Europe’s largest known deposit of rare earth elements found in Sweden

Subject : Geography

Section: Economic Geography

Context:

Swedish state-owned mining company, LKAB announced that it has discovered more than one million tonnes of rare earth oxides in the northern area of the country.

More in the news:

This is the largest known deposit in Europe.
Currently, no rare earths are mined in Europe and it mostly imports them from other regions.
About 98 per cent of rare earths used by the European Union were sent by China.

Significance of this discovery:

Reduced reliance on China for rare earths.
Self sufficiency in Electricity generation.
Help in transition to green energy: Elements like neodymium and dysprosium are used in wind turbine motors.
Crucial for Electric vehicles.

Minerals securiy partnership (MSP):

In 2022, the US and 10 other nations — Australia, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Japan, the Republic of Korea (South Korea), Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the European Commission — came together in a bid to break China’s dominance in the global marketof rare earth minerals and formed the Minerals Security Partnership (MSP).
Objective:
- The goal of the MSP is to ensure that critical minerals are produced, processed, and recycled in a manner that supports the ability of countries to realize the full economic development benefit of their geological endowments.
- Focus would be on the supply chains of minerals such as Cobalt, Nickel, Lithium and also the 17 “rare earth” minerals.

What are rare earths?

Rare earth elements or rare earth metals are a set of 17 chemical elements in the periodic table — the 15 lanthanides, plus scandium and yttrium, which tend to occur in the same ore deposits as the lanthanides, and have similar chemical properties.
The 17 rare earths are cerium (Ce), dysprosium (Dy), erbium (Er), europium (Eu), gadolinium (Gd), holmium (Ho), lanthanum (La), lutetium (Lu), neodymium (Nd), praseodymium (Pr), promethium (Pm), samarium (Sm), scandium (Sc), terbium (Tb), thulium (Tm), ytterbium (Yb), and yttrium (Y).
Despite their classification, most of these elements are not really “rare”.
One of the rare earths, promethium, is radioactive.

Use of rare earths minerals?

These elements are important in technologies of consumer electronics, computers and networks, communications, clean energy, advanced transportation, healthcare, environmental mitigation, and national defence, among others.
Cerium, the most abundant rare earth element, is essential to NASA’s Space Shuttle Programme.