rules.

Chinese dependence

The US’s attempt to broker new alliances to secure mineral supplies comes as Washington is seeking to fast-track mining permits at home and announced plans to stockpile minerals to help shield domestic manufacturers from cheaper Chinese competition.

This is particularly acute when it comes to rare earths with China accounting for around 60% of mining output and more than 90% of global rare earths refining capacity.

The Trump administration has doubled down on efforts to diversify its mineral supplies, especially for rare earths, after American manufacturers faced supply shortages last year when China expanded export restrictions amid trade tensions with Washington.

Rare earths are pivotal to producing magnets that are used in wind turbines, electric vehicle motors as well as many other advanced technologies. Both countries reached a deal to lift the restrictions on supplies but some limits are still in place despite the truce.

“We just can’t be in a position where our entire economy… is in a position to be held hostage by someone that could change the world economy through a form of export controls,” US Secretary of the Interior Burgum said on Tuesday.

Yet, for many resource-rich countries, the US’s national security strategy poses the biggest risk to global supply chain stability, said Cory Combs, head of critical mineral research at advisory firm Trivium China.

Ultimately, global efforts to diversify mineral value chain mean China will lose market share. “But it’s not going to lose its advantages,” he told Climate Home News.

“Industry will still buy every Chinese material they can possibly get their hands on, because it’s cheaper, it’s better, it’s faster and more reliable when you don’t have the export controls,” he said.

Project Vault

To help shore up mineral reserves in the short-term, President Donald Trump announced the establishment of a US critical mineral reserve earlier this week.

Project Vault will “ensure that American businesses and workers are never harmed by any shortage – we never want to go through what we went through a year ago,” he said.

The US Export-Import Bank is providing up to $10 billion in loans – the largest deal in the bank’s history – to procure and store minerals in warehouses across the US for manufacturers to use in case of a supply shock.

Dozens of companies have committed an additional $1.67bn in private capital to build up the reserve. EV battery manufacturer Clarios, GE Vernova, which produces wind turbines and grid electrification technologies, as well as carmakers Stellantis and General Motors and planemaker Boeing have said they would participate.

Mineral analysts warn that stockpiling might be a short-term solution to securing minerals but in the case of rare earths it could in fact deepen reliance on Beijing if Chinese supplies remain the cheapest on the market and are therefore used to fill the vault.

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‘America needs you’: US seeks trade alliance to break China’s critical mineral dominance  

There are days when the sulphur-like, toxic smell coming from the nearby oil facilities is so potent that Azuh Chinenye struggles to go outside her house early in the morning. “When you inhale, you as a person, your body system, and every other thing will change… you can’t stand the odour,” she said.

Chinenye lives in Oyigbo, a town less than 20 miles (32 km) from Port Harcourt, in the Niger Delta, the heart of Nigeria’s main oil-producing region.

Signs of the industry are everywhere in Oyigbo. Active flare stacks stand just metres from homes and businesses, whose walls are caked in soot. Close to a primary school, Climate Home News saw oil spilling from a corroded underground pipe.

The local oil field here was for many years owned and operated by Shell, until it was sold to a Nigerian firm for $533 million in early 2021. Since the sale, gas flaring has increased dramatically at Oyigbo, despite the new operator’s promise to “protect our planet” and the health of communities.

A local doctor and residents told Climate Home News that the opposite is happening in reality, as people struggle with the effects of noxious pollutants released by flaring at production facilities close to their homes.

Flaring worsens climate crisis

Fifteen times more gas was burned at the Oyigbo field in 2024 compared to 2020, according to an analysis of satellite data prepared for Climate Home News by SkyTruth, an environmental watchdog. This pattern is repeated at other fields previously owned by Shell across the Niger Delta, the data shows.

Flaring occurs when gas produced during oil drilling is burned off, instead of being utilised. The process releases vast amounts of carbon dioxide and methane, a potent planet-heating greenhouse gas, alongside toxic chemicals.

Failure to tackle gas flaring pushes global climate goals further out of reach, as cutting methane emissions from the oil and gas industry is widely seen by climate and energy experts as a quick win to slow global warming in the short term.

Shell claims to have significantly reduced its emissions and says it achieved zero routine flaring last year, but our analysis reveals that this was driven primarily by selling off high-emission assets – from the US to Nigeria – which are then free to continue polluting, albeit under different management.

After Shell divestments, flaring on the rise

A spokesperson for Shell told Climate Home News by email that, when the energy giant selects buyers for divestments, it assesses “a number of factors such as their financial strength, operating culture and environmental performance” and shares emissions reduction plans for the assets, where relevant.

But Shell does not monitor the performance of those assets once it has handed over control to the buyer, the spokesperson said, adding that regulation of operations by the new owner is carried out by governments.

After years of staying flat at the global level, flaring has risen again since 2023, including in Nigeria, where smaller home-grown firms have been ramping up production seeking to maximise oil revenues while lacking the expertise to prevent flaring, according to a World Bank report.

