Norway Discovers Europe's Largest Deposit of Rare Earth Metals 85
Rare Earths Norway has discovered Europe's largest proven deposit of rare earth elements in the Fen Carbonatite Complex, positioning Norway as a key player in Europe's effort to reduce reliance on China's rare earths supply. CNBC reports: Rare Earths Norway said in a June 6 statement that its Fen Carbonatite Complex in the southeast of the country boasts 8.8 million metric tons of total rare earth oxides (TREOs) with a reasonable prospect for economic extraction. Within the TREOs, which are considered vital to the global shift away from fossil fuels, the company says there is an estimated 1.5 million metric tons of magnet-related rare earths which can be used in electric vehicles and wind turbines. The discovery eclipses a massive rare earths deposit found last year in neighboring Sweden.
One of the aims of the Critical Raw Materials Act is to extract at least 10% of the European Union's annual demand for rare earths by 2030 and Rare Earths Norway says it hopes to contribute to that goal. Rare Earths Norway said the rare earths deposit in Telemark, roughly 210 kilometers (130 miles) southwest of Oslo, is likely to underscore Norway's position as an integral part of Europe's rare earth and critical raw material value chain.
One of the aims of the Critical Raw Materials Act is to extract at least 10% of the European Union's annual demand for rare earths by 2030 and Rare Earths Norway says it hopes to contribute to that goal. Rare Earths Norway said the rare earths deposit in Telemark, roughly 210 kilometers (130 miles) southwest of Oslo, is likely to underscore Norway's position as an integral part of Europe's rare earth and critical raw material value chain.
One problem (Score:4, Interesting)
My understanding is that 'rare earth elements' aren't actually that rare, but the extraction and purification process is so nasty that processing the ore tends to be prohibitively expensive.
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My understanding is that 'rare earth elements' aren't actually that rare, but the extraction and purification process is so nasty that processing the ore tends to be prohibitively expensive.
No, they are rare compared to other elements [wikipedia.org] like oxygen (46.1%) and silicon (28.2%). The most abundant of the rare earth elements is scandium at 0.0022%.
Re:One problem (Score:5, Informative)
> No, they are rare compared to other elements like oxygen (46.1%) and silicon (28.2%)
"They are rare compared to the two most abundant elements" might be the dumbest take I've ever seen on the subject.
> The most abundant of the rare earth elements is scandium at 0.0022%.
There is 42% more scandium than lead.
There is more than twice as much scandium than there is tin.
Scandium is three times more abundant than silver and 5500 times more abundant than gold.
Just think of all the stuff we have made of these elements. Take all the shit we've made out of pure tin, pile it up in a big mountain, and imagine that a pile of identical items made out of scandium at an equal proportion to its abundance would be more than twice the size.
"Rare earth elements" aren't actually that rare.
=Smidge=
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Correct. Being "rare earth" elements just means that they are usually very well distributed and appear as trace elements, so you need to collect massive amounts of other material and filter out the rare earth metals you want.
Places where there are unusually high concentrations of rare earth metals are of interest because they making collecting it much more economically viable, and less environmentally destructive.
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No, being "rare earth", is the name the discoverers of that element group gave them.
Of course at that time those elements were considered rare.
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AGAIN: "rare earth" is a NAME.
It has nothing to do with rareness.
Look at a periodic table.
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Scandium is three times more abundant than silver and 5500 times more abundant than gold.
You do know gold is rare, right? Historically when gold was discovered somewhere, people created towns from nothing to mine it.
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> You do know gold is rare, right?
And yet look around at all the fucking gold there is...
=Smidge=
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And yet we waste millions of tons on it decorating ourselves with jewelry made out of it.
If it was truly rare, we'd reserve it for useful things.
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But tin and lead isn't... Way to quote yourself stupid.
the difference (Score:2)
unlike other elements, however, scandium is being increasingly used up by politicians in there scandials . . .
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They're not rare in terms of their prevalence, they're rare in terms of deposits being rich enough to be worth extracting are rare.
You can scoop up a handful river silt and chances are really good there's some neodymium etc in it, but the concentration is so small you'd need to process an entire mountain's worth to get a commercially viable quantity, and of course you'd never get enough to cover the costs of doing so.
=Smidge=
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Your understanding that "rare" earths are not that rare is correct. I do not think "prohibitively expensive" is true though. I think the world was just far too happy to buy cheap in China.
Re: One problem (Score:2)
Re: One problem (Score:2)
There's carbonatites in Norway? Huh! (Score:5, Informative)
I should have read up more on major deposit localities. :)
Carbonatites are really neat. There's only been one active carbonatite volcano on Earth in all of human history (Ol Doinyo Lengai). Carbonatite lava are unusually cool, 500-600 degrees (not even hot enough to melt alumium), so they look black during the day - and thanks to their unusually low viscosity, they splatter and flow like oil. At night though they're still hot enough to see a maroon glow coming off them. Once they cool, they weather very quickly to a bright powdery white. Check out pics [google.com] and vids [youtube.com] :)
But they're not just rare and aesthetically interesting. In volcanic minerology there's a category of elements called "incompatible elements". These are elements that don't substitute easily into the common crystal structures found in cooling igneous melts. As a result, they tend to stay in the melt phase much longer, and thus only found in specific concentrated areas instead of being spread out through a larger volume of crystalized rock. Two things happen to be true about incompatible elements: one, most of them tend to be valuable; and two, carbonatites tend to be extremely rich in them.
