It is deep winter with temperatures dropping to -20C. The sun never rises above the horizon, instead bathing Sweden’s most northerly town of Kiruna in a blue crepuscular light, or “civil twilight” as it is known, for two or three hours a day stretching visibility a few metres, notwithstanding heavy snow.
But 900 metres below the arctic conditions, a team of 20 gather every day, forgoing the brief glimpse of natural light and spearheading the EU’s race to mine its own rare earths. Despite identification of several deposits around the continent, and some rare earth refineries including Solvay in France, there are no operational rare earth mines in Europe.
Across the globe, the scramble for rare earths has become the source of huge geopolitical tension, with China accused last year by the EU of “weaponising” its near monopoly on raw materials and end products, essential for everything from smartphones, to electric cars, to fridges, music speakers and military jets.
China’s willingness to slap export bans on rare earths led to the vicious trade war with Donald Trump last year and is partly driving his current bid to take over Greenland, which is rich in these materials, now among the most precious in the world.
Every day the team at LKAB mine in Kiruna drive 4km (2.5 miles) down an impressive network of tunnels to get closer to what is known as the Per Geijer deposit of magnetite-hematite-phosphate named after the Swedish geologist who identified it more than 100 years ago.
The team are now operating at two levels – 900m and 1.3km deep underground as they try to connect the existing vast iron ore mine in Kiruna with Per Geijer about 2km away.
Using remote technology they drill a fan of 84 holes in the rock face; pump them with explosives which are then blasted between 1.15am and 1.45am every night, sometimes disturbing the inhabitants overground, and causing subsidence that has led to the state-owned compamy moving parts of the town and its church.
Less than four hours later the team are back.
“At 5am in the morning, when we have ventilated out the blasting fumes, we start the mucking out,” says 37-year-old Kiruna native Jim Lidström, who leads the tunnelling to what is one of Europe’s largest deposits of rare earths.
Once cleared, a separate team of men and women, sitting in a modern console centre 1.3k below ground, “scale” the rock, remotely controlling machines that break the detritus into transportable chunks for onward transport to a driverless train.
Lidström’s team then set about making the tunnel stable and usable, drilling bolts into the freshly made walls and then spraying it with a layer of concrete or “shotcrete” before the whole process starts all over again.
“We do about five metres a day,” Lidström says.
The hunt for rare earths is slow.
The 17 rare earth elements – all found in Kiruna – include neodymium and praseodymium, critical materials for the powerful permanent magnets needed for everything from electric cars to household appliances and military jets.
Although geological surveys show large ore bodies across the west – including the Fen complex in Norway, thought to be Europe’s largest deposit – from mine to refined end production could take 10 to 15 years, say experts.
“I think people often miss the point. They say ‘why don’t we just produce rare earths in Europe?’. But you have to have the entire supply chain to do that,” says Nigel Steward, a professor at Imperial College London, a materials scientist and a former executive in the US mining industry.
The experience in Kiruna shows just how challenging it is to reduce the EU’s dependency on China, which is now the core supplier of rare earth magnets and willing to choke supplies, as it did last year, if politically desirable.
State-owned LKAB is now trying to accelerate the process of mining, extraction, and separation of the crumbs from the ore, to help the EU de-risk as quickly as possible.
Jan Moström, the chief executive of LKAB, explains that it could take “years and years” if the company tried to expose the entire length of the Per Geijer deposit for mining purposes.
“But that is not what we are going to do. What we are going to do is to open up incrementally,” he says.
He refuses to give a timeline because of its sensitivity, instead explaining the complex task ahead in the vast network of tunnels circling the deposit.
“The main focus for us now in the Kiruna system is to find a mine design to deal with the mining of the present reserves down to the main level, at 1,365 metres , then to work out how we go beneath that and develop that resource into reserves, and also how to connect the Per Geijer deposit into the [existing iron ore mining] system. We will start to develop it incrementally, and that is the huge difference [from previous approaches],” he says.