To understand more about how this wasteful and dangerous process continues to harm people’s lives, Climate Home News went to the Niger Delta, a part of the world unique for how many residents are forced to live in close proximity to flare stacks.

New owner promised sustainable production

“Gas flaring has increased in the years since Shell left,” said Chief Maduabuchi Felix Achiele, a community leader in Oyigbo. “In a week, we can observe two, three, four instances of flaring but when Shell was here, it was just once in a while.”

The field has been owned by Trans-Niger Oil and Gas (TNOG) since January 2021, along with the rest of the assets within the OML 17 oil block. The company that runs operations in the block – Lagos-based Heirs Energies – has boasted about turning an “underperforming asset” into an economic success after taking it over from Shell.

Heirs Energies said it has doubled production at OML 17 without that coming at the expense of environmental and climate integrity. “We can create a symmetry, a symbiotic relationship between oil and gas, the environment and people […] sustainability is infused in what we are doing,” its CEO Osayande Igiehon said in an interview late last year.

Heirs Energies announced an agreement with the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) to capture and monetise gas from OML 17 in December, though the company did not give a timeframe for when this project would be completed. Heirs failed to respond to questions sent by Climate Home News for this story.

On its website, the company says it is “committed to eliminating routine flaring and greenhouse gas emissions by 2025”. But the emissions figures and experience of the local community tell a radically different story.

Jump in flaring volumes

In OML 17, the vast oil block that covers much of the urban area of Port Harcourt and its surrounding towns like Oyigbo, gas flaring volumes grew sevenfold between 2020 – the last year of Shell’s involvement – and 2024, according to data presented to Climate Home News by SkyTruth.

To conduct this analysis, we tracked sales of onshore Nigerian assets, determined the location of each site using open source data, and then worked with SkyTruth to monitor flaring from these locations using data from the Earth Observation Group at the Colorado School of Mines.

Within OML 17, at Agbada, about a 30-minute drive north of Port Harcourt city centre, flaring doubled immediately after the sale in 2021. The following year, it almost doubled again and has remained close to that mark since. In Nkali, another asset within OML 17, flaring was nearly four times higher in the year after the sale.

While SkyTruth’s analysis was only able to use figures up to 2024, flaring remained high at these oil blocks throughout 2025, according to publicly available data from the NNPC.

This pattern can be seen in other oil blocks. Shell lost its right to operate OML 11 in August 2021, a block that spans the Ogoniland region. This helped the company to record a drop in emissions from both greenhouse gases and volatile organic compounds, while flaring went up under the block’s new operator, a subsidiary of the government-owned NNPC.

“Catastrophic” for communities

Communities in Ogoniland are seeking reparations for the decades-long environmental devastation caused by oil drilling. When it took control of the assets in 2021, the NNPC said the firm’s operations would be driven by “a social contract that would put the people and environment of the Niger Delta above pecuniary considerations”. Nonetheless, gas flaring tripled between 2021 and 2024 across all OML 11 fields, according to the analysis prepared by SkyTruth.

It was a similar story at Nembe Creek, part of the OML 29 block sold by Shell to Nigerian firm Aiteo for $1.7bn in March 2015. That year, flaring rose by around a quarter and then doubled in 2016.

For blighted Niger Delta communities, oil spill clean-ups are another broken promise

Production at the facility fell dramatically following a huge oil spill in 2021 that dumped 20,000 barrels of oil per day into local creeks for a month. Gas flaring at Nembe Creek spiked again in 2024, to an annual volume 54% higher than in 2014, when Shell still ran the field. In June 2024, another spill forced Aiteo to halt production.

Andrew Baxter, senior director for business and energy transition at the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), told Climate Home News: “Flaring and spills harm human health. Flaring is not just a climate menace, it’s catastrophic to the communities that live around these facilities.”

It also wastes energy, he said. “This is a depressing waste of resources when there are still significant challenges around energy access,” he added.

Q&A: “False” climate solutions help keep fossil fuel firms in business

Given the need to address climate change, it’s important that when majors sell fossil fuel assets, buyers have comparable green targets and operating standards, according to organisations like EDF.

Baxter argued that the way Shell managed its troubled oil operations in the Niger Delta over decades had limited its options when selling them on.

“When operators have a poor environmental record and substandard record of community engagement, it should come as little surprise when they cannot attract many interested buyers for those assets. This rule applies globally,” he said.

Big Oil’s “paper decarbonisation”

Between 2016 and 2023, more than 60% of Shell’s emissions reductions came from divestments. That matters because, despite these emissions no longer being Shell’s responsibility, they are still heating up the Earth’s climate.

Krista Halttunen, a visiting researcher at Imperial College London who focuses on the future of the oil industry, told Climate Home News that companies like Shell are practising “paper decarbonisation”, reducing emissions in their annual reports rather than the real world.

