Swedish Chemists Want to Build Magnets Around the Rocks They Already Have — and Loosen China's Grip

Rare earth elements are not, despite the name, especially rare. What is rare is finding them concentrated enough to pull out of the ground economically — and having somewhere to process them that is not China. A research program at Uppsala University is attacking that problem from an unusual direction: rather than mining for one target metal and discarding the rest, the team wants to inventory everything Swedish deposits contain and then design magnets around whatever nature actually put there.

"It's a bit like the TV show What's in Your Fridge," said Martin Sahlberg, professor of materials chemistry at Uppsala University, who leads the work under the university's Sustainable Materials and Material Flows research area. "Historically, we have mined for a specific metal — iron, copper or maybe gold. We're taking a broader approach here to find out what elements are there."

Sweden has known rare earth mineral deposits at Kiruna in the far north, in the Bergslagen mining district, and at Norra Kärr outside Gränna. "In Sweden our possibilities for extracting REE, even when compared internationally, are relatively good," Sahlberg said. The elements are essential to displays, motors and the permanent magnets at the heart of wind turbines and electric vehicles — the hardware of any energy transition.

The geopolitical stakes have sharpened fast. "It's a geopolitical problem," Sahlberg said. "In the last year with the trade war and the US tariffs, we've seen that China halted exports of rare earth elements." He pointed to President Trump's push on Greenland and the Ukraine–United States minerals agreement as further examples of resource access becoming a matter of state conflict rather than commerce. "Today, China basically has a world monopoly, but we not only have deposits but also good access to water and relatively cheap energy. There is also an interest in leading the green transition here in Sweden."

The environmental argument runs alongside the strategic one. Separating and purifying rare earth elements from ore typically requires aggressive, toxic chemistry, and radioactive material — thorium and uranium in particular — is frequently bound up in the same geological formations. "It's rather a dirty business today," Sahlberg said. Most of the world's rare earth magnets are manufactured in China under environmental rules that differ substantially from Sweden's.

Matching magnet chemistry to the natural composition of a deposit could cut out processing steps, which is where much of the pollution, energy use and waste is generated. That is the scientific bet: an alloy tuned to the mix of neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium and whatever else a given Swedish ore body yields may perform well enough to compete without requiring each element to be separated to high purity first.

The effort is interdisciplinary — theoretical materials physicists, geologists and materials engineers working together — and Sahlberg expects it to run for many years. The first priority is the inventory itself: a detailed picture of what rare earth minerals exist across Sweden, in what combinations and at what grades. Everything downstream depends on that catalog.