Tony Sage’s Greenland gamble: Inside the Perth-led rare earths mine Trump wants and China fears

Greg Barnes was hungover. Really hungover. The kind of hangover where even the slightest movement causes thunderbolts to erupt inside your head and your stomach to lurch.

Even by the standards of an Aussie geologist, the session at the pub in Greenland had been a big drink.

Fast forward to the next day and Barnes was in a place someone suffering a bad hangover really didn’t want to be — a tiny helicopter banking sharply through mountains.

“I had to tell the pilot, an Israeli bloke, to put it down because I was going to be sick,” Barnes recalls from his South Perth office.

“The area we were going to land on was solid rock. Nothing was growing there. Just rock. Everywhere else was green but this area surrounding a fjord’s basin was barren.

“The closer we got to the ground I started noticing how much red was in the rock. I walked away from the helicopter to have a pee and saw the red turn to brown after it was wet.”

That change of colour was a telltale sign. The rock was riddled with a silicate material called eudialyte, which is the main geological carrier of what today are the most sought-after elements in the world.

Barnes, an accidental geologist who chose to study the science of rocks because classes in the subject finished early, was standing on one of the biggest rare earths and critical minerals deposits on Earth.

It was 1992.

A BIT OF EVERYTHING

The story of the Tanbreez mining project in Greenland has a bit of everything.

Geographically, it is a mystery; Greenland is tucked away in a corner of the map few will ever visit.

Geologically, it’s an alphabet soup drawn from the most lucrative parts of the periodic table.

The name Tanbreez comes from the chemical symbols of the deposit’s four main commodities: Ta is from tantalum, the n is from niobium, the characters “ree” are a nod to “rare earth elements” and the final letter pays homage to the presence of zirconium.

Geopolitically it’s a double-sided lightning rod. Its size and purity mean Tanbreez could single-handedly break China’s stranglehold on critical minerals and rare earths, and it’s in a country that Donald Trump has threatened to annex as a US territory.

The story has protagonists with unusual resumes — and not just the hard-drinking, dinosaur fossil-collecting Barnes.

The ringmaster on whose shoulders the fate of the project rests is veteran company promoter Tony Sage, a man who has been developing mines for four decades but is best known by most Australians as the former owner of the Perth Glory soccer team.

Malcolm Day, a Perth A-lister who made his fortune through an online sex products business, has dusted off his mining surveyor credentials to play a supporting role.

And to top it all off, the tale is set against a 4.7 billion-tonne hunk of rock next to a tiny seaside town that’s perched on the edge of the Arctic Circle.

The thing is, it’s not just any old hunk of rock.

“It is probably the most strategically important mining project in the world right now,” Barnes says matter-of-factly.

Barnes talks a big game but a personal invitation to the White House to brief the President’s advisers suggests he is entitled to.

A small group of mine developers are now applying themselves to the not-so-small problem of how to get the minerals out of the ground efficiently.

That job is complicated by two things.

The first is politics. The deposit is one of the lesser-known reasons Donald Trump has his eye on the island.

The second is geography. Greenland is a country that is so harsh even the Vikings left exhausted.

SUMMER NIGHTS

It is the third month of summer when The Nightly visits the Tanbreez project, which is near the southern town of Qaqortoq.

Icebergs float in the fingers of water that surround the town and the temperature hovers around 10C. The days are considered warm enough for the town’s children to go swimming in the fjords and it is light until well past 11pm.

Winter plunges the town into near constant darkness and a warm day is minus 10C. The wind chill brings the temperature down to minus 30C and for month after month the village is covered in thick snow.

The extreme weather rattles Australian mining engineers, who are accustomed to blistering heat.

Two generations of resources workers have based themselves in Qaqortoq while exploring nearby mining tenements, and the 3000-odd people who call the town home are familiar with the men in hi-vis who order beer with an Aussie twang.

“The people are very friendly,” seasoned Australian miner Nigel Soley says while giving The Nightly a driving tour of a town he is calling home.

As Tanbreez’s general manager for operations, Soley spends a disproportionate amount of time on logistics.

The local terrain is so rugged you have to fly over it or sail around it. Greenlanders use boats and helicopters like the rest of the world uses cars and trucks.

Soley’s agenda is dominated by construction of a temporary 30-bed camp on the edge of a deep fjord at the edge of the mineral deposit Tanbreez is mining.

“There aren’t many mining camps in the world with a better view than this,” Soley says as he looks out a window across the crystal waters of the nearby fjord.

