Mines | Finland has a “mega class project” compared to Sweden’s gigantic ground metal discovery

Swedish mining company LKAB said on Thursday that it had found a significant deposit of rare earth metals, i.e. REE metals (rare earth element). Several mining companies are investigating the utilization of rare earth metals in Finland as well.

The mining company of Sokli, located in Eastern Lapland, is currently investigating whether it could extract not only other raw materials but also rare earth metals from its deposits.

“We’ve been doing a preliminary feasibility study all year long, and during the current winter we plan to announce the research results and possible options for progress”, Sokli’s project director Mr. Heino tells.

The fertilizer company Yara sold Sokli two years ago to the state-owned Suomen Malmijalostus oy. Yara was mainly interested in phosphate in Sokl, but the new owner is investigating the Sokl deposit more widely.

“We have looked at the project holistically. In the past, Sokl has focused on a certain or certain raw materials. We are now looking at all potential raw materials.”

Plinth is a huge deposit, tens of square kilometers wide and several kilometers deep, a large part of which is still unexplored. However, it is clear that Sokli has a wide range of different raw materials.

In addition to phosphate and rare earth metals, niobium, hafnium, tantalum, iron, manganese, vermiculite, zircon, copper, silver and uranium can possibly be found in the area, Heino lists. Now the goal is to find a solution so that collecting at least some raw materials would be technically and economically meaningful.

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“We will do well for the Swedes in this race.”

“Then what the main product is, it’s related to which ores would eventually be recovered at all,” says Heino.

Sokli’s ore has been explored for decades, but there is no actual mining in the area, and there probably won’t be. The area is remote and without proper infrastructure, which makes it difficult to start the project.

Environmental permits are also running out. The Supreme Administrative Court returned Sokli’s environmental and water management permit back to the regional administrative agency for consideration last spring. In practice, in addition to technical and financial studies, the mining company has to commission more environmental studies and get permits for its plans before the project can proceed.

Read more: Deep in the wilderness of Lapland, the 360-million-year-old Sokli sleeps – soon it may become a treasure trove of electric cars, and it arouses horror in some

“Finland has numerous interesting deposits of rare earth metals. In my opinion, perhaps the most interesting of them is Sokli, which is quite a mega-class project compared to the performance reported by LKAB”, director of science and innovation at the Geological Survey Saku Vuori tells.

The mountain according to Sokli’s deposit as a whole is even thousands of times larger than the deposit that LKAB reported on Thursday. The comparison of different mining projects is not quite straightforward, because almost all of the ore in Sokl does not contain rare earth metals, but the size difference between Sokl and the REE deposit reported by LKAB is still undeniable.

“We do well for the Swedes in this race,” says Vuori.

Also Terrafame, which operates from the former Talvivaara mine in Sotkamo, may use rare earth metals in the next few years. Terrafame’s production is based on bioleaching, where metals such as nickel, zinc, copper and uranium are dissolved from the rest of the soil. At the same time, rare earth metals such as dysprosium, neodymium and scandium also dissolve.

Terrafame said in December that it would start uranium recovery by the summer of 2024. Uranium recovery is essentially related to REE metals, as the company needs to separate the uranium so that rarer metals can even theoretically be used.

“We will find out in the next few years whether it is financially profitable for us to recover rare earth metals. If recovery is profitable, it could start towards the end of this decade.”, CEO of Terrafame Joni Lukkaroinen tells.

REE metals are unlikely to become Terrafame’s main business.

“We produce 30,000 tons of nickel and 60,000 tons of zinc per year. In the future, we will get about 200 tons of uranium per year, and the order of magnitude of rare earth metals is the same as in uranium.”

Suomen Malmijalostus oy, which owns Sokli, is also the main owner of Terrafame. The minority owners of Terrafame are the raw materials company Trafigura and the insurance group Sampo.

REE metals are critically important in numerous high-tech devices and processes. While a hundred years ago the industry ran with the help of a few basic metals, now the technology race requires a significantly larger number of different materials, including REE metals.

The availability of REE metals has been good until recently, so the importance of these metals has received relatively little attention. Now, however, their demand and economic importance are growing rapidly as a result of the energy revolution and other technological developments.

“The concentrations of REE metals in the ore are very small and the prices of many REE metals are comparatively low,” says Vuori.

For example, neodymium is used in permanent magnets and lighting technology. Although neodymium is an essential piece of cutting-edge technology, the price of neodymium is currently around $200 per kilogram, a fraction compared to, say, the price of precious metals. Neodymium concentrations in the ore can be very small, so the economic equation is difficult for mining companies.

“Due to the low price, reclamation is almost always not financially profitable for the mine. Most of the REE metals are recovered as side streams of other mining operations,” says Vuori.

Numerous countries have realized the economic and strategic importance of rare earth metals in recent years. China dominates the world market for REE metals and has also used the raw materials in question as a tool of its foreign policy.