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In this aerial view, melting icebergs crowd the Ilulissat Icefjord on July 16, 2024 near Ilulissat, Greenland.
Sean Gallup | Getty Images News | fake images
Greenland’s significant ice loss is exposing the island’s natural resources, inadvertently rendering some of the world’s largest natural resources untapped. critical mineral reserves more accessible.
Greenland, a vast but sparsely populated island situated between the Arctic and North Atlantic oceans, has been transformed by climate crisis in recent decades.
A major analysis of historical satellite images, published last year by researchers at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom, showed that the Danish autonomous territory is becoming increasingly green due to man-made global warming.
The changing environment has seen parts of the Greenland ice sheet and glaciers replaced by wetlands, bush areas and barren rocks.
Scientists have repeatedly repeated the alarm sounded on melting snow and ice on the island, warning that risks of ice mass loss increased greenhouse gas emissions and sea level rise.
For mining companies, the retreat of the Greenland ice could facilitate the start of a “gold rush” for minerals.
Landscape, on the Drygalski Peninsula, with icebergs in the Uummannaq fjord system in northwest Greenland, north of the polar circle.
Reda | Universal Image Group | fake images
“What’s happening now is interesting because the waters around Greenland open earlier and earlier each year and close later and later each year. And the ability to reach these remote places is much easier than it was ago. 20, 30, 40 or 70 years ago,” Roderick McIllree, CEO of British mining company 80 Mile, told CNBC via video call.
“Now, ice probably only forms for three or four months in the northernmost latitudes and the rest of the country is seeing a retreat of ice sheets that is exposing potential rocks and mineral deposits that have not been seen before,” he added. .
80 Mile currently has three projects it is actively developing in Greenland, including a large oil concession on the island’s east coast, a titanium project near the US Pituffik space base in the northwest, and its Disko-Nuussuaq project in the southwest.
Underscoring the island’s strategic potential as a globally important mining hub, McIllree said the company’s Disko project could be one of the largest nickel and copper mines on the planet.
A geopolitical storm
Tony Sage, chief executive of Critical Metals Corporation, which is developing one of the world’s largest rare earth assets in Greenland, said the melting ice on the island had done the mining company “huge favours” from one point of view. from a logistical point of view.
Sage said the company had been able to bring large ships directly from the North Atlantic “to the edge of our field” at Tanbreez in southern Greenland, adding that the creation of 80-metre-deep fjords meant the team had been able make use of a floating dock instead of a port.
A boat carrying tourists maneuvers between icebergs floating in Disko Bay, Ilulissat, west Greenland, June 30, 2022.
Strange Andersen | AFP | fake images
“You can imagine, it’s easier to do these things now. If you go to Russia, for example, in Siberia, there is a lot of permafrost and ice and they still manage to extract a lot of minerals, as well as oil and gas. “So yes, there will be a mini rush of gold in Greenland,” Sage told CNBC via video call.
In addition to Greenland’s harsh climate, remote landscape and small population, Sage highlighted the lack of infrastructure as a barrier that mining companies must overcome.
“It’s just logistics. The Danes never built a railway (and) they didn’t build any roads,” Sage said.
“Once you’re out of these small towns and cities, there are no roads. So if you want to go to Nuuk, for example, between Qaqortoq, where we are, you have to take a helicopter. So that’s the problem we’ll have with the gold rush,” he added.
Greenland, which has long been presented as a Western alternative to China almost monopoly on rare earth elements, has launched center of a geopolitical storm in recent weeks.
US President-elect Donald Trump has repeatedly expressed his desire to seize control of the territory, describing the prospect as “absolute necessity“for purposes related to national security.
At a news conference earlier this month, Trump refused to rule out the possibility of using military force to make Greenland part of the United States.
Greenland Prime Minister Mute Egede saying Monday that the island is open to closer ties with the United States, particularly in areas such as mining. Egede has previously insisted that Greenland is “not for sale“and called on the international community to respect the island’s aspirations for independence.
First stages
Jakob Kløve Keiding, senior consultant at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS), said that 2023 survey of Greenland’s resource potential assessed a total of 38 raw materials on the island, the vast majority of which have relatively high or moderate potential.
These materials include the rare earth metals graphite, niobium, platinum group metals, molybdenum, tantalum and titanium. Greenland is also known to have significant deposits of lithium, hafnium, uranium and gold.
Critical minerals refer to a subset of materials considered essential for the energy transition. The end use of these materials, which tend to have a high risk of supply chain disruption, is highly varied and includes electric vehicle batteries, energy storage technologies and national security applications.
A woman watches from a tour boat as it sails away from a glacier between Maniitsoq and Sisimiut, on the west coast of Greenland, on September 4, 2024.
James Brooks | AFP | fake images
“There is huge potential (in Greenland) but at the moment there is not much mining going on,” Keiding told CNBC by phone.
“Greenland is what we would call a greenfield exploration area. So, (it’s) in the early stages of exploration where, for many of the deposits, we don’t have a lot of data. But there are some large, well-established deposits with known resources.” “
Keiding sounded a note of caution when asked about the prospect of a mineral gold rush, saying that while the retreating Greenland ice may remove some logistical hurdles, progress in terms of extraction will likely take “quite a while.”
