00:00Well, let's discuss this more now. Dr. Gavin Mudd is director of the UK Critical Minerals Intelligence Centre.
00:06Gavin, great to speak to you.
00:08So, I've been really fascinated reading into this and the vast amount of resources that Greenland has,
00:14but can it realistically become a global supplier of oil and rare earth elements?
00:22Thank you, Siobhan. I think when you look at Greenland, I think it's very unique.
00:27It has certainly some large deposits. Tanbreeze would be one. Kavanefield is another. Skergard is another.
00:34But they're not easy to develop, and I think we see this all over the world.
00:40If you look at the Olympic Dam mine in South Australia, for example,
00:44it's already an operating mine that produces copper, uranium, gold and silver,
00:49and the ore contains rare earths at the same concentration as the very big Tanbreeze project in Greenland.
00:57And yet, it's not economic or technically possible, according to the company, BHP,
01:02that own the mine, to actually extract those rare earths.
01:05So, I think there's a range of challenges, but certainly there's resources,
01:11and some of those resources are certainly very large by mining industry standards.
01:16But they're often, you know, the grades are low, but there's some other characteristics that make them potentially attractive.
01:25For Tanbreeze, it has a high concentration or higher concentration than normal of the heavy side of the rare earth
01:33elements.
01:33So, when you're looking at the 15 elements that we talk about under the rare earth element family,
01:40Tanbreeze has a much higher amount of those than normal rare earth deposits.
01:45And certainly for Olympic Dam, it has a very low proportion of that.
01:49So, I think there's certainly possibilities there in Greenland,
01:53but there's a lot of work to do to work out whether it's viable.
01:57The U.S. has been reliant on China for rare earth elements.
02:02Just how dependent is the U.S. on China for this?
02:07If you look at global rare earths, China used to be as high as about 90%, 95% of mining
02:14of rare earth elements.
02:15That's now down probably to about 70%, 75%.
02:19And that's still on an increasing volume as well, actually.
02:22So, they're still producing more rare earths, but we're seeing more production.
02:26The U.S. has restarted Mountain Pass.
02:28You're seeing production out of Australia.
02:30There's been increase in production from Myanmar, of course.
02:34So, the mining is one thing, but then it's the refining.
02:39And that's where we take, say, the concentrates that are sort of very rich in rare earths,
02:44and we separate out all of the individual elements so that they can be used accordingly.
02:48And that's where China is about 90% to 98% of refining still.
02:54So, all of the concentrate from America, for example, from the Mountain Pass mine, still goes to China for refining.
03:01So, there's still a dependency there.
03:04Now, the U.S. has been investing, as has Australia and elsewhere, on building new refineries that can hopefully bypass
03:11China.
03:12And I guess we're all waiting to see that, you know, exactly how all of that comes to be.
03:16But Greenland could be part of that next wave that continues that sort of pattern.
03:22Yes, we'll see.
03:22So, thank you very much, Dr. Gavin Mudd, Director of the UK Critical Minerals Intelligence Centre.
03:28Back to you, Juliette.
03:29Thanks, Yvonne.
