Rare earths found in Sweden: a game-changer?

SAP Me, or Lapland in the Arctic Circle, is home to huge expanses of pristine nature and also to deposits of rare earths, precious raw materials that have seen a rapid growth in demand from industrialized nations. Drilling teams at a range of locations are collecting rock samples from the ground down below. The operation is being funded by Swedish mining company LKAB, which anticipates a new gold rush. The team here is currently still busy identifying and analyzing the potential sites before those deposits are mined sometime in the future. The client spokesman is also on hand to inspect proceedings. We are still drilling and cannot see where it ends. We have drilled deeper than 2000 meters from the surface and we have found more than 700 million tons of iron ore and some 1.3 million tons of rare earth oxide. So it’s a very good deposit and we think that we have explored perhaps 1/4 of it. So far. They’ve literally found no end to the rare earth’s deposits today. They’re taking a sample from a depth of some 900 meters down. The operation has made international headlines due to the discovery of the first known rare earth deposits in Europe. This device records the depth of the relevant site to within a centimetre. In total, the teams are taking several thousand samples, which are catalogued by depth. Geologist Sean Jaheen takes away the samples for further analysis in the lab. He’s one of a 5 strong team working there on shift. The geologists hail from a variety of countries. Sean Jahin himself is French. The sample analysis stage conducted prior to the development of the site will cost the mining company many millions of EUR. I can go and scratch the rocks and see so this this part is really hard. I need to to press press harder and this here is softer so it gives me gives me information on what kind of mineral it could be. The material samples are actually 50% iron ore and have a rare Earth’s content of just 0.2%. They also contain significant levels of phosphate which will later be sold to fertilizer producers. So this is a bonus we get when mining the iron ore, that’s the main idea of our operations. But we get the this critical raw materials as a byproduct. As a bonus, China is dominating the market. But this deposit, that Padilla deposit, is the biggest reported bare earth deposit in Europe, so it has very big importance for the self-sufficiency of the of critical raw materials. The rare earths would then be extracted from material mined from newly created tunnels belonging to the neighbouring mine. Without rare earths, we’d have no screens or displays, no magnets for wind turbines, no electric cars, and indeed no green energy transition. But the plans certainly have their critics, too. Every year, the indigenous Sami people drive their reindeer several 100 kilometers from east to West and back again. In addition to the pollution, the mine would block the animal’s trails, says one reindeer farmer. They want to open up more mines and that will I guess totally destroy the the reindeer herding in this district, in this area, in this Sami village. And and you can say we can’t move to the South, we can’t move to the north, we are stuck in this area. A spokeswoman for the Sami Community Association points out those obstacles, from craters and a new copper mine to lakes full of mine water, railroad tracks and highways. The traditional grazing areas for each Sami clan measure around 80 by 100 kilometres. The new mine, right in the middle, would block all of the animals routes. Well, it would be the end for traditional reindeer herding in in my community, in the community of Gabbana. And it would have a deep impact on our culture and our future. So what does the spokesman for the mining company have to say? It is quite narrow for reindeer herders to bring the reindeers past Kiruna from the mountain areas where they are during the summers down to the forest areas in the winter times. We want to find them solutions, Solutions in dialogue with the summer village. The rare earths beneath those migration routes amount to at least eight times annual global consumption, and mining the resources so close to home would reduce Europe’s dependency on China and Russia for supplies amid growing global tensions.