For Moström, who has spent his career in mines, the last 11 with LKAB, the stranglehold Beijing has built in rare earths was no accident, and something he has been pressing home in Brussels repeatedly.
As the US and Europe started to regulate against toxic waste in the 1980s, China which had none of the environmental concerns, ploughed on charring the landscape as it went building a chokehold on raw materials now critical for modern life.
“I’ve been talking in Brussels the past two or three years about the huge disadvantages we created in the 1970s and the 1980s when we closed the mining industry and started importing metals from South America, Africa, Australia,” he says.
Asked why it has taken the EU so long to wake up to the dangers of dependency on China’s rare earth supply, he is blunt: “Politicians will never be more courageous than the voters.”
“Nobody saw any future in mining, then the super-cycle started and China started to consume enormous volumes of metals,” he says referring to the boom at the turn of the century when China drove a huge commodities boom on the back of urbanisation.
“I have the perception that the European Commission, the commissioners, really understand the importance of domestic mining and some sort of self-sufficiency,” Moström says.
As part of the acceleration efforts, LKAB has put €80m (£69m) into a new “demonstration” plant in nearby Luleå to test the process of separation before mining even begins. It has also taken a stake in the Norwegian company REEtec to develop an environmentally friendly way of refining the extract.
Contrary to what the name suggests, rare earths – a group of 17 soft metals with unique properties such as strong magnetismor high temperature resistance – are not rare.
Speckled like crumbs in the earth’s crust, the tag “rare” stuck because of the difficulty accessing them, mining them, and separating them from the ore in which they are found, a process that can take a decade.
LKAB has already been visited by a line of Brussels dignitaries, including industry commissioner Stéphane Séjourné in September, because is represents the EU’s best current hope of weaning itself of a dependency on Chinese supplies that has left Europe vulnerable to increasing geopolitical tensions.
Despite the rhetoric in Brussels, London and Washington over the need to wean industries off China, Beijing will hold the rare earth cards for years to come.
“Right now China controls 85% of the final processing of light rare earths and it control 100% of the heavy rare earths,” says Darren Wilson, the chief executive of LKAB’s industrial minerals division.
According to senior European Commission officials in December the EU uses 20,000 tonnes of permanent magnets, a year of which 17,000 to 18,000 come from China, creating an unbalanced and high-risk trade relationship.
Last April, in retaliation against Trump’s reciprocal tariffs, China imposed global export restrictions on rare earths, hitting Europe’s car industry. It threatened to impose more restrictions in October, until a 12-month truce was agreed with Trump at in Korea the same month.
As George Riddell, a senior adviser at Flint Global and a trade expert, says: “China has not just got the capacity to weaponise its trade but shown it has the willingness to do so.”
All hopes rest on LKAB now being the first to reduce the EU’s reliance on China, with a pre-existing highly developed mining operation employing about 2,000 workers directly and double that indirectly.
Magnetic appeal: what are permanent magnets?
Magnetic properties of some metals were discovered by the Greeks 4,000 years ago.
Permanent magnets, found in speakers, headphones, toys, cars and military equipment are typically manufactured from a neodymium-iron-boron alloy.
The process begins by melting suitable raw materials, placing them into a mould that is then chilled, resulting in a powder. All the particles have then to align in the right direction to create a powerful magnetic force. The powder is sintered in a furnace, bonding the particles together into a mass that is then cut for final use.
Permanent magnets were developed in the research department of the General Motors Company in the US and by the Japanese materials scientist Masato Sagawa in the 1980s.
But making these powerful magnets generates radioactive byproducts that can contaminate water and soil.
As the west introduced environmental regulations in the 1980s, US rare earth suppliers “started exporting their product to China because they were willing to process it,” says Imperial College London’s Steward.
GM is now working with Mountain Pass, the only operational rare earth mine in the US, which is thought to be about two years away from producing products for the American market.
“There is no reason why we can’t remake magnets. They were our inventions, in the west. That is the crazy thing,” Steward says.
