The world may not often be very interested in Greenland but it is fascinated by what lies beneath it. As the country’s ice cap melts, hidden mineral wealth is coming tantalisingly within reach. The country’s riches include “rare earth” metals that are essential in the production of many electronic devices, from electric-car batteries to television screens. Metals such as cerium (used in glass manufacturing) and yttrium (which goes into electronic displays) are among those that are hidden under the ice. Many rare earths are not as scarce as their misleading name suggests, but they are scattered thinly and can be difficult to extract. In Greenland they are often mixed up with uranium, which under the country's current laws is illegal to mine. Most of the precious metals therefore remain underground. ...Should Ms Hammond’s plans go ahead, and Greenland manage to ramp up its extraction of rare earths, it could deliver a jolt to the market for the valuable metals. At the moment rare-earth supply is dominated by China. In recent years China has restricted its exports of rare earths, citing environmental concerns. Extraction of the metals is dirty and dangerous, and stories of poisoning are common. But some see an ulterior motive in China’s cutbacks: by controlling the supply of high-value materials, China can also control their use in finished products. That could help it in its broader strategy to move from low- to high-value manufacturing. If Greenland becomes a big supplier of those same minerals, China’s grip on the market could loosen, and prices around the world may fall. Polar politics therefore matter to many more than the 57,000 people who live in Greenland.
Saturday, 25 May 2013
Wednesday, 26 September 2012
As icebergs in the Kayak Harbor pop and hiss while melting away, this remote Arctic town and its culture are also disappearing in a changing climate.Narsaq’s largest employer, a shrimp factory, closed a few years ago after the crustaceans fled north to cooler water. Where once there were eight commercial fishing vessels, there is now one.
As a result, the population here, one of southern Greenland’s major towns, has been halved to 1,500 in just a decade. Suicides are up.
“Fishing is the heart of this town,” said Hans Kaspersen, 63, a fisherman. “Lots of people have lost their livelihoods.”
But even as warming temperatures are upending traditional Greenlandic life, they are also offering up intriguing new opportunities for this state of 57,000 — perhaps nowhere more so than here in Narsaq.
Vast new deposits of minerals and gems are being discovered as Greenland’s massive ice cap recedes, forming the basis of a potentially lucrative mining industry.
One of the world’s largest deposits of rare earth metals — essential for manufacturing cellphones, wind turbines and electric cars — sits just outside Narsaq.
This could be momentous for Greenland, which has long relied on half a billion dollars a year in welfare payments from Denmark, its parent state. Mining profits could help Greenland become economically self sufficient, and may someday even render it the first sovereign nation created by global warming.
“One of our goals is to obtain independence,” said Vittus Qujaukitsoq, a prominent labor union leader.
But the rapid transition from a society of individual fishermen and hunters to an economy supported by corporate mining raises difficult questions. How would Greenland’s insular settlements tolerate an influx of thousands of Polish or Chinese construction workers, as has been proposed? Will mining despoil a natural environment essential to Greenland’s national identity — the whales and seals, the silent icy fjords, and mythic polar bears? Can fishermen reinvent themselves as miners?
“I think mining will be the future, but this is a difficult phase,” said Jens B. Frederiksen, Greenland’s housing and infrastructure minister and a deputy premier. “It’s a plan that not everyone wants. It’s about traditions, the freedom of a boat, family professions.”
The Arctic is warming even faster than other parts of the planet, and the rapidly melting ice is causing alarm among scientists about sea-level rise. In northeastern Greenland, average yearly temperature have risen 4.5 degrees in the past 15 years, and scientists predict the area could warm by 14 to 21 degrees by the end of the century.
Energy companies should not drill for crude oil in Arctic waters because the environmental risks are too high, Total SA Chief Executive Officer Christophe de Margerie said in the Financial Times on Wednesday. The newspaper described de Margerie's comments as the first time a major oil company has publicly criticised offshore exploration in the Arctic.The risk of an oil spill in such an environmentally sensitive area was simply too high, according to de Margerie. "Oil on Greenland would be a disaster. A leak would do too much damage to the image of the company," he said.
Friday, 18 November 2011
After nearly three years of soaring prices for rare earth metals, with the cost per ton of some of these elements rising nearly thirtyfold, the market is rapidly coming back down.
International prices for some light rare earths, like cerium and lanthanum, used in industries like the polishing of flat-screen televisions and oil refining, respectively, have fallen by two-thirds since August and are still dropping. Prices have declined almost as quickly for highly magnetic rare earths, like neodymium, needed for products like smartphones, computers and large wind turbines.
Big companies in the United States, Europe and Japan have been moving operations to China, drawing down inventories, switching to alternative materials or even curtailing production to avoid paying extremely high prices that prevailed outside China over the summer, executives said at an annual conference in Hong Kong on Wednesday.
As demand for rare earths has wilted outside China, speculators have been dumping inventories, feeding the downward plunge. Cerium peaked at $170 per kilogram, or $77 a pound, in August but now sells for $45 to $60 per kilogram.
That is still far above its price of $6 a pound three years ago, before China, the world’s dominant producer, began sharply reducing exports by cutting its export quotas.
“We all learned a hard lesson in July and August, how high these prices can go before customers begin yelling,” said Mark Smith, the chief executive and president of Molycorp, the only U.S. producer of rare earths.
He added that rare earth mining outside China remained very profitable even with the decline in prices, which has brought the market back down to its level last spring.
The sharp decline in demand and prices outside China could yet create another shortage next year, said Constantine Karayannopoulos, the chief executive of Neo Material Technologies, a Canadian company that has its factories in China.
That is because Chinese exporters are very unlikely to use all of their export quotas this year, and the Chinese Commerce Ministry has historically penalized exporters that do not use all of their quotas by giving them smaller quotas the next year.
China mines 94 percent of the rare earth metals in the world. Through 2008, it supplied almost all of the rest of the global annual demand of 50,000 to 55,000 tons. But it cut export quotas to a little more than 30,000 tons last year and again this year, and imposed steep export taxes, producing a shortage outside China.
