United States officials have for more than a century viewed Greenland’s vast deposits of oil, gas and critical minerals as a treasure chest that’s waiting to be opened, government documents show.
But the challenge of unlocking those riches from the rugged, ice-covered island consistently has stymied the development efforts of ambitious mining firms and some of the world’s largest oil companies.
Now, President Donald Trump is reviving an old idea with a new geopolitical twist: To prevent greater Chinese control of the Arctic and rare earth minerals market, the U.S. would take over the Danish territory — by buying or seizing it. Trump’s strong-arm tactics toward Denmark have sent shock waves through Europe and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization defense alliance, while industry analysts have been left scratching their heads.
If Trump intends to secure U.S. access to those resources and to newly navigable Arctic shipping routes, analysts argued, it likely would be easier to accomplish those goals by working with leaders in Nuuk, the capital of Greenland.
“What’s the purpose? Nobody can really get their head around that,” said Kenneth Medlock, an energy and resource economics fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
Greenland and its territorial waters are believed to hold the equivalent of over 31 billion barrels of oil, more than the proven reserves of Qatar, Brazil and other major oil and gas powers. Trump has courted the oil industry with promises to “drill, baby, drill” — something that’s now effectively banned in Greenland, an autonomous region within the kingdom of Denmark that prizes its largely untouched environment.
The mineral-rich island contains an estimated 228,000 tons of elemental uranium as well, about 2.5 times the amount produced by Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union. Greenland has outlawed the mining of uranium, which can be used to fuel nuclear power plants or build atomic bombs.
Its rare earth reserves are nearly as large as those in the United States, even though the island is about a quarter of the size. But accessing those minerals — crucial for developing everything from renewable energy and electric cars to cell phones and advanced military technologies — has been complicated by their proximity to uranium.
Trump’s focus on Greenland comes as the miles-thick ice sheet covering much of the island is melting, potentially making it easier to drill and dig for those lucrative deposits. American rivals are also growing more assertive in the Arctic, which Pentagon officials have long warned could be a new vulnerability for the West in a warmer world. The U.S. has had a military base in northwestern Greenland since 1943.
Trump said at a press briefing shortly before taking office that the U.S. needs to gain full control of Greenland for reasons related to “national security” and “economic security,” without elaborating on how such a move would benefit the American military or domestic economy.
“I’m talking about protecting the free world,” Trump said when asked about his plans for Greenland. “You have China ships all over the place. You have Russian ships all over the place. We’re not letting that happen.”
Trump rejected an offer earlier this month from Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen of more cooperation on military bases and mineral exploitation, insisting that Denmark give up its territory, the Financial Times reported last week. Frederiksen has since been on a diplomatic blitz across Europe to shore up support for maintaining its territorial integrity.
“There must be respect for territory and the sovereignty of states,” the Danish leader said Tuesday, alongside German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. “This is an absolutely crucial cornerstone of the international world order we have built since World War II.”
The White House declined to comment.
‘So bananas’
Trump first floated the idea of purchasing Greenland in 2019. While he didn’t mention it on the campaign trail, his renewed pursuit of territory has been cheered by members of his second administration and many congressional Republicans.
“This is about critical minerals. This is about natural resources,” national security adviser Mike Waltz said in an interview on Fox News earlier this month. “So it’s oil and gas. It’s our national security.”
A dozen House Republicans introduced the “Make Greenland Great Again Act,” a bill that would authorize the president to “enter into negotiations with the Kingdom of Denmark to secure the acquisition of Greenland.”
Then during his Jan. 14 confirmation hearing, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth refused to rule out using the U.S. military to take control of the Danish territory.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio the next day underscored the Trump administration’s focus on increasing U.S. control of the territory.
“The reason why is because of where it’s located geographically, yes, but their access to the minerals on Greenland are critically important,” Rubio said at his confirmation hearing.
The leaders of Greenland and Denmark have said the island is not for sale. And a new poll found that 85 percent of Greenlanders are against the idea of joining the United States.

In the early 2000s, Exxon, Chevron and other companies explored drilling in Greenland. But Medlock, who’s based in Houston and frequently speaks with oil executives for his research, said the island has never come up in conversations as a priority for development.
“That’s what’s so bananas about this,” Medlock said. Oil majors “typically don’t try to get involved in regime change,” he added, and likely aren’t here either.
Greenland holds strategically important reserves of 43 of the 50 “critical minerals” that the U.S. considers vital to security, according to the advisory firm Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. In particular, the island has significant deposits of rare earth elements, which are needed for advanced military hardware such as F-35 aircraft and artificial intelligence chips, as well as climate technologies such as solar panels and wind turbines.
But tapping into those minerals would face a host of challenges, including the territory’s low-grade ores and local concerns about the environmental damages associated with mining, said Adam Webb, who leads Benchmark’s analysis of battery raw materials.
“Greenland has historically been under-explored for mineral deposits due its remote location [and] harsh and sensitive environment,” he said. “As a result, mineral deposits there are at a relatively early stage of development.”
