Greenland's harsh environment stalls rare earth mining

New York, Jan. 12: Greenland's harsh environment, lack of key infrastructure and difficult geology have so far prevented anyone from building a mine to extract the sought-after rare earth elements that many high-tech products require. Even if President Donald Trump prevails in his effort to take control of the Arctic island, those challenges won't go away.

Trump has prioritized breaking China's stranglehold on the global supply of rare earths ever since the world's number two economy sharply restricted who could buy them after the United States imposed widespread tariffs last spring. The Trump administration has invested hundreds of millions of dollars and even taken stakes in several companies. Now the president is again pitching the idea that wresting control of Greenland away from Denmark could solve the problem.

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

But Greenland may not be able to produce rare earths for years — if ever. Some companies are trying anyway, but their efforts to unearth some of the 1.5 million tons of rare earths encased in rock in Greenland generally haven't advanced beyond the exploratory stage. Trump's fascination with the island nation may be more about countering Russian and Chinese influence in the Arctic than securing any of the hard-to-pronounce elements like neodymium and terbium that are used to produce the high-powered magnets needed in electric vehicles, wind turbines, robots and fighter jets among other products.

"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."

Trump confirmed those geopolitical concerns at the White House Friday.

"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," Trump said

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