The CICERO project held its fourth consortium meeting on 21 May 2025 in Leuven, Belgium.
It has been already a year and a half since eleven partners have been actively collaborating on sustainable processing of Europe’s low-grade sulphidic and lateritic nickel/cobalt ores and tailings into battery-grade metals. All five private companies and six top-level research institutions, working together on the EU-funded CICERO project, have produced the first technical report and used their meeting to evaluate their work on task-by-task level, as well as the overall scientific progress.
It was concluded that the Work Plan progresses as planned, and despite the recent changes in the global geo-political landscape, there are no major deviations in the technical work carried out.
It also became apparent, that the smooth project execution, is due to the consistent collaboration between all partners, despite being located in eight different European countries. Strong synergies between the Work Packages have also proven instrumental for the progress of the work.
The Consortium Meeting was proceeded by a Workshop on Exploitation activities, that the project coordinator lead. In the first part of the workshop, the partners reviewed the high-level Exploitation Strategy of the CICERO project. In the second part of the workshop, the consortium reviewed the progress of all ten Key Exploitable Results, as laid out in the CICERO Work Plan. In addition, the five private companies active in the project, that operate along the entire battery raw materials chain, discussed their preliminary plans for scalability, commercialisation and deployment.
The fourth Consortium Meeting of CICERO was concluded with a meeting of the project Executive Committee, which discussed the recent trends in the development of the raw materials market (specifically for Ni, Co and Mn) in Europe and globally.
