Second wave of strategic projects on the horizon – do the CRMA's permitting schedules have teeth?

With the European Commission's second selection round for Strategic Projects under the Critical Raw Materials Act (Regulation (EU) 2024/1252, CRMA) officially closed, a new cohort of project developers is set to benefit from the CRMA's permitting privileges. But what do those privileges actually mean in practice—specifically, are the CRMA's pre-defined permitting schedules legally enforceable?

The second selection round

The second call for CRMA Strategic Projects officially closed on January 15, 2026, with the European Commission having received 95 applications from within the EU and 66 from outside the EU, including 40 from countries and overseas territories with which the EU has concluded a strategic partnership on raw materials. Overall, the CRMA's Strategic Project mechanism continues to attract genuine market interest. In terms of the applications' material focus, battery value chain technologies dominate the pipeline with 75 project proposals. These are followed by rare earth elements for permanent magnets (21 proposals) and several submissions linked directly to aerospace and defense, i.e., sectors that sit at the intersection of the EU's industrial and security priorities. The breadth of the pipeline reflects the CRMA's ambition to secure EU access to the full spectrum of critical raw materials needed for the green and digital transitions, as well as for strategic autonomy in defense.

Currently, the applications are undergoing a completeness check and an in-depth expert-led assessment by the Commission to determine which will achieve Strategic Project status under the CRMA. Final assessment results and the publication of the new list of recognized Strategic Projects is expected any time now.

What has the CRMA achieved so far?

Two years into the designation of the first wave of 47 Strategic Projects under the CRMA, with the regulation intended to herald faster permitting and easier financing to Strategic Projects, the question arises as to what has happened since designation and, in particular, whether the shorter and streamlined permitting schedules mandated under the CRMA for Strategic Projects in the EU (in principle, not exceeding 27 months for extraction projects and 15 months for only processing and recycling projects)¹ have proven effective. Our key observations are:

• Overall, progress since designation appears to have been limited and concentrated on a small number of already advanced projects, with little evidence so far of accelerated permitting outcomes across the wider portfolio of designated Strategic Projects.
• The majority of Strategic Projects remain in the planning or the pilot phase, without having entered or completed permitting in a visible way. Projects that have materially advanced fall into two categories: construction-stage projects, which continue to deliver,² and early-stage projects, which progress on financing and scale-up plans, but not permitting.³
• A critical aspect for the permitting schedules is a Strategic Project's maturity at selection. The first wave of designated Strategic Projects included many early-stage projects, limiting the practical application of the CRMA's permitting deadlines, because at designation, most projects were still at feasibility or pilot stage and had not completed the engineering design process, nor has an environmental impact assessment report been prepared. Accordingly, for a significant portion of the designated Strategic Projects, the permitting timeline under the CRMA has not yet become binding in practice.⁴
• To streamline the permitting process, reduce complexity and increase efficiency and transparency in the permit-granting process, the CRMA required Member States to establish by February 2025 national single points of contact (one-stop shops) responsible for facilitating and coordinating the entire permit-granting process and for interacting with project promoters, and to provide them with sufficient personnel and resources.⁵ However, as of November 2025, only 16 of the 27 Member States had created these one-stop shops.⁶

What legal redress do project promoters have?

For many developers, the prospect of a legally defined permitting schedule—replacing the open-ended timelines that have historically plagued large infrastructure and extractive projects across the EU—is the most compelling aspect of the CRMA framework. With the empirical data confirming the doubts raised from the outset about whether the CRMA would prove effective to accelerate mining, processing and recycling projects in the EU, the question about possible legal redress for project promoters arises when Member States fail to deliver on the permitting timeline.

