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With sea ice receding, billionaires want to mine Greenland for rare Earth metals to power batteries. It could be part of a climate solution ... or “a perfect symbol for our dystopian times.”

Earlier this month, CNN published a piece provocatively titled “Billionaires are funding a massive treasure hunt in Greenland as ice vanishes.” In the story, reporter René Marsh explains that investors including Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos have helped fund an expedition to explore the mineral wealths of Greenland, a feat made easier by the ravages of climate change.

It inspired a ton of predictable responses about billionaires dancing on Earth’s grave. But the participating startup, KoBold Metals, says the materials it wants to mine—nickel and cobalt—will actually help us fight climate change more effectively. But can both takes be true at once? We spoke to a few experts to find out.

Nickel and cobalt are key metals for the battery industry, which is expected to boom as our society decarbonizes everything from fossil fuel-powered cars to generators in favor of electrics. In particular, nickel is a low-cost resource that has high energy density, meaning a particular amount of nickel can store more battery power than the same amount of another material could. Nickel is quite plentiful in nature, but most is still used to make stainless steel; an increased demand for batteries could squeeze the existing supply.

Cobalt is more contested and controversial, with a price that increased more than 50 percent between March 2021 and March 2022. So far, the industry has been centered in the Democratic Republic of Congo, an underdeveloped and war-torn nation where child labor is often used. So while 70 percent of Earth’s deposits of cobalt are believed to be in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the industry is interested in finding that other 30 percent for both political and supply chain stability. In rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, for example, cobalt’s role is to greatly increase how quickly the lithium ions can be passed back and forth. That lowers charge time, something experts say is key to increasing adoption of electric vehicles.

So yes, nickel and cobalt are keenly desired in the battery industry. But if Greenland is a rich source of them, why haven’t they been mined there before now? CNN explains that the melting ice pack around Greenland has made it far more practical for ships to access the Greenland coast for a longer period of time each year. And that makes sense. If you’ve ever read a harrowing book about ships like the RV Belgica or the HMS Terror, you know being icebound is no joke.

Governments and entrepreneurs alike have been eyeing the entire Arctic zone for decades. In northeast Asia, an area that includes parts of Russia, Mongolia, China, and Japan, there’s a metallogenic belt full of minerals and ore, including rare Earth metals. Northern Canada is extremely mineral rich, and mining is the second-largest industry in Canada. Russia already has nuclear-powered icebreaker ships, and China is building some now, too—all with the goal of unlocking highly-valued resources beneath the Arctic zone, both on land and under the Arctic Ocean.

Even among resource-rich Arctic regions, Greenland is special. Between the dismaying climate, huge swaths of protected national park lands, a large indigenous population, and overseas colonization by Norway and later Denmark, Greenland has remained largely untouched.

It remains a colony of Denmark to this day, but has technically had its own government since 1979. In 2008, it took on more power locally, with Denmark’s blessing. A 2014 Brookings report says that this timeframe coincided with “sky-rocketing global commodity prices” in 2009, driven by the one-two punch of China’s rapidly growing economy and the stimulus packages related to recovery from the global economic recession. Greenland was “trying to create an attractive investment climate” in 2014, with an existing gold mine as well as a ruby mine that opened in 2017.

“The conditions in Greenland are very harsh and technically demanding, and the costs of extraction high,” the Brookings report explains. And in 2014, Brookings cited little investor interest abroad in more than just the high-profile precious metals and gems industry. So all that sets the scene for a new player to enter the arena.

All this brings us back to the question of Greenland’s climate and its experience of climate change. KoBold Metals is investigating Greenland’s western coast, an area that is already one of the large island’s most-traveled and populated spots. The iconic Arctic Umiaq Line, a ferry service that makes a full route up and down the southwestern coast each week for most of the year, stops on Disko Island, where KoBold Metals’ expedition is based—all the way into January. The location is about as accessible as a place can be in Greenland.

“The Disko region has seen the rare convergence of events in Earth’s history that could have resulted in forming a world-class battery metal deposit,” KoBold Metals CEO Kurt House said in 2021.

