Greenland's easy access to seaborne freight gives it a tremendous cost advantage over northern Canada. If you are in the interior of the Canadian north, you need to truck your product, usually across vast distances, to get it to a railhead or port, sometimes utilizing both a railway and ocean freighter to get it to a smelter. In Greenland, transport distances from project site to open water are usually only tens of kilometers, versus hundreds of kilometers in Canada's north.

Access to the sea puts the world's smelters, end users, middlemen, etc., at your fingertips. It lowers your upfront development costs and capital expenditures/operating expenditures [capex/opex] when it comes time to build and run your mine. The southwest coastal region of Greenland has a relatively mild climate with deep-sea shipping possible year round. And climate change leading to the disappearance of sea ice seems to be making the Northwest Passage a viable route.

TMR: Canada's native peoples are often highly suspicious of-and sometimes outright hostile to-mining activity. This is not the case in Greenland?

RM: No, they seem to welcome the increased capital. Mining brings an awful lot of money into the local and national economies. It provides jobs and taxes. Greenland is dependent on Denmark for much of its funding but wants to become self sufficient. Greenlanders are very protective of their environment. They've got rules in place, but they're not onerous. You can get your work done.

There is a nickel-sulphide deposit in southwest Greenland at the 70-km Greenland Norite Belt [GNB]. Something to understand about nickel sulphides is that although they can occur as individual bodies, groups of deposits may occur in belts up to hundreds of kilometers long. Such deposits are known as districts. Two giant nickel-copper districts stand out above all the rest in the world: Sudbury, Ontario and Noril'sk-Talnakh, Russia I.W.