EU will open office in Greenland, made strategically important by rare resources and melting ice

While not in the EU, the autonomous Danish territory of Greenland is of strong interest to Brussels, especially for highly sought after raw materials – it believes it has 25 of the 34 that it needs.

That all sounds great, but it's hard to mine the stuff we do no not have. We can either extract from less rich souces at a price at least one order of magnitude more expensive and subsidize that, or buy it cheap from elsewhere. There's an argument to be made for keeping a small local production going to prevent the worst case, but it'll be expensive nonetheless and won't significantly reduce the reliance on ressource-rich countries.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The revival of Europe's domestic mining sector could reduce the continent's dependence on Chinese rare earth minerals, as well as risks such as price volatility and loss of competitiveness.

The Critical Raw Materials Act is one of the more decisive pieces of legislation that Europe has rolled out for domestic mining and the production of rare earth minerals in the past few years.

The European Commission said that the aim of the project "is to develop a recycling supply chain for rare earth magnets in the EU and to demonstrate these new materials on a pilot scale within a range of application sectors.

"With targeted economic incentives, we are creating project-planning certainty for private investors - through single points of contact for companies and fast and simple authorisation procedures with clear deadlines for national authorities," she said.

"At this very moment, if we would produce rare earths in the EU, they would have to go through China (or at least Asia) for some transformation steps into a magnet," said Stephane Bourg, director at the French Geological Survey according to Investigate Europe.

This increased European dependence on China for critical minerals has left the continent open to significant risks such as price volatility, supply blockages, as well as the loss of competitiveness.

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