{"id":231736,"date":"2026-01-11T00:05:10","date_gmt":"2026-01-11T00:05:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/231736\/"},"modified":"2026-01-11T00:05:10","modified_gmt":"2026-01-11T00:05:10","slug":"greenland-looks-like-trumps-next-geopolitical-priority-it-could-also-be-the-oil-industrys-next-great-hope","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/231736\/","title":{"rendered":"Greenland looks like Trump\u2019s next geopolitical priority. It could also be the oil industry\u2019s next great hope"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In a meeting with more than dozen major oil executives<\/a> at the White House, Trump said, “When we own it, we defend it. You don’t defend leases the same way, you have to own it,” in reference to Greenland.<\/p>\n

“We are going to do something on Greenland whether they like it or not.”<\/p>\n

In a briefing to Congress on Jan. 6, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the US would pursue a purchase of the territory, and Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry \u2014 appointed special envoy to Greenland by Trump \u2014 said he intends to \u201cmake Greenland a part of the U.S.<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n

At the same time, China and Russia have been increasing their military and shipping presence throughout the Arctic region, pressuring the US and Europe to ramp up their own combat preparedness and making Greenland a key security node. In January, a subsidiary of the Russian state-controlled nuclear corporation posted a video<\/a> on Telegram of an icebreaking ship using the “Northern Sea Route,” which passes by Greenland to connect Europe and Asia in a path far faster than traversing the Suez Canal.<\/p>\n

If Price\u2019s company is successful, March GL\u2019s operations could result in a major American energy presence in the High North at a time when territorial control has become a key focus of the White House.<\/p>\n

Not that this was part of Price\u2019s plan.<\/p>\n

\"Once Once the waters freeze over in Tasiilaq, no supplies will get in or out until the ice thaws. (Yahoo Finance\/Jake Conley) \u00b7 Jake Conley <\/p>\n

The stakes are high for Price\u2019s company.<\/p>\n

March GL is planning to spend hundreds of millions of dollars, pooled from Price\u2019s personal network and the company\u2019s upcoming SPAC merger that will take it public, to develop the Jameson Land prospect, with plans to drill two initial wells at a cost of $40 million for the first and roughly $20 million for the second. Despite the arduous nature of operating in a region cut off from the rest of the world, Price is determined to install the exploratory wells in 2026.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt takes a company with vision to get the first two wells drilled,\u201d Price told Yahoo Finance. \u201cUpon a discovery here, we all of a sudden become close to a major oil and gas company overnight.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Greenland, where the local government has spent decades desperate for any source of economic development, March GL\u2019s success is also no small matter. Keeping Greenland from claiming its own sovereignty is an annual $560 million or so in funding that the territory receives from Denmark, accounting for more than half of the Greenlandic government\u2019s revenue. Billions of barrels of oil exported from Greenland\u2019s shores, from which the local government would collect a share of the profits, would go toward filling in that half-a-billion-dollar gap.<\/p>\n

Yet, Price is chasing a major frontier prospect at a time where market dynamics in the oil industry have made costly new exploration efforts the most unattractive they’ve been since prices crashed in 2014. The market is headed for a major wave of oversupply<\/a> as the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC, the 12-member cartel controlled by Saudi Arabia, has spent the past eight months raising its production targets and US shale oil operators and other exporters in the Americas have maintained or increased their own outputs.<\/p>\n

Prices were trending toward four-year lows when Price\u2019s team last traveled to Greenland in September, and the market is likely to be oversupplied by more than 3 million barrels per day in 2026, according to the International Energy Agency. Some on Wall Street have warned of prices on West Texas Intermediate crude, the US benchmark, falling to the $30 per barrel range next year if measures aren\u2019t taken to curtail supply. And that\u2019s accounting for the oil the world\u2019s biggest producers have already identified, let alone what they haven\u2019t.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt the risk of flogging a very dead horse, our message to the market has remained consistent since June 2023,\u201d JPMorgan strategists wrote in a report earlier this year<\/a>. \u201cWhile demand is robust, supply is simply too abundant.\u201d<\/p>\n

But oil drilling is never without risk. For Price, this is the biggest shot of his career, a moonshot.<\/p>\n

Jameson Land sits more than 250 miles above the Arctic Circle, isolated from civilization. A ring of high mountains to the west, the Arctic Ocean to the north and east, and the deepest fjord system in the world to the south protect the basin from the harsh arctic environment and rip current winds that roar off the ice sheet covering nearly all of Greenland.<\/p>\n