This question only arises where the designated project has achieved sufficient maturity, with the environmental impact assessment report (where required) already prepared and the permit-application having been acknowledged by the Member State's single point of contact as complete, as only this formal acknowledgement starts the clock for the regulation's permitting schedule.⁷

The missing teeth of the CRMA

CRMA does not set forth a regime for legal redress

The CRMA does not explicitly address the scenario where pre-defined permitting schedules under Article 11 paras. 1 and 2 CRMA (with the possibility of time-limited extensions in exceptional cases) are not achieved at the national level. However, the CRMA clearly anticipates a degree of delay.⁸ For instance:

• The project promoter shall, every two years after the date of recognition as a Strategic Project, submit a report to the Commission containing information on, inter alia, (a) the progress in the implementation of the project, in particular with regard to the permitting granting progress and (b) where relevant, reasons for delays compared to the timetable for the implementation of the project, including on required permits and the status of the corresponding permit-granting process (cf. Article 7 para. 1 (c) CRMA), and a plan to overcome such delays (see Article 8 para. 1 (a) and (b) CRMA).
• Pursuant to Article 7 para. 2 in conjunction with Article 36 para. 7 (c) CRMA, the Commission shall submit a copy of the report of the project promoter to the board to facilitate discussions on the implementation of the Strategic Project and, where necessary, measures that could be taken by the project promoter or the Member State whose territory is concerned by a Strategic Project to further facilitate the implementation of those Strategic Projects pursuant to Article 15 CRMA.
• The Commission monitors supply risks related to critical minerals, including bottlenecks at any stages for Strategic Projects within the EU (Article 20 para.1 (f) CRMA).

No tacit approval mechanism

During the legislative drafting of the CRMA, a "fictional permit" or tacit approval mechanism was initially included in the original proposal for Strategic Projects involving only processing or recycling.⁹ This tacit approval mechanism as initially proposed would have created a genuine consequence for administrative inaction, giving promoters of non-mining Strategic Projects an automatic fallback where a Member State failed to conclude the permitting process within the prescribed schedule. However, it did not appear in the final regulation, with the adopted version of Article 11 setting maximum durations and clock-stopping rules, but without providing an automatic consequence for missing the deadline. There is no silence-means-consent rule. The CRMA does not establish a dedicated EU-level compensation scheme for project promoters affected by permitting delays. It does not give the European Commission the power to override a Member State's permitting decision. It does not create an EU-level sanctions mechanism that can be deployed rapidly against a Member State that systematically misses the Article 11 deadlines. The deadlines are, in that sense, procedural targets backed by a coordination architecture, not carrying an automatic legal consequence in case of non-compliance.

Are there any "teeth" at all if deadlines are not met?

Essentially, permitting remains amongst the most material project risks, both in terms of ability to raise capital and ability to build. While the CRMA establishes formal fast-tracking timelines, it does not impose a response or even sanctions regime on the national permitting authorities or Member States for failure to comply with the pre-defined permitting schedules of the CRMA.

When permitting drifts beyond the CRMA's deadlines, project promoters may consider the following avenues — it being understood that none of these provides swift or automatic relief:

Building political pressure

The project promoter may flag delays through the single point of contact and escalate within the CRMA's governance framework. While this is soft-power leverage rather than a hard legal remedy, it may serve to ensure visibility and generate political pressure.

National administrative and judicial remedies

National administrative and judicial remedies provide the primary route to potential redress. The CRMA explicitly provides that its permitting schedule operates "without prejudice" to administrative appeal procedures and judicial remedies available under national law. Project promoters can invoke Article 11 CRMA as a legal basis to bring proceedings for unlawful administrative inaction or undue delay before national courts or administrative tribunals, seeking an order requiring the competent authority to decide within a specified period. The availability and effectiveness of such remedies depends on national procedural law and, thus, may vary by Member State. In some EU jurisdictions, administrative courts can move quickly and issue mandatory orders compelling authority action; in others, the process may be slow and the practical outcome uncertain.

In jurisdictions where administrative courts have broad interim relief powers, a Strategic Project promoter may seek urgent procedural orders compelling specific steps in the permitting process. This is a more targeted remedy than full judicial review and can, in appropriate cases, provide meaningful pressure on a competent authority that has allowed the process to stall.