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I can see why you were too embarrassed to post from your actual account, you sound like a mentally-deficient 12 year old who is jealous of the smart kid in the class because they can actually contribute to the conversation with the adults.
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Woh, you're not kidding that's cool.
Smart Norway (Score:3, Informative)
A smart Norway would leverage its find into keeping the minerals in-country and require buyers to build manufacturing facilities in country, rather than shipping them out to manufacturing in other countries.
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A smart Norway would leverage its find into keeping the minerals in-country and require buyers to build manufacturing facilities in country
Norway has one of the highest labor costs in the world, and manufacturing there makes very little sense. Not many Norwegians are interested in working on an assembly line.
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Give a the immigrants there something to do, if nothing else.
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Norwegians will happily work in a factory if the wages are good, just like they still have literal McJobs at McDonalds, retail and so on.
Norway is actually a good place to be manufacturing with this stuff. They have a fairly clean electricity grid, are already very heavily into EVs (and not just cars, trucks and ferries and aircraft too), and lots of practical experience and skills around the technology. They are right off the North Sea, one of the best wind resources in the world.
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The big problem is we can't attract them now. The krone is too week compared to the Euro and our alcohol is to expensive. I have this from a Belarusian who earns his living importing workers. He said he can only find "the shit no one else wants" and that Germany is far more attractive for skilled laborers now.
Unfortunately, government leadership profits from a weak krone. Sadly, our roads have deteriorated to a dismal condition because even though we can pay to
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That's unimportant.
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Companies that care about their bottom line are likely to say, "Thanks but no thanks".
Companies that don't want to do business in your country tend not to provide many jobs to your people.
Companies that don't care about their bottom line tend to go bankrupt.
Companies that have gone bankrupt tend not to employ so many people, either.
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A smart Norway would leverage its find into keeping the minerals in-country and require buyers to build manufacturing facilities in country, rather than shipping them out to manufacturing in other countries.
Smart Norway oil fund has US$1.6 trillion in assets and owns on average 1.5% of the worlds listed companies, to draw from when oil runs out (Norway only has a population of 5.5 million). I expect them to do the same this time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Not trying to soak up what's essentially a temporary windfall leads to all sorts of problems. Just the horror of the current price of a beer in Oslo ought to be enough to convince anyone.
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A Smart Norway would probably beep and throw an error whenever it loses its access to the internet.
Amazing. The Rich Get Richer! (Score:2)
Plenty of fossil fuels while that's valuable... now swimming in raw materials needed for the transition. And they've got their collective shit together, being stable and industrious enough to make use of it. Good for them.
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Plenty of fossil fuels while that's valuable... now swimming in raw materials needed for the transition.
"For to every one who has will more be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away." -- Matthew 25:29
Matthew effect [wikipedia.org]
Telemark (Score:2)
Wasn't there nuclear facilities there during WWII, part of the Nazi research into atomic weapons?
(Heavy water maybe)
I think the Norwegian resistance blew it up or something...
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I think the Norwegian resistance blew it up or something...
It was a combination of sabotage by the Norwegian resistance and British bombers.
Norwegian heavy water sabotage [wikipedia.org]
But it had nothing to do with rare earths.
It also didn't affect the outcome of the war. The Krauts never made a serious attempt to build a nuke.
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The Krauts never made a serious attempt to build a nuke.
In part because they inexplicably kept running their supply chains through Stalag 13, where Hogan and crew could disrupt things by tricking Klink, Burkhalter and the rest of the Nazis.
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Wasn't there nuclear facilities there during WWII, part of the Nazi research into atomic weapons?
(Heavy water maybe)
I think the Norwegian resistance blew it up or something...
There's the not so highly rated Kirk Douglas movie The Heroes of Telemark https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0... [imdb.com] and a higher rated 2015 Norwegian tv series (which I haven't seen) The Heavy Water War: Stopping Hitler's Atomic Bomb https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3... [imdb.com]
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Re:Telemark (mix up!) (Score:1)
They found heavy metals in Carbonatite (Score:3)
Did they perchance also find Han Solo there?
Love me... (Score:1)
I love me some Norwegian metal.
DIMMU BORGIR? (Score:2)
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Combining the two topics of "lava deposits" and "Dimmuborgir", in Iceland there's a lava field called Dimmuborgir [google.com] :)
Soviet Re-Union Moving Tanks North (Score:1)
As we speak. Pewtins' little beady eyes are gleaming!
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I'll bet Sweden is counting it's blessings that it got into NATO in the nick of time.
