All the barriers to rare earth mining in Greenland

Greenland’s formidable environment, underdeveloped infrastructure, and challenging geology have consistently thwarted attempts to establish mines for the rare earth elements crucial to numerous high-tech products.

Even as US President Donald Trump pursues his ambition to acquire the Arctic island, those fundamental obstacles are unlikely to diminish.

Mr Trump has made it a priority to dismantle China’s near-monopoly on the global rare earths supply, particularly after Beijing significantly restricted exports following the widespread US tariffs imposed last spring.

His administration has already committed hundreds of millions of dollars and acquired stakes in several companies to this end. Now, the president is once again advocating the idea that wresting control of Greenland from Denmark could provide a solution to the strategic dilemma.

"We are going to do something on Greenland whether they like it or not," Mr Trump said last Friday.

However, Greenland’s capacity to produce rare earths remains uncertain for years, if not indefinitely. While some companies are making efforts, their attempts to unearth a fraction of the estimated 1.5 million tonnes of rare earths embedded in Greenlandic rock have largely remained in the exploratory phase.

It is plausible that Mr Trump’s keen interest in the island nation is driven more by a desire to counter Russian and Chinese influence in the Arctic, rather than solely securing elements like neodymium and terbium, which are vital for high-powered magnets in electric vehicles, wind turbines, robots, and fighter jets.

“The fixation on Greenland has always been more about geopolitical posturing — a military-strategic interest and stock-promotion narrative — than a realistic supply solution for the tech sector,” said Tracy Hughes, founder and executive director of the Critical Minerals Institute.

“The hype far outstrips the hard science and economics behind these critical minerals."

Mr Trump confirmed those geopolitical concerns at the White House.

“We don’t want Russia or China going to Greenland, which if we don’t take Greenland, you can have Russia or China as your next door neighbour. That’s not going to happen,” he said.

The main challenge to mine in Greenland is the remoteness, said Diogo Rosa, an economic geology researcher at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland.

“Even in the south where it’s populated, there are few roads and no railways, so any mining venture would have to create these accessibilities.”

Power would also have to be generated locally, and expert manpower would have to be brought in.

Another concern is the prospect of mining rare earths in the fragile Arctic environment just as Greenland tries to build a thriving tourism industry, said Patrick Schröder, a senior fellow in the Environment and Society programme at the Chatham House think-tank in London.

“Toxic chemicals needed to separate the minerals out from the rock, so that can be highly polluting and further downstream as well, the processing," Mr Shröder said. Plus, rare earths are often found alongside radioactive uranium.

Besides the unforgiving climate that encases much of Greenland under layers of ice and freezes the northern fjords for much of the year, the rare earths found there tend to be encased in a complex type of rock called eudialyte, and no one has ever developed a profitable process to extract rare earths from that type of rock.

Elsewhere, these elements are normally found in different rock formation called carbonatites, and there are proven methods to work with that.

“If we’re in a race for resources — for critical minerals — then we should be focusing on the resources that are most easily able to get to market," said David Abraham, a rare earths expert who has followed the industry for decades and wrote the book The Elements of Power.

This week, Critical Metals’ stock price more than doubled after it said it plans to build a pilot plant in Greenland this year. But that company and more than a dozen others exploring deposits on the island remain far away from actually building a mine and would still need to raise at least hundreds of millions of dollars.

Even the most promising projects can struggle to turn a profit, particularly when China resorts to dumping extra materials onto the market to depress prices and drive competitors out of business as it has done many times in the past. And currently most critical minerals have to be processed in China.

The US is scrambling to expand the supply of rare earths outside of China during the one-year reprieve from even tougher restrictions that Mr Trump said Xi Jinping agreed to in October. A number of companies around the world are already producing rare earths or magnets and can deliver more quickly than anything in Greenland, which Mr Trump has threatened to seize with military power if Denmark doesn't agree to sell it.

“Everybody’s just been running to get to this endpoint. And if you go to Greenland, it’s like you’re going back to the beginning,” said Ian Lange, an economics professor who focuses on rare earths at the Colorado School of Mines.

Many in the industry, too, think America should focus on helping proven companies instead of trying to build new rare earth mines in Greenland, Ukraine, Africa or elsewhere. A number of other mining projects in the US and friendly nations like Australia are farther along and in much more accessible locations.

The US government has invested directly in the company that runs the only rare earths mine in the US, MP Materials, and a lithium miner and a company that recycles batteries and other products with rare earths.

Scott Dunn, CEO of Noveon Magnetics, said those investments should do more to reduce China's leverage, but it's hard to change the math quickly when more than 90 per cent of the world's rare earths come from China.

“There are very few folks that can rely on a track record for delivering anything in each of these instances, and that obviously should be where we start, and especially in my view if you’re the US government,” said Mr Dunn, whose company is already producing more than 2,000 metric tons of magnets each year at a plant in Texas from elements it gets outside of China.