The largest known deposit of rare earths in Europe has just been characterized in Sweden.
The site, already known, would lock up, according to the mining group LKAB which made the announcement Thursday on the occasion of the launch of the Swedish presidency of the European Union in Kiruna in Lapland, 1 million tons of these minerals essential to the energetic transition.
That is nearly 1% of world reserves.
For the European Union, which imports 98% of its rare earths from China, which holds a virtual global monopoly, this is a modest step towards a little more sovereignty over the green technology sector.
It will take ten to fifteen years before starting to operate the mine according to LKAB.
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The dependence of Europe, and almost all of the world, on a few producers of essential minerals, is worrying, rightly underlines a report by the International Energy Agency (IEA) also published on Thursday.
In question, the concentration, in a few countries, of the extraction and processing of materials...
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