Kore Metals' EIC Accelerator Pilot for Low-Carbon Silicon

Silicon metal goes into aluminium alloys, silicones, solar cells, chips and battery anodes, and the EU's Critical Raw Materials Act lists it as both a critical and a strategic raw material. The conventional process heats quartz with coal so that the carbon strips out the oxygen. Kore Metals, a Luxembourg spin-off of the space resources company Maana Electric, says it can do the same job with electricity alone, by dissolving sand in molten salt and splitting it into silicon and oxygen in cells adapted from aluminium smelting.

The European Commission's selection list for the 2026 EIC Accelerator batches names Kore Metals and its project, Kore- SI, for blended finance. CORDIS records a grant agreement signed on 23 September 2026, with an EU contribution of €2,499,999 for a project running from 1 October 2026 to 30 September 2028. Its central promise is a single pilot cell equivalent to a production unit of 1,000 tonnes a year. A month into the grant, that cell is a plan, and this article is about what can already be checked.

A space company's sand process, brought down to earth

Maana Electric was founded in 2018 and sits at the same Foetz address. The Luxembourg Space Agency's directory describes it as a 25-person SME working on technologies that turn low-value feedstocks such as desert sand and lunar regolith into resources, including a "Green Silicon" product made without carbothermal reduction and a project to extract silicon and oxygen from lunar regolith. Change Inc reported in October 2025 that Maana develops the patented process for the space industry with support from the European Space Agency, and that van Oorschot's student thesis was about making solar panels on the Moon.

The terrestrial silicon business was split off in 2025. North Data shows the company registered in July 2025 as Maana Green Silicon Sàrl, with a corporate purpose of silicon production by electrochemical reduction, and carrying the Kore Metals name in an entry of 18 December 2025. Pappers lists the registration filing on 7 August 2025, the company as active, and no annual accounts so far. The public launch came on 22 October 2025 at InnoEnergy's Business Booster in Lisbon, where InnoEnergy announced a "high seven-digit" investment and Maana Electric announced its first terrestrial spin-off.

Electricity instead of coal

Conventional silicon metal is made by heating quartz with carbon. Van Oorschot told Change Inc that each tonne produced this way emits 10 to 12 tonnes of CO2 on average. Kore Metals' website describes the alternative: silica sand is dissolved in molten salt, an electric current deposits silicon on the cathode and releases oxygen at the anode, and post-processing removes the remaining salt. The process is patent-pending, according to both the company and InnoEnergy.

The claims that follow are the company's. It says the process cuts emissions by up to five times; L'Echo du Solaire printed both "more than five times" and "up to five times" in the same article. Van Oorschot told Paperjam that raw materials would fall below 5% of production cost, against 35 to 40% today, and that "All we need is sand, and not particularly pure sand." He told Change Inc that about 90% of the equipment is the same as in aluminium smelting. The website advertises "2x" higher purity without naming the baseline. No purity measurement, energy balance or life-cycle assessment has been published that would let an outsider check these figures.

The weak point of any electrolytic route is electricity. Van Oorschot told Paperjam that a full industrial plant would need about 200 megawatts of continuous power and a large site, and that "Luxembourg does not have the most competitive electricity prices", so the location of such a plant would depend mainly on energy prices and logistics.

What Kore- SI is meant to deliver

The CORDIS objective is to demonstrate an electricity-driven route to metallurgical-grade silicon by removing fossil carbon from the core reduction step, and to replace very large furnaces with modular units that scale by replication. Within the grant, the company is to optimise the process for scale-up and design, build and operate the single-cell pilot. The company's announcement of 25 June 2026 adds the goals of validating silicon recovery and product quality, confirming repeatability, and advancing engineering and permitting. The project was funded under the EIC Accelerator challenge for the European critical raw materials value chain, and CORDIS tags 40% of the grant to climate action.

1. Optimise the process for scale-upUnder wayProject started 1 October 2026; CORDIS shows no report yet.
2. Build a pilot cell equivalent to 1,000 tonnes a yearNot builtInnoEnergy and L'Echo du Solaire gave 2027 for a pilot line; the CRU conference bio says 2028.
3. Validate silicon recovery and product qualityNo dataNo purity or yield figures published.
4. Samples in customers' handsKilogram scaleKilogram quantities delivered for tests, per Change Inc; testers in aluminium, chemicals and batteries, unnamed, per InnoEnergy.

The timing is not consistent across sources. InnoEnergy and L'Echo du Solaire wrote in late 2025 that a full-scale pilot line was planned for 2027. Paperjam put the pilot plant at 500 to 1,000 tonnes a year. The speaker biography for the CRU Silicon Market Forum, where van Oorschot presented on 8 September 2026, says the company "is on track to build an industrial pilot plant by 2028", which is also the year the EIC project ends.

The money, and what is not itemised

Kore Metals headlined its June 2026 announcement as support "worth up to €14.5 million" from the EIC Accelerator and from WISER, a Horizon Europe project on semiconductor raw materials, without breaking the figure down. The CRU biography says the company "has secured €14 million of funding in 2026". What the public record itemises is smaller. CORDIS records the €2,499,999 EIC grant, with no total project cost listed, and a net EU contribution of €937,261.50 to Kore Metals in WISER, a four-year project coordinated by the Swiss research centre CSEM from May 2026 that aims to recover antimony, silicon and silver from asbestos mining waste, photovoltaic waste and geothermal water residues. The equity part of the blended finance award has not been announced, and Kore Metals did not appear on the EIC Fund's list of invested companies when it was checked on 4 November 2026. Paperjam reported that the company planned a financing round of more than €10 million in 2026; no closed round has been announced.

Why the EU wants this to work

The Critical Raw Materials Act of 2024 lists silicon metal among its strategic raw materials and sets the aim that by 2030 the Union should not depend on a single third country for more than 65% of its supply of any of them. The CRM Alliance puts China at 77% of global silicon metal output in 2022, out of about 4.5 million tonnes, with European producers in France, Spain, Germany, Slovakia, Norway, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Iceland making around 400,000 tonnes. Van Oorschot gave higher figures for China: "almost 90%" to Paperjam and about 90% to Change Inc. Change Inc also reported that European producers have recently shut furnaces because they could not compete on price.

Paperjam reported that the company targets aluminium, semiconductor, chemical and battery customers rather than solar, which it sees as dominated by China. If the process performs as claimed, it would answer two EU concerns at once: the dependency the Act targets and the coal in the conventional process. Neither has been demonstrated at the scale the EIC is paying for.

The reporting is based on publicly available sources, listed below.