Review of potential resources for critical minerals in Greenland

Minerals are essential resources for the development and progress of modern society. The availability of the mineral resources varies from country to country and from commodity to commodity. In some instances the supply-chain of minerals that are of crucial importance to society, is threatened. Such mineral resources are defined as critical raw materials. Supply risk is in many cases related to monopolism in the up-stream part of the supply chain. Improving knowhow related to mineral resource potential is one of the keys to overcome criticality.

This report presents a review of the Greenlandic potential mineral resources for undiscovered deposits of critical minerals, focusing on the raw materials labelled as critical by the European Commission in 2014 (EC 2014).

The Greenland marginal ice-free zone makes up about 0.4 million km2, hosting complex geological terranes, that represent almost four billion years of geological history, covering the spectrum from Archaean to recent processes. This makes Greenland favourable for finding and exploiting a wide range of mineral resources including some of the critical minerals. GEUS and the Greenland Ministry of Mineral Resources (MMR) have since 2009 held annual regional mineral resource assessment workshops on selected commodities. The approach applied in these assessments constitutes the background for this review.

For each of the commodities chosen, their known occurrences in Greenland are reported together with a description of the regional to semi-regional tracts with favourable permissive geological settings, settings that potentially could host mineral occurrences of the primary deposit type.

The review points out that some areas are likely to host high potential undiscovered mineral deposits. Aside from the known deposits at Kvanefjeld and Kringlerne, South Greenland has a high potential for hosting undiscovered REE deposits, for example in the Grønnedal-Ika carbonatite, the Qassiarssuk/Green Dyke, and the Ivittuut alkaline intrusion. South Greenland also has the potential for niobium occurrences and deposits in the same geological environment. Central East Greenland stands out with a high potential for tungsten and antimony. The North Atlantic Craton (Archaean) and the Palaeoproterozoic terranes have a good potential for hosting undiscovered deposits of chromium, platinum group metals, graphite and, as a by-product of cobalt.