"The last Russian ships in Greenland were here during the 2013-2014 season. An unusual warm current came in, and the mackerel banks reached much further north than usual, so Russian fishing vessels with Danish captains had to be hired to catch them because everyone else was already committed to the cod and turbot season." This was the reaction of a former captain of a deep-sea fishing vessel in the port of Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, following the statements of the President of the United States, Donald Trump claiming that the island was literally "covered with Russian and Chinese ships".
The Russian fishing vessels with Danish captains chasing mackerel do not seem to be heirs to the Soviet ships that spied during the Cold War, and even if they were, more than a decade has passed since they sailed through the waters surrounding the world's largest island. However, this anecdote is just one of the things that Trump claims exist in Greenland, which the Greenlanders maintain do not exist or, if they do, nobody knows the quantity or the cost of exploiting them. Especially, the alleged mineral riches of the territory.
Trump has been in power for a year promising mineral colonialism that does not work due to one factor: geology. In Venezuela, he promised an oil treasure only to find that companies are not willing to spend 100 billion euros to exploit expensive and poor-quality crude oil, especially in a time of low prices. In Ukraine, he became obsessed with rare earth elements, despite the fact that the country does not have them. So much so that in the (so far) latest U.S. peace plan for Ukraine, launched in November, rare earth elements were not mentioned once.
Greenland has large reserves of oil, coal (graphite), iron, and rare earth elements. These last ones have been at the center of Donald Trump's campaign to annex the island. The problem is that the gap between Trump's imagination and geological reality is also enormous. Firstly, due to the costs. 80% of Greenland is covered by ice, which can reach a maximum thickness of 3,488 meters. Translated into Spanish terms, this means that the entire Aneto mountain could fit there with 84 meters of ice to spare. In reality, Greenland is not just an island, but three, buried and connected by ice. If this ice were to melt, a fourth island would appear, as the weight of the ice is so great that the land in the center of the territory is submerged below sea level and, without glaciers, it would emerge. In fact, due to melting ice caused by climate change, the land in Greenland is already starting to rise. The most repeated words on any topographic map of the territory are "Ikke Opmålt", which in Danish means "unexplored".
Excluding the 80% covered by ice, there are 410,000 square kilometers on the south and southwest coast suitable for human activity. However, even in that region, the difficulties for any kind of industrial operation are endless. Despite the riches of Greenland's subsoil, over the three centuries of active Danish and Norwegian colonization, there have been barely a dozen mines on the island, dedicated to the exploitation of cryolite, zinc, lead, coal, graphite, gold, gemstones, anorthosite, and olivine.
Many of them never truly became operational. All were subsidized, had Danish state participation, operated under a monopoly regime, or benefited from significant tax exemptions. Even with these aids, they ended up closing, although now several are likely to be reopened. The reality is that currently only two mines are operational in all of Greenland.
The problem is that apart from the deposits, there is nothing else. In Greenland, there are no roads or railways. All travel is by boat or plane. Nothing is cultivated, so all food must be imported from America or Europe. There are no factories, so construction materials must also be imported. And, of course, there are no mineral conveyors, pipelines, water channels, power lines, or power plants. Nor is there any workforce, skilled or unskilled, because hardly anyone lives there.
This makes the costs incalculable. For example, the oil sector estimates that extracting oil on the island costs $80 per barrel. That is about 10 times more than in Saudi Arabia and two to three times more than in Texas. With the barrel price at $55, it does not make sense to exploit the crude oil, which is also offshore, requiring the construction of oil platforms capable of operating in a zone that is just a thousand kilometers from the geographic North Pole.
This opens the door to potential ecological catastrophes, as evidenced by the precedent of the Kulluk platform, manufactured in Japan and used in 2012 by the British oil company Shell to drill for oil in the waters of northern Alaska, where the weather conditions are similar, although not as extreme as in northeastern Greenland. Shell invested 3 billion euros in the project, but the Kulluk never reached its destination. Thousands of kilometers from where it was supposed to operate, the sea released it from the tugboat towing it, and the platform ended up running aground in southern Alaska with over half a million liters of fuel on board, which fortunately did not spill into the sea.
Furthermore, one thing is having reserves, and another is their quantity. Once again, oil provides a good example of this paradox. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, which is the equivalent of the Spanish Geological and Mining Institute, Greenland has between 17,500 and 31,400 million barrels of technically recoverable oil. Although this is a considerable amount, the margin of error in the estimate is enormous. At the lower end of the range, this is as much oil as Brazil; at the higher end, as much as Kazakhstan.
"In reality, any attempt to calculate the reserves [of minerals] is approximate. Expert teams must move from one place to another by helicopter, leaving vast expanses of land uncovered, and can only work for two or three months a year. This makes it very difficult to measure reserves accurately," explains Dan Sivertsen, Secretary-General of the Greenland Business Association, the island's business association.
This sometimes creates confusion among the uninitiated. Because in Greenland, it is relatively common for people to extract minerals on their own, creating the impression that the island is an immense untapped vein of wealth. But one thing is for someone like Miki Østergaard, a 64-year-old retiree who was in the French Foreign Legion and now makes crafts for tourists, to do it, and another very different thing is for these veins to be profitable in an industrial operation. "From time to time, I go to the south, where the ruby mine of Aappaluttoq was, which went bankrupt a couple of years ago, and I bring some to make crafts," explains Østergaard in his workshop on the outskirts of Nuuk. The mine went bankrupt, but he and others can continue with low-cost mining. The problem is that this does not work on a business level.
But nowhere is the disproportion between Trump's words and the reality of Greenland more evident than in the case of rare earths, which have become a true fixation for the U.S. President since he took office at the White House and which, according to some reports, would be included in the alleged "framework agreement" he reached on the island with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte in Davos.
First of all, a detail: the United States has more rare earths than Greenland, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Rare earths are, in addition, like UFOs: something everyone talks about but no one really knows what they are. First of all, they are anything but rare, as they are scattered all over the Earth. And their price is relatively low. In 2024, the entire rare earths sector - including extraction, processing, and distribution - generated between 15,500 and 16,200 million euros worldwide, according to the consulting firm GMI, which closely monitors that market. That is approximately 0.4% of the 3.6 trillion euros that oil moved.
What Greenland does have are heavy rare earths, which are rare outside of China. There are two key projects on a global scale. The most relevant is Tanbreez - in which Trump's eldest son, Don Jr., participates as an investor - with large reserves of dysprosium (necessary in the nuclear industry and electric cars) and terbium (essential in the aeronautical sector and specifically in radar-invisible aircraft). Near Tanbreez is the Kvanefjeld deposit, even more important, but its exploitation by the Australian company Energy Transition Minerals was halted when the Greenlandic Government suspended it in 2021 citing environmental reasons. A little further south, there is yttrium, used in lasers and superconductors.
These three deposits are important. However, once again, their costs and extraction difficulties make them long-term projects. Even after the pre-allocation of a $120 million credit (102 million euros) from the U.S. government to Critical Minerals, the company that will exploit Tanbreez, that project - the most advanced one - will take years to start extracting minerals. This slowness is more significant considering that Tanbreez is in one of the most populated (or least depopulated) and best infrastructure areas of Greenland, permanently inhabited for centuries, and where other mining projects exist.
In fact, the Greenlanders are very aware that mining will progress very slowly on their island, despite climate change hitting the Arctic with three times the intensity of the Earth's average. That is why the Nuuk government was able to ban most oil and mining activities in 2021. The measure was controversial and may be eliminated or softened in the future. But there seems to be little doubt that the world's largest island will become a new mining El Dorado.