Greenland Resources continues to build an offtake pipeline for its proposed US$1 billion Malmbjerg molybdenum project in central-east Greenland, signing a new memorandum of understanding for supply of the steel-hardening material with a German steel conglomerate.
MoU signee ROGESA Roheisen-und Rohstoffgesellschaft Saar is jointly owned by Saarland steel producers Dillinger and Saarstahl, which produce about 4.5 million tonnes of crude steel per annum and generate circa-€5.2 billion of combined sales.
Toronto-listed Greenland Resources, which has a current market value around C$207 million, last year signed a 10-year offtake deal last year with Finland’s Outokumpu, Europe’s largest stainless steel producer, covering 25% of its planned initial output. Earlier this year it announced an MoU with privately-owned German steel maker GMH Gruppe SE & Co KG. Greenland Resources says it has offtake agreements and MoUs nominally worth more than US$5 billion with EU steel companies in Italy, Austria, Germany, Finland, Sweden and Denmark.
The EU, which has no ‘domestic’ molybdenum mining, is the world’s second biggest collective user of the grey metal, accounting for 19% or about 122 million pounds a year of annual consumption, according to the International Molybdenum Association.
Primary molybdenum production is dominated by China, which the association says mines 87% of the world’s moly, and the USA (13%). The metal is categorised as critical or strategic by top-five defence nations, US, China, Russia, India and South Korea.
Greenland Resources says Malmbjerg can meet 100% of EU defence needs.
Its 2022 definitive feasibility study, compiled by US-based Tetra Tech, outlined a 20-year project producing 32.8 million pounds of contained molybdenum metal a year for the first decade of its life and an average 24.1Mlb a year at life-of-mine cash costs around US$6.40.
The DFS used an average moly price of US$18/lb, compared with the current $26.60-26.80/lb LME price. Its DFS base case diesel price of 62c/litre compares with current prices above $1.40/l.
Greenland Resources also wants to produce magnesium from its tailings via an offshore plant that uses seawater, which wasn’t part of its 2022 DFS.
Most of the world’s molybdenum (c90%) is produced as a byproduct of copper or other metal mining. Major producer Freeport McMoRan’s primary molybdenum-producing Colorado mines, Climax and Henderson, have circa-0.16% moly reserve grades compared with typical Western large-scale by-product mine grades of 0.01-0.02%.
Greenland Resources is promoting proven and probable reserves of 245 million tonnes at an average 0.176% molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) at Malmbjerg, for circa-571Mlb contained metal.
The company said last June Greenland mineral resources minister Naaja Nathanielsen had signed a 30-year exploitation permit for molybdenum and magnesium at Malmbjerg. The licence stipulated a 2028 mining start “unless otherwise approved”.
“The project comes at a time of deglobalisation and significant growth in defence expenditures,” Greenland Resources chair and president Dr Ruben Shiffman said at the time.
“It will be able to supply around 25% of all EU molybdenum needs and 100% of defence applications [with] more than 80% of the metallic materials for defence [requiring] molybdenum.”
Shiffman said this month Malmbjerg could expand Greenland’s GDP by more than 25% and “provide new life skills to the people in Greenland, especially now that we have engaged Nuna Group of Companies, Canada’s largest, majority Inuit-owned heavy civil construction mining company that will build the mine and train the Greenlandic Inuit given their deep understanding of the language and culture”.
