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President Trump says the alleged new framework for a Greenland deal involves U.S. access to mineral rights, but is it really a land of untapped riches? The Indicator's Darian Woods and Wailin Wong talked to a geologist who went looking for these minerals himself.
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DARIAN WOODS: When Greg Barnes was at college in Australia, he decided to study geology because the other subjects ended too late in the day.
WAILIN WONG: Greg's geology career took him all over the world. He made a lot of money fixing up old mines. Eventually, he started exploring Greenland in the 1990s. There, he found a mineral deposit unlike any other he'd seen.
GREG BARNES: This one stood out like a sore thumb. In fact, of all the geology deposits on Earth, this would be one that every geologist should go to before he dies. There's hundreds of minerals - all unique, all very big.
WOODS: What excited Greg so much was a mineral called eudialyte. Basically, think of a shiny red or pink gemstone. What he knew was that this contains rare earth elements.
WONG: Greenland has large deposits of rare earth minerals but no commercial rare earth mining.
WOODS: And outside of China, processed rare earth elements are in short supply. It's only a little bit of an exaggeration to say that China froze the trade war with the U.S. simply by pulling down the lever on its rare earth exports. So even in the 1990s, the possibility of a rare earths motherlode was tantalizing for Greg.
WONG: Greg eventually got an exploration license for the site, but to make actual money, he needed an exploitation license from the Greenlandic government. And that meant a lot of money over years, proving that what he was sitting on was viable.
BARNES: I spent 50 million of my own money. I never spent 50 million of my own money on anything before.
WOODS: Then there's also the community consent situation. So would a majority of Greenlanders support a mine that dug up their land and potentially risked toxic pollution? Rare earths mining in particular is challenging because they're often found with radioactive materials. In Greenland, this is uranium.
WONG: To the community, Greg emphasized the relatively low concentration of uranium in his deposits compared to others in Greenland, and this approach seemed to pay off. In 2020, he was granted an exploitation license - basically, a license to start extracting rocks if certain conditions were met over the next several years.
WOODS: Today, Greg's plan is starting to come into focus.
BARNES: That mine will go into production sometime this year or next, producing rare earths.
WONG: Now, Gracelin Baskaran has strong doubts about whether Greg's story is representative of a wider treasure trove of mineral wealth in Greenland. She's a critical minerals expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and she's written about Greg's project.
GRACELIN BASKARAN: The difficulty with Greenland is you can have a lot of good geology that doesn't necessarily make sure that it's economically viable to extract. Eighty percent of Greenland is still under ice. There are 93 miles of roads. There is not enough energy. It is the lowest population density in the world. And quite frankly, a lot of people in Greenland don't want mining.
WOODS: This skepticism is echoed by a lot of other minerals experts. As Greg's story shows, even getting to the cusp of production is a project that can take decades. Darian Woods.
WONG: Wailin Wong, NPR News.
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