The Norwegian minerals industry had a turnover of NOK 14.25 billion in 2023. Slightly more than half of the total turnover, around NOK 7.7 billion, is accounted for by exports of minerals. Norway’s mineral resources are divided into five mineral groups: construction raw materials, industrial minerals, metallic ores, natural stone and energy minerals.

On March 28, the government presented a proposal for a new Minerals Act which will replace the Minerals Act of 2009. A key purpose of the proposal is to improve and simplify the regulations so that it contributes to the best possible overall value creation in the Norwegian economy. The proposal also takes national security interests into account, as minerals are of increasing strategic and geopolitical importance as components for renewable energy, digital transformation and the space and defense sectors.

The proposal is based on NOU 2022 8: New Minerals Act and facilitates more sustainable and efficient management and utilization of mineral resources in Norway. The proposal involves extensive changes compared to the Minerals Act of 2009. Essentially, the proposal aims to modernize the regulations. For Norwegian players in the minerals industry, the new Minerals Act will facilitate simpler and more transparent public licensing procedures, as well as contribute to areas being allocated to players and projects with a greater chance of realization based on the fact that conflict issues have been clarified to a greater extent in advance and the shortening of time in the exploration permits will incentivize players to initiate investigations faster.

One of the main steps towards achieving the ambition of more sustainable and efficient management and utilization of mineral resources in Norway is to ensure that application processes under the Minerals Act are more efficient and better coordinated with other relevant regulations. Specifically, the government is proposing to strengthen the coordination of the various public licensing procedures in the mineral field and a structured sequence for the public licensing procedures, which will ensure that an extraction area must be clarified in a decision under the Planning and Building Act before a decision can be made on an operating license.

Central to improving the application processes is the introduction of a joint exploration license for the state’s minerals, industrial minerals and light metals in Chapter 4 of the Act. This will contribute to more predictable framework conditions for the minerals industry and avoid conflicts in relation to the right to mineral deposits. The current prioritization system is proposed to be abolished and replaced with an exclusive exploration license for the state’s minerals and light metals. The new proposal means that at any given time there will only be one operator with an exploration license in a given area, instead of several operators with different priorities.

Furthermore, changes have been made to the requirements for the preparation of an exploration plan pursuant to Section 4-6, which shall form the basis for the application for the exploration permit. Both the application and the exploration plan must be submitted for consultation to the municipality, county administration, state administrator, landowners and affected right of use holders, cf. Section 4-5, last paragraph. The aim of this is to clarify potential conflicts with other interests at an early stage and reduce the risk of exploration permits being granted in areas where they should not have been granted.

The proposal takes particular account of Sámi interests and the relationship to international law, as a large part of Norway’s mineral resources are located in areas where the Sámi people live and carry out traditional Sámi industries. Mineral extraction in traditional Sami areas may specifically have negative impacts on reindeer herding which is particularly important for the Sami language and culture. The proposal clarifies how international law obligations are to be effectively complied with and to strengthen the protection of Sami rights holders. This includes, among other things, an expansion of the scope of the provisions that apply to Sami matters from Finnmark to the entire traditional Sami area.

It is also proposed that the duration of the exploration license be reduced from seven to three years, and that requirements be set for activity during the exploration period in order to extend it. This will help to prevent less serious operators from holding an area without actually conducting surveys.

The proposal for a new Mineral Act in Norway comes in the wake of the EU’s work on the follow-up of the “European Green Deal” where, among other, a regulation for the production and safeguarding of critical raw materials, the Critical Raw Materials Act (CRMA) was adopted in 2024. Critical raw materials are also essential for the EU’s continued prosperity and global competitiveness and play an important role in the green and digital transitions, as well as in the EU’s defense and space sectors. However, access to critical raw materials is limited due to geographical and process constraints.

CRMA defines certain raw materials as “strategic” and “critical”. What these categories have in common is that they are raw materials that are economically important and, because production is currently concentrated in a few third countries, are also vulnerable to supply risks. CRMA therefore sets a target that at least 10% of the EU’s need for strategic raw materials should be covered by own extraction, 40% of processing should be covered through processing in the EU and 25% of the raw materials should come from material recycling in the EU.

In order to facilitate the achievement of the ambitions the regulation contains harmonized rules to make national licensing processes for critical raw material projects more efficient, more coordinated and more predictable for the applicant. In public procurement, emphasis should be placed on whether the critical raw material used contribute to increased circularity. In addition, the regulation requires a single point of contact in the nation states to coordinate the application processes and lays down rules relating to the selection of strategic projects and measures to promote them. Among other things, the strategic projects are to be given special priority in national licensing processes and specific deadlines are set for the permit process.

To support the implementation of the CRMA, the European Investment Bank (EIB) has adopted a Critical Raw Material Strategy, which sets a high level of ambition for financing and investment across the critical raw materials value chain. The aim is to mobilize EUR 2 billion annually, as well as to drive the development of sustainable solutions and increase security of supply.

Norway has worked closely with the other EEA countries and the EU on the development of the CRMA and considers that it is of great importance for Norwegian interests to make the CRMA part of the EEA Agreement. The question of whether the CRMA should be implemented in the EEA Agreement is now under consideration in the EEA countries. The government is working for implementation, so that the CRMA becomes part of the Norwegian regulations. The EU has marked the regulation as EEA-relevant.

Norway is already an important supplier of critical raw materials to Europe and is the largest supplier to Europe of aluminum and silicon, produced by the Norwegian process industry. Norway has the potential to deliver more. The proposal for a new Minerals Act and CRMA will together contribute to faster realization of new Norwegian projects. If the Government does not succeed in its efforts to implement the CRMA, it is assumed to be a competitive disadvantage for Norwegian players that minerals from Norway, processing in Norway and recycling in Norway cannot contribute to the achievement of goals under the CRMA and thus be considered as minerals from other third countries.