The Swedish mining company LKAB announced Thursday that it has found the largest deposit of rare earths in the European Union (EU) in the far north of the country, a deposit that will represent “a substantial part of Europe’s needs” to produce electric vehicles and turbines. of wind.
“We have discovered the largest deposit of rare earths in Europe and we will continue to explore,” Jan Moström, CEO (Managing Director) of LKAB, told a news conference from inside the Kiruna iron ore mine in northern Sweden.
Initial exploration of the deposit, named Per Geijer, suggests it contains 585m tonnes of ore, including the ore apatite, which contains phosphorus and other rare elements.
LKAB believes one million tons of the deposit are oxides, including praseodymium or neodymium, which are used to produce permanent magnets that are then incorporated into electric vehicles.
The concentration of rare earths found is 0.18% of the volume of the stored ore, but its large volume makes it potentially “profitable and sustainable” to exploit it to turn it into metals for industrial use, David Hognelid, head of special products at the LKBA . strategy.
The company has already begun to prepare the access galleries to the deposit, located about 700 meters from the Kiruna iron mine, to be able to investigate “in depth and detail.”
The head of the LKAB predicted that it will take “one or two years” to know when these reserves can begin to be exploited, which, at the current rate, would require “ten or fifteen years”, but he is confident that it can be accelerated.
The announcement “shows that there are important conclusions for the green transition” and will help the EU bloc reduce its dependence on China for these essential minerals for electrification, said Swedish Energy and Industry Minister Ebba Busch, whose country ranks Presidency of the Council of the EU for the next six months.
Source: TSF
