Beyond Critical Minerals Targets: Digital Rock Physics as Infrastructure for Secure and Circular Supply Chains

Abstract

The United Kingdom and Europe are moving rapidly from critical minerals target-setting to implementation. The EU Critical Raw Materials Act and the UK's Vision 2035 create ambitious benchmarks for domestic extraction, processing, recycling, circularity, and supply-chain resilience, but many prospective regional resources remain complex, under-explored, historically worked, or economically marginal. This paper argues that implementation will depend not only on permitting reform and project designation, but also on pre-competitive measurement, modelling, and data infrastructure capable of determining which ores, brines, waste streams, and recycling feedstocks can be processed viably and with lower environmental impact. Digital Rock Physics (DRP) should therefore be understood as enabling infrastructure for resource policy rather than as a specialist laboratory method alone. By combining three-dimensional imaging, correlative chemistry, AI-enabled image analysis, and pore-scale modelling, DRP can connect mineral texture and reactive pathways to decisions about ore characterisation, liberation prediction, leaching, Direct Lithium Extraction, mine-waste valorisation, and battery recycling. The paper sets out a UK-European policy agenda built around translational demonstrators, cross-disciplinary training, a Digital Ore Passport standard, a federated Digital Ore Database, and integrated geo-reactive end stations. Treated as shared implementation infrastructure, DRP could help turn critical minerals strategies into practical routes for supply security, resource efficiency, circularity, and more environmentally responsible development.