“This story shows the limits of company-driven emissions reduction,” she said. “Very few companies are reducing real-world emissions. Fossil fuel companies can’t meaningfully decarbonise without changing their business model, because their whole reason for being is digging up material that will add more carbon to the atmosphere.”

Shell did not reply to Climate Home News’ questions about how it had achieved its emission reductions.

It also appears that Shell’s achievement of reaching zero routine flaring in 2025 was achieved in large part through the sale of its Nigerian assets. In March of that year Shell sold its onshore Nigerian assets to a consortium of companies called Renaissance Africa. Earlier, in 2023, Shell had stated that its remaining Nigerian assets accounted for around half of total routine and non-routine flaring in its integrated gas and upstream facilities.

Removing Nigerian assets from its portfolio, whether in the Renaissance deal or earlier transactions, may have helped transform Shell’s flaring emissions, but for people living in the Niger Delta life has stayed the same.

“Flaring is not new in this community,” explained Theodore Ike Ogu, a 60-year-old smallholder farmer who lives in Oyigbo. “We are suffering and flaring is increasing.”

Here, temperatures regularly hover around 35 degrees Celsius during the day, with humidity often exceeding 50%. When the flares are going full blast, the heat for those living and working nearby can be unbearable, locals said. At night, when the town is quiet, the noise from the flares keeps people awake.

Chief Maduabuchi recalled that residents used to collect water during the rainy season to drink and wash. “You can’t even use it to wash because, as it comes down, it is dirty because of the smoke,” he complained.

Health risks from toxic chemicals

Gas flaring releases harmful chemicals, and numerous studies, including some conducted in the Niger Delta, have linked living close to flares with being more likely to contract forms of cancer and respiratory illnesses.

Complaints from local communities about health issues and unexplained deaths have been rising in oil-producing communities such as Oyigbo as gas flaring intensifies, according to Dr Bieye Renner Briggs, a Port Harcourt-based public health physician and environmental advocate.

While he cautions that a direct link has not yet been scientifically proven in the Niger Delta, Dr Briggs says the connection is “probable”, given similar findings in other oil regions worldwide. He recommended performing routine autopsies in the local communities to establish clear evidence of whether deaths are caused by gas flaring or oil pollution.

Dr Briggs warned that people living near flare sites face a wide range of serious health hazards, from hypertension and cardiomyopathy, which can increase the risk of heart failure, to asthma, chronic bronchitis and kidney disease.

Soot particles released by flaring represent a particularly acute health risk, he warned. These are small enough to bypass the body’s natural defences and enter the bloodstream, increasing the risk of cancers and other conditions, he told Climate Home News. “Everything a smoker will suffer and more is what somebody that is exposed to soot will suffer,” he said, noting that, unlike smokers, residents can do little to limit their constant exposure.

The oil companies contacted by Climate Home News for this article, including Shell, did not respond to requests for comment on the health effects of flaring.

“I have different health issues: incessant lung pains, at times a cough, all those things, catarrh,” said Theodore Ike Ogu, adding there are “so many things that we notice health-wise which we believe are due to flaring”.

Azuh Chinenye’s husband, Kelechi Prince Azuh, died in May last year after suffering from breathing difficulties and frequent asthma attacks. “He was 49 years old,” she said, fighting back tears. “You see his poster outside there and three of the children are in university. He didn’t even see them complete their first year.”

“Nowhere else to go”

Oil production, meanwhile, has increased at former Shell fields. Extracting oil from mature fields like those in Nigeria produces a significant amount of associated gas and, in the absence of funding and infrastructure to make use of this, it is often flared.

Last May, Heirs Energies CEO Igiehon told the Financial Times that Nigerian firms could build better relationships with locals, after years of tension with oil majors over frequent spills and the destruction of local livelihoods. “We’re able to move around unfettered because we have a robust relationship with the communities,” he argued.

The increase in flaring in blocks like OML 17 has tested that idea.

Colombia aims to launch fossil fuel transition platform at first global conference

“Shell was great,” said Chief Maduabuchi, who explained that the company provided healthcare and food to the local community. The new operator, he says, “only gives us a small amount of rice, unlike Shell which used to give us each 50kg”.

Asked why she has chosen to stay in Oyigbo after her husband’s death, Azuh Chinenye explains that it’s much cheaper to live here than in the centre of Port Harcourt. She uses her inhaler when she struggles to breathe and tries not to go outside when the soot gets bad.

“I can easily pack up, but this is my compound, this is my community, and there is nowhere else I will go,” she said.

Cover photo: A woman empties a plastic bowl filled with tapioca, which is derived from cassava paste, on sewn sacks laid on the ground close to a gas flaring furnace in Ughelli, Delta State, Nigeria September 17, 2020. (Photo: REUTERS/Afolabi Sotunde)

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Gas flaring soars in Niger Delta post-Shell, afflicting communities