Reaching the peninsula is famously difficult and highly dependent on weather and light. Visitors fly from Iceland and land on the icy runway at Kulusuk, tucked in the mountains of Greenland\u2019s southeastern corner, then fly more than 500 miles further north to land on the dirt at Nerlerit Inaat Airport, a tiny operating station known as Constable Point. Finally, they must take a helicopter or boat another 20 miles out to Ittoqqortoormiit.<\/p>\n

Price, the 65-year-old visionary leading the team prospecting Jameson Land, has spent most of his life in the oil industry, and he is betting that the spoils of the peninsula are worth the effort. Throughout his more than 40 years in the field, the chief executive of recently formed oil exploration company March GL has drilled frontier \u201cwildcat\u201d wells across the continental US, in states ranging from North Dakota and Oklahoma to Kansas and Nebraska.<\/p>\n

But Greenland has long drawn Price\u2019s attention. Family history ties him to the region, as does a desire for a discovery on a scale that has eluded him thus far.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have drilled for and found millions of barrels of oil over my career,\u201d Price told Yahoo Finance. \u201cI have never, never drilled for billions of barrels.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"With With no roads connecting Greenland’s settlements, all travel around the island must be done by air or sea. (Yahoo Finance\/Jake Conley) \u00b7 Jake Conley <\/p>\n

As we flew over the Denmark Strait, Price described to me how he ended up leading the first major oil exploration project on Greenland in a generation. His father served as a weatherman in World War II, stationed by the US Air Force at a remote outpost on the arctic island. From that station, the elder Price wrote a series of letters describing the strangeness of being so far from civilization, the boredom and darkness, a polar bear fended off with a wooden two-by-four. Those letters were passed down to the younger Price, who was enamored with the alien world they depicted.<\/p>\n

After making his way in the industry by managing some of the US’ largest oil and gas trusts \u2014 vast sums of riches made by earlier generations of wildcat oilmen \u2014 Price joined the ranks of a rarefied and dying breed of resource cowboys willing to take huge risks on even bigger payoffs, drilling for oil himself across the US.<\/p>\n

Many of those sites turned up millions of barrels of oil. But the crown jewel \u2014 a billion-barrel discovery \u2014 never showed. It haunted Price and, eventually, drew him toward Greenland, one of the last untamed frontiers on the planet.<\/p>\n

\u201cI saw firsthand what oil wealth can do for families,\u201d Price told me, \u201cwhat it can do for communities and economic development.\u201d<\/p>\n

For several years, the prize of Greenland has been locked away from the market. In July 2021, the Naalakkersuisut government, concerned with preserving what remains of a pristine environment, passed a moratorium banning any new oil and gas drilling licenses.<\/p>\n

In a statement issued<\/a> when the decision was made public, Greenland\u2019s government noted that, while data had shown vast potential for hydrocarbon development both on the island and beneath the waves off its shores, \u201cthe Greenlandic government believes the cost of extraction is too high.\u201d The moratorium was being instated \u201cfor the sake of our nature, for the sake of our fisheries, for the sake of our tourism industry, and to focus our business on sustainable potentials.\u201d<\/p>\n

But in a stroke of luck for Price\u2019s company, the government issued four hydrocarbon licenses to two small companies prior to the ban. Crucially, those licenses could not be annulled so long as the companies continued operating the sites.<\/p>\n

Not that they were seen as having much promise. \u201cMy understanding is that the licenses that remain have very limited potential,\u201d Mads Christensen, then the executive director of the Nordic branch of environmental advocacy group Greenpeace, told the Danish magazine Ingeni\u00f8ren<\/a> shortly after the decision was announced. But they remained active nonetheless. Today, three out of the four remain alive, all onshore oil and gas exploration licenses for acreage on Jameson Land.<\/p>\n

When the set came up for an international bidding process, a subsidiary of the British exploration company 80 Mile bid for and won the licenses. Under the terms of a deal arranged between March GL and 80 Mile<\/a>, Price\u2019s company is funding new exploration efforts in return for a 70% stake in the license.<\/p>\n

As the operational leader for the project, March GL will lead the drilling efforts, essentially grandfathered in under the nose of Greenland\u2019s drilling moratorium. Upon merging with a blank-check company called Pelican Acquisition Corp. (PELIR<\/a>), March GL will list on the public market in the first quarter of 2026 as Greenland Energy Company.<\/p>\n