The facility is supporting the drilling crews who are generating the all-important core samples needed to convince the Greenland Government and foreign investors that the geology of Tanbreez is as astonishing as its promoters say.

The facility is well progressed when The Nightly toured the deposit in August.

The scale of the development is a shock for the residents of Qaqortoq, who for two decades have been promised big things about the mine only to discover that talk is cheap.

The only people likely more surprised than the Greenlanders are Australian mining analysts who have followed the career of ASX journeyman Tony Sage.

GROWING PAINS

“They gave me the nickname Flipper,” Sage says with a self-deprecating chuckle.

“They look at Tanbreez and think, ‘there he goes again doing his thing, he’ll be out of it in a few months and onto something different’.

“When they see how much progress we have made, they are quite shocked.”

Sage is speaking to The Nightly at a community open day at Tanbreez’s under-construction processing plant and headquarters, which are a five-minute drive from central Qaqortoq.

As dozens of locals enjoy a barbecue lunch and ask questions about the proposed mine, Sage walks around the hulking steel frame of the factory. The insulation-lined steel skin sits in neat piles, ready to be hoisted into place.

Once finished, the facility will process 300 tonnes of bulk samples ferried from the deposit to Qaqortoq harbour.

Those samples, Sage hopes, will prove sceptics wrong about the commerciality of Tanbreez and arrest concerns that the silica in the eudialyte will complicate the refining process.

He is confident they will, but as he looks at the steel frame he knows there is a lot riding on a good set of numbers.

Sage has spent a lot of money to get to this point. The scale of construction is enough to justify Tanbreez buying a 70 per cent stake in a local contracting firm.

“We need security of supply,” he explains. “It’s a family-owned company which is going to go from having a few dozen workers to more than 100 when we start mining the deposit properly, so there are going to be some growing pains.”

Housing those 140 workers close to the deposit has required an innovative, and expensive, solution.

Tanbreez has bought a cruise liner named the Ocean Endeavour and is reconfiguring it as living quarters.

“We are going to sail it to the mine and anchor it on the other side of the fjord,” he says.

“The workers will literally go back to a cruise ship each night and they will look out over mountains. It wasn’t cheap, but we will make a lot of the money back purely on its value as scrap.”

When The Nightly suggests at the company barbecue that Sage’s sceptics would be surprised at his level of financial commitment to the project, he nods knowingly.

“It is certainly odd behaviour for someone a lot of people reckon is a fly-by-nighter who doesn’t stick around,” he says.

“We have some hurdles to clear, of course, but the path to production is clearly defined.”

The drilled cores are being analysed in Ireland but the bulk samples, which will be taken from two different areas of the sprawling tenement, will need to be assessed on site.

“We will need an independent organisation such as ALS to do that,” Sage says.

He is confident he will obtain the final approval he needs from the Greenland Government and has inked a deal for the ore to be processed at a plant in Romania.

“If I could control the weather, it would make life a lot easier,” he laments as he watches yet another blanket of fog creep over the steel frame of the new Tanbreez plant where everyone is enjoying their lunch at the open day.

The fog can ground the helicopters that are the project’s lifeblood. There is no road to the tenement, so much of the material needed on site has to be flown in.

“The road will be a game changer for us because it will change the economics of construction.”

Tanbreez is negotiating with the local government about making that happen but, like every construction effort in Greenland, it will be expensive.

The conversation is interrupted by a construction worker who just finished his second helping of lunch.

“I know you,” the man says pointing at Sage. “I see you on social media.”

It’s been hard to miss him.

INTERNATIONAL DIPLOMACY

Stopping investors getting bored and the flow of capital drying up is Sage’s most important job.

In 2026, critical minerals and rare earths are the commodities du jour, but capital markets are fickle.

Sage does not pass up an opportunity to stress the geopolitical importance of Tanbreez. To that end, he has been a talking head on more business news bulletins than he can remember. CNN, Sky News, BBC, CNBC and Bloomberg have all been covering the story.

Some of the newsrooms concentrate on the mine’s impact on the pristine glacial environment, but most questions are about China’s dominance of the critical minerals and rare earths market.

When Sage is on air, he is speaking as chief executive and executive chairman of Critical Metals Corp, a Nasdaq-listed company which owns the Tanbreez project after purchasing the rights from Greg Barnes in a cash and scrip deal in 2024.

Barnes retains ownership of neighbouring tenements.

The corporate history of Critical Metals is a tickertape puzzle spanning three countries.

