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The European Commission has named Verde Magnesium Industries of Bucharest as the promoter of one of 46 new Strategic Projects under the Critical Raw Materials Act (CRMA), in a decision adopted on 9 October 2026. The annex lists it as an ongoing processing project in Romania that aims to contribute to the supply of magnesium, alongside the magnesium extraction project in Bihor County that the same group placed on the first list in March 2025.
According to the Romanian business site Profit.ro, Verde Magnesium Industries is owned by Verde Magnesium LLC of the United States, which also controls Verde Magnesium SRL, the developer of the brucite deposit at Budureasa. The new list contains two magnesium projects, which the Commission groups under defence and aerospace.
Together with the 60 projects selected in 2025, the Commission says, the Strategic Projects could fully meet the CRMA's 2030 extraction benchmark for magnesium and cover 51% of its processing benchmark. The benchmarks ask EU capacity to cover at least 10% of annual consumption through extraction and 40% through processing by 2030. For magnesium the starting point is low, since the Commission's own factsheet says the EU is fully reliant on imports of magnesium metal.
Strategic Project status brings a streamlined permitting framework, in which permit procedures should take no more than 27 months for extraction projects and 15 months for other projects, together with Commission help in reaching finance and in connecting suppliers with buyers. It does not automatically bring EU money. Reuters reported that progress on the projects picked last year has been slow and that some have struggled to move forward.
Source: Verde Magnesium
Verde's own timeline shows why funding matters. When the Budureasa project joined the first list on 25 March 2025, as the only magnesium project on that list, the company expected commercial operations by the end of 2028 and 30,000 tonnes of magnesium a year in 2030. The feedstock is brucite, a magnesium hydroxide ore, from the Dealul Pițigușului perimeter at Budureasa, and the company describes an aluminothermic route in which calcined ore is reduced with aluminium scrap in electric furnaces. It plans to start with a 360-tonne-a-year "Mother Plant" in Beiuș, about 15 km from the deposit, and then build a smelter of up to 30,000 tonnes a year by 2030.
In November 2025 and again on 25 May 2026, Verde Magnesium SRL took concessions on two plots totalling 4.17 hectares in the Beiuș Smart Specialisation Park, the second tied to an investment of RON 51 million (about €10 million). That second contract takes effect only once the company secures EU funds through Romania's North-West Regional Development Agency. On 21 September 2026 the company opened a supplier tender for a calcined-products plant in the park under the regional programme of the European Regional Development Fund, stating that the financing contract had not yet been signed. The next day Shanghai Metals Market (SMM) reported that Verde's start-up was still waiting for EU funding.
Source: European Commission, Annex to Decision C(2026) 8051, entry 44 — 9 Oct 2026
Source: European Commission press release IP/26/2113 — 9 Oct 2026
Source: Reuters via Mining.com — 9 Oct 2026