Data that Price\u2019s company acquired and reprocessed tells him that, with these licenses, his team is sitting on 13 billion or more barrels of commercially recoverable oil, likely within the top five largest discoveries in the past 50 years, if accurate.<\/p>\n

\"Price's Price’s earthmoving equipment will remain stuck in Tasiilaq until it can be barged up the coast in spring. (Yahoo Finance\/Jake Conley) \u00b7 Jake Conley <\/p>\n

Getting to all that oil, however, will be immensely difficult.<\/p>\n

Ice flowing from the north and blocking prominent sea corridors can delay equipment deliveries and working time, and rogue weather can make it impossible to operate at times. Price is looking to spud, or begin drilling, his first well in the second half of 2026. But there are no highways or even backroads to Jameson Land from any of Greenland\u2019s major settlements in the West, and the waterways in and out of the area freeze over in winter\u2019s subzero conditions.<\/p>\n

To get the hulking masses of metal that make up oil-drilling rigs out to the sites where Price and his lead petroleum engineer, Neel Duncan, are planning to drill their first wells, they must build their own roads. Equipment must be barged from Canada, Alaska, or the American Gulf Coast in a process entirely dependent on weather, and crews must be flown in by helicopter to work year-round in conditions that range from uncomfortable to dangerous.<\/p>\n

Even once the drilling rigs are in place and ready to break ground, they may miss the \u201ctraps,\u201d or spots in the rock hundreds or thousands of feet below the surface where oil has spent millennia collecting.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s been plenty of other basins where, in theory, you do your work, your evaluation, and you see the potential for there to be a large resource, then the wells don\u2019t ultimately yield what you hoped to find,\u201d said Ruaraidh Montgomery, head of energy trends and analysis at the industry intelligence firm Welligence.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s high risk stuff, and it will remain that way until they actually physically go and take a look at what can be done.\u201d<\/p>\n

The story of the oil industry is one of wild prospects that often left the explorers brave enough to chase them penniless. The masterstrokes of luck that have minted fortunes, however, keep investors coming back.<\/p>\n

In the early 1960s, American geologists were pushing north, hunting for fossil fuels among the snow and ice of the Arctic Circle. By 1968, an American company called Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO), today part of the British energy giant BP (BP<\/a>), would make one of the most important discoveries in the history of the American energy sector: northern Alaska\u2019s Prudhoe Bay<\/a>, the largest oilfield in the US and a transformative asset for the country.<\/p>\n

Decades later, in 2015, ExxonMobil (XOM<\/a>) began drilling wells in the Atlantic waters about 100 miles off the coast of Guyana. Other companies tried and failed over the years to find oil beneath the seafloor, but in March 2015, workers onboard an oil-drilling ship called the Deepwater Champion placed the first of what would become dozens of wells into the water.<\/p>\n

By 2022, Exxon had increased its Guyana estimates to 11 billion barrels of recoverable oil, a discovery that has helped the largest publicly owned oil company in the world vault past its peers. The area, called the Stabroek block, is now one of the most active and high-value oil plays globally.<\/p>\n

Nearly 20 years after ARCO discovered Prudhoe Bay, the company was looking for new prospects, acquiring a license to explore a 10,000 square kilometer patch of land on Greenland\u2019s Jameson Land. In the 1980s, the company spent more than $100 million in today\u2019s dollars building out a bare minimum of infrastructure that included the Constable Point airport, a collection of less than a dozen buildings and a small aircraft hangar sitting adjacent to a dirt runway less than 1,000 feet from the waters of the peninsula\u2019s fjords.<\/p>\n

By 1989, a study of samples pulled from Jameson Land by ARCO and the Geological Survey of Greenland heralded good fortune<\/a> for hydrocarbon exploration on the peninsula. Not only was there oil underfoot, but its profile was nearly identical to that of the oil being pulled from the floor of northern Europe\u2019s North Sea \u2014 a light, sweet version of the substance, known as Brent (BZ=F<\/a>), that has become the international benchmark for crude oil pricing, given demand for the oil\u2019s profile.<\/p>\n

Refiners may process 40 or 50 different grades, or chemical makeups, of oil on any given day. But light, sweet crude is particularly desirable because it requires a much smaller amount of processing to turn the substance into products like diesel or jet fuel than the heavier, more \u201csour\u201d \u2014 or sulfurous \u2014 oils found elsewhere around the globe, according to several analysts at energy intelligence firms. Most of the oil discovered in Venezuela, for instance, is of this latter variety<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Millions of years ago, the areas that are now Greenland\u2019s east coast and Europe\u2019s North Sea were conjoined, geologic studies have shown. They were separated over time as volcanic activity shifted tectonic plates. But the fossil fuels, pushed apart with the land masses, remain similar.<\/p>\n