It was created in 2024 when European Lithium’s wholly owned Austrian subsidiary, which holds the Wolfsberg lithium project, combined with Sizzle Acquisition Corp — a so-called special purpose acquisition company.

ASX-listed European Lithium, which Sage chairs and whose boardroom includes Malcolm Day, has sold down its 80 per cent stake to raise cash and now holds about a third of Critical Metals.

Critical Metals announced in April it intended to acquire all outstanding European Lithium shares in an all-scrip deal worth about $US835 million ($1.164 billion). Court approval for that merger is pending.

Sage is using any media exposure he gets about that transaction to talk up the Tanbreez deposit’s reserves of hafnium, an element needed in nuclear reactors because it allows operators to regulate the fission process.

“Everyone knows that China is the price-maker with critical minerals and rare earths because they dominate the processing chain,” Sage says.

“As soon as anyone looks like getting a project up commercially they can tank the price to protect their position.

“We are concentrating on hafnium because we believe China will need to use all of their own reserves of that internally. Beijing has commissioned something like 40 nuclear reactors and that will require a huge amount of hafnium.”

It’s a compelling narrative but international investors are always nervous about sovereign risk and are acutely aware that Greenland is at the heart of a dispute between Washington and Brussels that is threatening to fracture NATO.

Denmark is worried enough about Trump’s intention to this month dispatch conscripts to Greenland to train in arctic warfare.

To say Americans are unpopular on the island is an understatement.

“He has two brain cells which are competing for third place,” was one local’s summation of Trump’s position.

Sage ensures his company-embossed jacket has a visible Australian flag.

“We have to explain to everyone that, yes, Critical Metals is on an American stock exchange but it’s essentially an Australian company,” he says.

Sage starts each morning checking Truth Social, often with his heart in his mouth.

“There’s not much I can do regarding international diplomacy, so I am nothing more than a very interested observer really,” he says.

He keeps an eye on developments on the world stage but as someone who has operated in such far-flung jurisdictions as Russia, Sierra Leone, Guinea and Cote d’Ivoire, Sage knows that all politics is local.

HUNTING RIGHTS

The mayor of Greenland’s Kujalleq municipality, which controls Qaqortoq, is a 31-year-old mother of two named Malene Vahl Rasmussen.

Rasmussen shot to national stardom in 2018 when she became the youngest person to be elected to the country’s national parliament.

She has a soft spot for Qaqortoq because she grew up there.

“There are a lot of people who don’t think this project will happen,” Rasmussen tells The Nightly over dinner at a Thai restaurant hidden inside an industrial shed near the harbour.

“There has been a lot of talk but not much action. Until now.”

The waters around Southern Greenland were overfished in the early 2000s and the region has been in near-constant recession since.

Tourists pouring out of the cruise ships which are drawn to the spectacular scenery are an occasional economic fillip, but Rasmussen knows the community needs a steady source of jobs.

The municipality intends to open a school of mines, but filling its classrooms will take some work.

Convincing a teenage Greenlander to get into resources is like asking an Australian kid to become a commercial fisherman; it’s a completely foreign concept.

The shortage of qualified tradespeople is something that exercises the mind of Rasmussen’s brother Malik, who is chief executive of 60 North, the contracting business that Tanbreez recently bought a stake in.

The mine Sage wants to build will need 300 workers at peak construction and 60 North will need to supply the labour.

Few Qaqortoq locals comprehend the scale of the Tanbreez project, but local 15-year-old Ujarak Motzfeldt is under no illusions about its impact on the town. He has picked up a casual job at 60 North and wants to study mining so he can take advantage of future opportunities.

Sage is acutely aware that on-the-ground know-how is critical to success.

Those local smarts come in the form of Thomas “Tyt” Mogensen, a finance and resources executive who most recently served as head of the Greenland Government’s business development arm, Nalik Ventures.

Mogensen grew up in Qaqortoq and now lives a 90-minute flight away in the country’s capital, Nuuk.

“People who come here from other countries for mining always have a lot to learn,” Mogensen explains.

“A simple but fundamental difference between here and other jurisdictions is that in Greenland people don’t own land. The building on the land, yes, the factory on the land, yes, but not the land itself.

“We’re a hunting nation. We believe it is everyone’s right to go across the land.”

Most of that land is covered in a sheet of ice up to 3.5km thick.

With first ore not expected to be shipped until late 2029, the question of whether Sage will prevail where Vikings once feared to tread will remain unanswered for some time yet.

*The reporter travelled as a guest of Critical Minerals