Great potential for critical raw materials in Greenland

The ice-free part of Greenland, which covers an area of 400,000 km2, has a very varied geology, which represents almost 4 billion years of geological history. Greenland’s great variation in geological environments has created favourable conditions for the formation of ore deposits, including many of the critical raw materials.

The report also assesses a few other raw materials such as molybdenum, chromium, tin and zirconium, which have a relatively high supply risk and are close to being critical according to the European Commission’s assessment criteria. The report contains an assessment of 38 raw materials in total, the vast majority of which are assessed to have moderate to high raw material potential in Greenland.

“The report shows that Greenland has a large untapped potential for critical raw materials – including the rare earth metals graphite, niobium, platinum group metals, molybdenum, tantalum and titanium, all of which already are or will become important for the green transition. Furthermore, the report shows that Greenland has a long and varied geological development comparable to countries such as Canada and Australia, where there is extensive mining. But in contrast to these countries, mining in Greenland has only been concentrated in a few places and has been of a modest scale,” says Jakob Kløve Keiding, Head of MiMa and co-author of the new report.

Although large parts of Greenland are assessed to have the potential to contain deposits of critical raw materials, Greenland is still relatively sparsely mapped compared to many other countries. This is partly due to Greenland’s often difficult terrain and harsh climate. Therefore, there is a need to increase the geological knowledge of the resource potential in order to attract exploration companies.

“In the report, we show that a significant raw material potential has already been identified, with several world-class deposits, and at the same time the study points out that the ice-free part of Greenland has the potential for several large mineral deposits of critical raw materials. But the knowledge base for many of the critical raw material resources is limited, and even the identified mineral deposits are often poorly studied, and the resource estimates are not well quantified by modern standards. Therefore, we need better mapping and more knowledge in order to be able to target efforts and better qualify the mineral potential,” says Diogo Rosa, Senior Researcher in Economic Geology at GEUS and first author of the report.