Drew Horn, a former Trump Energy Department official who now runs a consulting firm, also is evaluating the island for data center development.
From boom to bans
The U.S. first evaluated Greenland’s resource potential in 1868 and has several times sought to purchase the island from Denmark, most recently in 1946.
While those bids were rebuffed, the State Department has continued to monitor the potential for oil and uranium production in Greenland since at least the Carter administration, according to documents released by the nonprofit Wikileaks.
In a 1978 State Department cable sent from Copenhagen, the U.S. suggested Denmark would continue to set the island’s energy agenda, even though Greenland was poised to receive home-rule authority.
“A certain amount of purposely vague double-talk has taken place within the Home Rule Commission, leaving the impression that Greenlanders will have a larger voice than they will in fact have,” the unsigned cable said.
“Inasmuch as the oil companies have given up drilling, at least for the near future, this question will be pushed to the back burner for a time,” the State Department wrote. “Future discoveries of minerals, or the prospect of economic exploitation of the uranium, however, could open up the discussion again.”
(The cable also noted that “U.S. interests in Greenland are best served by keeping Greenland under a Danish flag and thereby under the NATO umbrella.”)
By 2009, the island had issued over 80 licenses to oil and gas companies and green-lighted the development of mines producing gold and the mineral olivine, the State Department noted in another cable from its Danish embassy.
Some geopolitical analysts at the time considered it inevitable there would be greater resource development — and U.S. involvement — in Greenland. The territory is four times the size of Texas but home to a tenth as many people as Wyoming, the least populated U.S. state.
“One thing to consider is that 57,000 people are not going to be allowed by the world community, and particularly the U.S., to govern such a strategic and resource-rich area by themselves,” Marko Papic, a former analyst at the consulting firm Stratfor wrote in a 2008 email released by Wikileaks. “We already own the place, I think we should just annex it in the next 50-100 years.”
Papic, who is now a senior vice president at the consultancy BCA Research, told POLITICO’s E&E News that “I don’t really have anything against my original take” but noted that many of his emails from back then were “written in jest.” Trump has “started an important conversation,” he added.
Momentum around developing the island’s resources began to slow the following decade, when a surge in U.S. shale oil production depressed prices at the pump, according to Flemming Christiansen, the former deputy director general of the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland who’s studied the history of Greenlandic oil exploration. That caused the industry to reconsider the economic viability of Greenland’s hard-to-access oil, Christiansen said in an interview.
Drilling activity on the island came to a virtual standstill in 2021, when Greenland announced a ban on oil production as a hedge against climate change. The government reinstated a ban on uranium mining the same year.
While still limited, mining activity has seen an uptick on the island in recent years. Exploration and drilling for minerals is occurring at about 170 sites across the island, up from 12 a decade ago, according to Benchmark. Four of those projects are related to rare earths production.
Drilling doubts, China fears
Moratoriums on oil drilling and uranium mining could be lifted if the U.S. were to take over Greenland, outright or via an association agreement akin to the ones the nation has with Micronesia and the Marshall Islands.
That doesn’t mean oil majors would rush back into Greenland.
No test wells have been drilled to measure the pressure and flow rates of the oil and gas locked beneath its coastal waters, said Medlock of the Baker Institute. Those would be key factors for determining the economic viability of Greenlandic operations.
Even if test wells delivered promising results, the reserves would still be situated in an Arctic environment that has no current oil and gas production, processing or workforce. There are also no roads or rail lines connecting the island’s coastal settlements.
“The cost would ultimately be an impediment,” Medlock said, expressing confusion in Trump’s interest in the island. “This is a weird one.”
Costs also would be a challenge for companies seeking to open mines on the island.
“Despite some of the deposits being large — and some of the rare earth deposits are quite rich — there are easier places to get it,” said Simon Moores, Benchmark’s CEO. “That’s been the underlying mantra to date, but things are rapidly changing.”
Skyrocketing interest in critical minerals and the Western push to decouple from China means a pact between the U.S. and Greenland could have far-reaching impacts, according to Moores.
“It isn’t just a throwaway, fun comment from Donald Trump,” he said. “It’s very interesting, strategic thinking for our industry.”
Another reason Greenland has “extraordinary potential,” according to Adrian Finch, a professor of geology at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, is because large swaths of it have yet to be explored.
In places like Alaska, companies have overcome harsh conditions to develop natural resources “if the price is right,” Finch added.
But there could also be value in ensuring that China doesn’t gain access to the island’s energy assets, according to Christiansen, the Danish geologist. Beijing already controls the world’s largest reserves of rare earth minerals and has previously sought to open a mine on the island.
“The nightmare scenario for Trump is that Chinese companies get licenses in Greenland,” he said. “Keep out China — that is the key issue at the moment.”
Trump could still increase military and economic cooperation with Greenland without taking it over, Christiansen added.
The best way to protect American interests on the island “is to have a close dialogue between the U.S., Denmark and Greenland,” he said.