Re: Soviet Re-Union Moving Tanks North (Score:2)
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Tanks moving north to invade Norway? Your ignorance of geography is appalling, almost as bad as your knowledge of international politics. Besides, they already have the fourth-largest deposit of rare earths in the world which they have barely begun to exploit.
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OP said "moving tanks north". On the reasonable assumptions that they're hinting at moving tanks (a) from Ukraine (b) to invade Norway through Finland and Sweden, the tanks need to go almost 2000km north before they move significantly west.
Re: Soviet Re-Union Moving Tanks North (Score:2)
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So you don't know that northern Norway is essentially unpassable mountains covered by glaciers and cut up by fjords, with only very limited roads mostly dependent on tunnels? It could be defended by a couple of old guys with snow shovels and BB guns.
They're making ACs dumber every day.
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Now if only they would build ships large enough to carry tanks, think they'll ever managed to do such a thing?
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What would happen? The opposing navy would get hit with hypersonic missiles. Then the Russian navy would get hit. Then they would come back with something else. There are no real winners in a war, only one side that loses less than the other. It's the biggest waste of lives and resources since the invention of civilization.
We need to... (Score:2)
Who's raping the earth now? (Score:2)
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The amount of resources extracted to sustain a cleantech economy are dramatically lower than for a non-cleantech economy.
And the fact that you think a mine produces "a couple ounces" of rare earths is just hilarious. The average REE ore is 1-2% rare earths. The average platinum ore (used in catalytic converters), by contrast, is a few parts per million, and sometimes even in the parts per billion. A typical high-end rare earth mine will over its life produce on the order of a megaton of target rare earths
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You're free to disbelieve the research all you want. Yes,it DOES involve way less mining, because it's mine-once, use-indefinitely, vs.fossil fuels which have to be continuously produced.
Wind and solar are not AT ALL "obscenely resource inefficient". Solar PV for example has an energy density similar to nuclear over the lifespan of the panel. Wind isn't as high, but is quite high, and by far most of the mass is steel, which is 100% recyclable. Versus, say, coal, oil, and natural gas at 0% recycleable
Is tthere thorium in the ore? (Score:3)
There's no shortage of rare earth metals in the USA but there's a lot of thorium in the ore too, and because of rules on how thorium must be handled few of the mines are profitable. They were profitable at one time, back when thorium was used for making gas lantern mantles. Then the rules changed and thorium was considered "weapon grade material" as if it was highly enriched uranium, in spite of no real evidence it's useful in producing a nuclear weapon.
With no market for thorium the thorium adds disposal costs. In China they will just pile up the thorium oxides in the tails like sand, because it is sand. It's quite dense so it doesn't really blow away in the wind or get washed away in the rain. While it is mildly radioactive it's not going to go critical if piled up, or pose any real radiation hazard unless eaten or breathed in. People will wear masks for avoiding such hazards if only because breathing in sand is bad for the lungs even if not radioactive.
A good market for thorium would be for fuel in nuclear fission reactors. Canada, India, China, and likely other nations have been experimenting with thorium as nuclear fuel. Preliminary experiments on thorium reactors were done in the 1960s and 1970s but they lost funding for primarily political reasons than any technical problems. There were technical problems to work out but then there were also technical problems for uranium reactors, solar photovoltaic cells, windmills, and certainly other sources of energy being investigated at the time out of a concern over getting enough petroleum and coal in the future.
I'm curious on how this deposit of rare earth metals in Norway compares to deposits in the USA on its thorium content. The USA largely gave up on mining rare earth metals because of the politics surrounding thorium. There's some mining for rare earth metals in the USA, and there may even be some mining for thorium since there's a tiny market for it in making precision optics, some steel alloys, and a few other fairly niche applications. With no large buyer of thorium, and the nonsense rules on disposal of thorium in mining tails, it is not economical to mine rare earth metals in the USA. A change in the rules on disposal of thorium, and/or a new application for thorium such as energy, and we could see the USA produce tons of rare earth metals.
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As a curiosity, many of these elements were found in Swedish mines in the 19th century. This mostly in Ytterby mine in the Stockholm archipelago, where quartz and feldspar were mined for porcelain production. There are guided tours for tourists. Thorium was found in Norway but named by a
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I love the fact that Ytterby, a Swedish village of only ~1k people on an island just east of Stockholm, has four separate elements named after it ;) (yttrium, terbium, erbium, ytterbium)
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but they lost funding for primarily political reasons than any technical problems.
Just Lolz. You should read that up
Stock needs a boost: Press release time! (Score:2)
You think they discovered this yesterday?
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Econ 101: fuck around and find out. (Score:2)
This is what happens when a market player decides to abuse their dominance. China has decided to get cunty about rare earths after becoming the dominant provider of them, so it becomes economically feasible to find other sources and use them instead. Now we have a couple of big finds in Europe, and a whole lot of interest in developing other known sources that were not economical to extract previous to China fucking around.
Now they are economical to extract, so now China gets to "find out."
Problem.. (Score:2)
What happened to the Japanese find? (Score:2)
Thought a spot just off the coast of Japan had so much they thought we'd never need another source (or some such thing).