Local access isn’t much of the problem, though. It’s the wider sea, where huge ships must cross while carrying heavy-duty mining equipment and everything else associated with building an industry from the ground up. KoBold Metals’ partner in this project is Bluejay Mining, whose CEO Bo Møller Stensgaard told CNN, “Generally speaking, climate changes overall have made exploration and mining in Greenland easier and more accessible.” Even nuclear icebreakers would have a hard time clearing a path for a major international cargo ship.

Richard Alley is the Evan Pugh University Professor of Geosciences at Penn State University, which is home to one of the best earth sciences programs in the nation. He’s traveled all over the world, including to Antarctica and Greenland, as part of a team that studies ice sheets and glaciers in relation to climate change. In an email to Popular Mechanics, he explains that Greenland is a key resource for climate science itself.

“Greenland is a fantastic storehouse of climate history, especially through ice cores, but also through lake sediments, moraines deposited by ice, odd isotopes exposed to cosmic rays when the ice was smaller than today, and more. Climate history [allows] us to test our models that are then used to project future climate changes based on human decisions,” Alley says. “Greenland also contains enough ice to raise global sea level a bit more than 7 [meters], and the meltwater can affect ocean circulation with additional effects on climate. So, Greenland matters a lot.”

But, Alley says, it’s also true that Greenland’s resources could factor into the fight against climate change. “We use a large number of fairly rare chemicals in all sorts of important ways. Rare earth elements are important in cell phones, and in oil refining, and in many other ways, for example,” he says. “In the longer term, there are large efforts in research labs to find batteries that use more-common elements, and to advance recycling and otherwise limit use of the rare elements.” He also says mining itself can be more or less impactful on the environment “based on the decisions made by people.”

In an email statement to Popular Mechanics, KoBold Metals explained how its models, hopefully, minimize false starts and intrusions in this way. “KoBold’s models rigorously quantify the uncertainty and guide our decisions about how to explore to most effectively reduce the uncertainty in our knowledge of the subsurface. These insights are generated in real-time during KoBold’s exploration programs and dynamically guide where KoBold’s geologists will survey, sample, drill, and discover.”

Not everyone is so circumspect, though. Politician Charlie Angus represents Canada’s progressive New Democratic Party in an area of Ontario known for its mining industry. He lives in Cobalt, Ontario, a now-tiny town founded after the discovery of cobalt there and whose mines Ontario hopes to revive in the 21st century. Angus wrote a history of Cobalt, released earlier this year, that also serves as a microcosm for mining around the globe.

“The image of the billionaires Gates, Bezos, and Bloomberg digging out the fragile and disappearing ice shields of the planet in order to gain more wealth is a perfect symbol for our dystopian times,” Angus tells Popular Mechanics by email. “Cobalt may play a role in the transition to a clean energy economy, but the exploitation of these resources have had serious environmental and human rights impacts. The name of their company literally means ‘demon metals.’ I wonder if they are aware of the dark and troubling mythologies associated with the metal and the Kobold demons.”

The word cobalt comes from the German word kobold, meaning goblin. These folklore figures live in the rocks deep underground and serve a dual purpose for miners, both warning them—like tommyknockers in the U.K. and the U.S.—and causing dangerous mischief.

For its part, KoBold Metals, based in California’s Bay Area, views itself as a key piece of a global efforts to close the gap between what people do today and what we must do to be in line with climate change policies like the Paris Agreement. Batteries are a huge part of almost every near-term model of how society will cope with climate change, and today, batteries require these rare Earth metals.

Yes, the CNN story presents a ready-made dystopian vision, and Angus is right that continuing to rely on cobalt is like making a deal with the devil. But in the interest of fair coverage, investors like Bill Gates have spent their money on dozens of companies and industries. Gates is a high-profile financial supporter of ESS, a publicly-traded company that makes batteries from iron, salt, and water. He has invested in renewable energy of almost every kind around the world.

You can argue that it’s dystopian for our world to have billionaires in the first place, and you might be right—but billionaires have definitely diversified their investments in the energy future.

Caroline Delbert is a writer, avid reader, and contributing editor at Pop Mech. She's also an enthusiast of just about everything. Her favorite topics include nuclear energy, cosmology, math of everyday things, and the philosophy of it all. 

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