Melting Greenland ice is making way for a mineral ‘gold rush’

The massive loss of ice from Greenland is exposing the island’s natural resources, inadvertently making some of the world’s largest untapped mineral reserves more accessible.

Greenland, a large but sparsely populated island located between the Arctic Ocean and the North Atlantic, has been transformed by the 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 autonomous Danish territory is becoming increasingly green due to human-caused global warming.

The changing environment has seen parts of Greenland’s ice sheet and glaciers replaced by wetlands, scrubland and barren rock.

Scientists have repeatedly sounded the alarm about melting snow and ice on the island, warning that the loss of ice mass risks increasing greenhouse gas emissions and rising sea levels.

For mining companies, the retreat of Greenland’s ice could facilitate the start of a mineral “gold rush.”

“What’s happening now is interesting because the waters around Greenland are opening earlier and earlier every year and closing later and later every year. And the ability to access these remote places is much easier than it was 20, 30. 40 or 70 years ago,” Roderick McIllree, chief executive of UK-based mining company 80 Mile, told CNBC via video call.

“Now, the ice probably only really forms for three or four months at very northern latitudes and the rest of the country is seeing the retreat of the ice caps which is exposing rocks and potential mineral deposits that haven’t 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 an important mining hub globally, McIllree said the firm’s Disko project could be one of the largest nickel and copper occurrences on the planet.

Tony Sage, CEO of Critical Metals Corporation, which is developing one of the world’s largest rare earth assets in Greenland, said melting ice on the island had done the mining company “huge favors” logistically.

Sage said the company had been able to bring large vessels directly from the North Atlantic “to the edge of our ore body” at Tanbreez in southern Greenland, adding that the creation of 80m-deep fjords meant the team had been able to use a floating dock rather than a port.

“You can imagine, now it’s easier to do these things. If you go to Russia, for example, in Siberia, it’s under a lot of frost and ice and they still manage to mine a lot of minerals, as well as oil and gas. So , yes, there will be a little bit of a gold rush in Greenland,” Sage told CNBC via video call.

Along with Greenland’s harsh climate, remote landscape and small population, Sage highlighted the lack of infrastructure as an obstacle that mining companies must overcome.

“It’s just logistics, the Danes never built a railway [and] didn’t build any roads,” Sage said.

“Once you’re outside these small towns and cities, there are no roads. So if you want to go to the middle, for example, to Qaqortoq, where we are, to Nuuk, you have to take a helicopter. So it’s a matter of you have a golden rush”, he added.

Greenland, which has long been presented as a Western alternative to China’s near-monopoly on rare earth elements, has been thrust into the center of a geopolitical storm in recent weeks.

US President-elect Donald Trump has repeatedly expressed his desire to gain control of the territory, describing the prospect as an “absolute necessity” for national security purposes.

Speaking at a press conference earlier this month, Trump refused to rule out the possibility of using military force to make Greenland part of the US.

Greenland Prime Minister Mute Egede said on Monday that the island is open to closer ties with the US, 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.

Jakob Kløve Keiding, senior consultant at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS), said a 2023 study of Greenland’s resource potential assessed a total of 38 raw materials on the island, the vast majority of which have a level relatively high or moderate. potential.

These materials include 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 to the energy transition. The end uses of these materials, which tend to have a high risk of supply chain disruption, are broad and include electric vehicle batteries, energy storage technologies, and national security applications.

“It has great potential [in Greenland] but, right now, there’s not actually a lot of mining going on,” Keiding told CNBC by phone.

“Greenland is what we would call a green exploration zone. So [it is] in the early stages of research, where for many of the deposits we do not have so much data. But there are some large and well-placed deposits with known resources.”

Keiding sounded a note of caution when asked about the possibility of a mineral gold rush, saying that while Greenland’s retreating ice could remove some logistical hurdles, progress on extraction is likely to take “quite a while.”