President Donald Trump said Friday the United States “is going to do something on Greenland whether they like it or not,” renewing his push to acquire the Danish autonomous territory. But geologists and industry experts say Greenland’s rare earth deposits face years of logistical, geological, and financial hurdles that would persist regardless of who controls the island.
Greenland holds an estimated 1.5 million tons of rare earth elements used in electric vehicles, wind turbines, and defense systems, but no one has yet built a mine there. Multiple experts told the Associated Press that Trump’s focus on the island may reflect Arctic geopolitical competition with Russia and China as much as any realistic near-term mineral strategy.
Geopolitics alongside minerals
Trump confirmed both rationales at the White House on Friday.
“We don’t want Russia or China going to Greenland, which if we don’t take Greenland, you can have Russia or China as your next door neighbor. That’s not going to happen,” Trump said.
Tracy Hughes, founder and executive director of the Critical Minerals Institute, said the resource argument does not hold up to scrutiny. “The fixation on Greenland has always been more about geopolitical posturing — a military-strategic interest and stock-promotion narrative — than a realistic supply solution for the tech sector,” Hughes said. “The hype far outstrips the hard science and economics behind these critical minerals.”
What makes Greenland difficult
Even setting aside the question of sovereignty, mining experts point to a series of compounding obstacles.
Diogo Rosa, an economic geology researcher at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, said the core problem is remoteness. “Even in the south where it’s populated, there are few roads and no railways, so any mining venture would have to create these accessibilities,” Rosa said. Any operation would also need to generate power locally and recruit skilled labor from abroad.
The geology compounds the challenge. The rare earths found in Greenland tend to be encased in a complex rock type called eudialyte, and no commercially viable process to extract rare earths from eudialyte has ever been developed. By contrast, most productive rare earth mines elsewhere work with a different rock formation called carbonatite, for which established extraction methods exist.
“If we’re in a race for resources — for critical minerals — then we should be focusing on the resources that are most easily able to get to market,” said David Abraham, a rare earths expert who has followed the industry for decades.
Patrick Schröder, a senior fellow at the Chatham House think-tank in London, added that rare earth processing requires toxic chemicals that can cause serious pollution, and that rare earths are often found alongside radioactive uranium — concerns that intersect with Greenland’s growing tourism industry and its fragile Arctic environment.
Market reality and existing options
Ian Lange, an economics professor at the Colorado School of Mines who focuses on rare earths, said the comparison between Greenland and more advanced projects elsewhere is stark. “Everybody’s just been running to get to this endpoint. And if you go to Greenland, it’s like you’re going back to the beginning,” Lange said.
More than a dozen companies are exploring deposits in Greenland, but most remain far from building a mine and would still need to raise at least hundreds of millions of dollars. This week, Critical Metals Corp.’s stock price more than doubled after the company announced plans to build a pilot plant in Greenland this year — an early-stage step that underscores how far the territory remains from commercial production.
China controls more than 90 percent of the global rare earth supply, according to Scott Dunn, CEO of Noveon Magnetics. The Trump administration has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in companies working to change that balance, including a direct stake in MP Materials, which operates the only rare earths mine currently running in the United States.
Dunn said the better path forward is to build on companies that already have track records. His firm produces more than 2,000 metric tons of rare earth magnets per year at a plant in Texas, sourcing elements from outside China. “There are very few folks that can rely on a track record for delivering anything in each of these instances, and that obviously should be where we start, and especially in my view if you’re the U.S. government,” Dunn said.
Trump has said President Xi Jinping agreed in October to a one-year reprieve from even tougher restrictions on rare earth exports to the United States. Industry experts say that window creates pressure to develop alternatives, but most of those alternatives lie closer to production than anything Greenland currently offers.