State liability

Where a Member State's failure to comply with the CRMA's permitting obligations constitutes a sufficiently serious breach of EU law that causes quantifiable loss, a claim for damages against the Member State may in principle be available under the relevant national law. This avenue is, however, subject to a high threshold and is heavily fact-dependent. To date, no test case has been brought under this heading in the context of the CRMA, but a well-documented claim by a Strategic Project promoter demonstrating concrete financial loss attributable to permitting delay could serve as a significant precedent for the enforceability of the CRMA's permitting schedules.

Commission complaint/infringement procedure

At the institutional level, a formal complaint to the European Commission alleging systematic failure by a Member State to comply with CRMA permitting obligations can, in appropriate cases, trigger infringement proceedings under Article 258 Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union ("TFEU"). Such infringement procedure is, however, more of a theoretical recourse, since, in reality, the Commission is slow and selective in bringing such cases, and at best (and after considerable time) it could result in a declaration that the Member State permitting authorities failed to comply with EU law, with an obligation to take necessary measures. While this avenue does not provide individual relief for the project promoter, it may generate useful political and institutional pressure. A targeted complaint by one or more Strategic Project promoters could, however, serve as a test case to clarify the European Commission's willingness to enforce the CRMA's permitting deadlines.

Conclusion

In sum, the CRMA alone does not yet appear to be delivering the accelerated permitting outcomes that project promoters and policymakers had envisaged. That said, the CRMA's permitting framework represents a meaningful step forward and projects on the list are clearly more likely to progress than those that are not designated as Strategic Projects. The regulation establishes clear, binding maximum durations that Member States must respect, mandates Strategic Projects to be treated as a matter of the highest national importance and processed as rapidly as possible, and requires that disputes related to them be handled with urgency where national procedural law provides for urgency track. In addition, the single point of contact framework creates mandatory coordination infrastructure designed to prevent the diffusion of responsibility that typically delays large-scale projects. Nonetheless, whether the regulation's permitting framework will prove effective in practice remains to be seen, as the first wave of Strategic Projects matures and the second wave enters the pipeline. In the meantime, it would not be surprising to see project promoters push for additional enforcement mechanisms to be incorporated into the CRMA framework and pursue test cases before national courts and EU institutions to probe the limits of what the CRMA's permitting schedules can deliver in practice.

_{1 See Article 11 para. 1 and 2 CRMA. Note that an extension by a maximum of six or three months respectively is available in "exceptional cases. Where the nature, complexity, location or size of the Strategic Project so require", Article 11 para. 4 CRMA.
2 See e.g. the following projects: Zero Carbon Lithium by Vulcan Energie Ressourcen GmbH, an extraction and processing project in Germany; Keliber Lithium by Keliber (Sibanye-Stillwater), an extraction and processing project in Finland; CirCular by Geomet s.r.o. a recycling project in Spain; and Lithium Hydroxide Converter Guben by Rock Tech Guben GmbH, a processing project in Germany.
3 See e.g. the following projects: MagFactory by MagREEsource, a recycling project in Fracne and Hycamite TCD Tech by Hycamite TCD Technologies Ltd, a processing project in Finland.
4 See Article 11 para. 3 and 6 CRMA.
5 Cf. preambular paragraph 28 and Article 9 CRMA.
6 See European Court of Auditors, Special Report 04/2026 "Critical raw materials for the energy transition. Not a rock-solid policy", para. 75 at p. 36, available at https://www.eca.europa.eu/ECAPublications/SR-2026-04/SR-2026-04_EN.pdf.
7 See Article 11 para. 6 CRMA.
8 Cf. Article 8 para 1 and 36 para 7(c) CRMA.
9 Article 10 para. 4 of the Proposal for a Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council establishing a framework for ensuring a secure and sustainable supply of critical raw materials and amending Regulations (EU) 168/2013, (EU) 2018/858, 2018/1724 and (EU) 2019/1020, COM(2023)160 final dated 16 March 2023, contained an explicit rule that for Strategic Projects only involving processing or recycling, the lack of comprehensive decision by the national competent authority within the applicable time limits shall result in the relevant permit granting application to be considered as approved, except in those cases where the specific project requires an environmental impact assessment or a determination of whether such environmental impact assessment is necessary and the relevant assessments have not yet been carried out.}

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