It's a guesstimated million tonne of rare earth oxides .. it doesn't say in what kind of volume that million tonnes is diffused through (ie. how much has to be removed and sorted through) and then the oxides need to be processed to extract the actual rare earth elements.

What you won't see for a few years yet is an industry standard Economic Feasibility Technical Report - which outlines over a thousand pages or so the model of the ore, the exploration techniques used to create that model, various alternative costed plans to extract that target ore (and the value of any other material also extracted) and the expected value of the ore over the lifetime of the mining operation.

The key to this report is whether or not it's actually worth while to extract or whether it would cost more in earth movin and processing than the value of the result.

As for the tonnage;

> In 2019, Kiruna produced 14.7Mt of iron ore products [1]

this is the adjacent current mine and the location from which a drift is being driven. Iron ore would be the co-product.

For comparison;

> Western Australia's iron ore output for 2020–21 was 838.7 million tonnes, the second-highest figure after 2017–18.

ie: big iron regions (all of WA iron mines are in the Pilbara) produce ~ 57x the mass.

Bear in mind that this million tonne of rare earth oxides would extracted over a decade or more, it's not going to be a fast hit all in a year.

[1] https://www.mining-technology.com/projects/kiruna/

Rare earths aren't really that rare, so probably not. Everyone has lots of rare earths, the rare thing is an environmental policy that allows them to be mined economically.

According to a quick google, there are approximately 120 million metric tons of rare earths in the world. So that's not a minuscule amount, but also not earth-shattering.

That's what I was going to ask: can anyone comment as to whether this is a disruptive event? Or is Europe so ordinarily devoid of such metals that it's comparatively little versus world supply?