\"The The sky over Greenland glows pale yellow and blue as the sun rises. (Yahoo Finance\/Jake Conley) \u00b7 Jake Conley <\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m very confident in those rocks just because it\u2019s the same geology as the North Sea,\u201d Duncan said. Even if the first two wells miss traps and come up dry, \u201cWe\u2019ll still be fine,\u201d Duncan told me. The data they\u2019re able to gather, he said, will almost guarantee success on following attempts.<\/p>\n

Yet, despite the promise of what could be another Prudhoe Bay-scale discovery, by 1990 ARCO had surrendered its Greenland licenses. The exploration rights, and all of the company\u2019s data, were turned over to a Danish government-funded research institute called the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland. Years later, the 80 Mile subsidiary White Flame won the licenses and data, which Price and his team have reprocessed.<\/p>\n

But it was not without reason that ARCO pulled out of Greenland. Not only had oil prices collapsed globally, making the risk of a frontier development with high upfront costs less attractive, but the logistics of operating in eastern Greenland are brutal, and the conditions even worse. In Jameson Land, roughly halfway up Greenland, the sun sets in early December and won\u2019t reemerge over the horizon until late January \u2014 polar night.<\/p>\n

For every Guyana-sized discovery, there are dozens of examples where the gamble didn\u2019t pay off. Between 2005 and 2008, British energy major Shell (SHEL<\/a>) went on a shopping spree, ultimately spending more than $2 billion buying up leases in the Chukchi Sea off the coast of Alaska. At the time, the Arctic, with its reserves long locked miles below the ice, was viewed as the next major frontier for oil wildcatting.<\/p>\n

Shell\u2019s progress in the Arctic was mired for years in delays ranging from pushback by environmental activists to the industry-wide public relations fallout of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Once the company finally managed to mobilize and begin deploying resources to the area in 2012, Shell\u2019s crews faced some of the harshest conditions on the planet, surrounded by water only four degrees above freezing in all directions and with only four months, from July to October, to get everything set up before ice set in for the winter.<\/p>\n

Everything went wrong. A containment dome, meant to prevent blowouts, was \u201ccrushed like a beer can\u201d during testing, according to a local radio station<\/a>. One rig ran aground in a storm, and another suffered mechanical failures. Shell called off the efforts after spending $7 billion<\/a>. Three years later, Shell tried one more time. But shortly after breaking ground on its first well, the company announced<\/a> it was ending its Arctic campaign \u201cfor the foreseeable future.\u201d Initial results from the wellhead weren\u2019t enough to justify continuing.<\/p>\n

\"Robert Robert Price, right, is pursuing a frontier prospect in an era of mass de-risking for the oil and gas industry. (Yahoo Finance\/Jake Conley) \u00b7 Jake Conley <\/p>\n

The largest discoveries throughout the industry\u2019s history have long been the domain of the largest companies in the world. Mexico\u2019s Cantarell Field has been handled by Petr\u00f3leos Mexicanos \u2014 Mexico\u2019s state-controlled oil company, referred to as PEMEX \u2014 since its discovery. The Stabroek oilfield, 100 miles off Guyana\u2019s western coast, is operated by a partnership between Exxon Mobil, Chevron (CVX<\/a>), and the China National Offshore Oil Corporation, or CNOOC. Kazakhstan\u2019s Kashagan oilfield was discovered by a consortium that included Exxon, Shell, BP, and the French and Italian majors TotalEnergies (TTE<\/a>) and Eni (E<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, at the same time that ARCO engineers were surveying Jameson Land, a coalition of companies, including Exxon, BP, and Shell, received licenses to prospect for oil through northeastern and northwestern Greenland, which were thought to be rich in fossil fuel reserves due to the regions\u2019 geological history. The coalition, in partnership with the national Greenlandic oil company Nunaoil, performed initial testing on the regions, often with promising results, but in the mid-2010s, all of those companies surrendered their licenses<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn a period of less than 10 years, Greenland has seen a dramatic change in industry interest from being one of the hottest regions for investments to virtually no activities at all,\u201d said geologist Flemming Christiansen, who has spent the past 50 years studying Greenland\u2019s petroleum and mineral extraction potential.<\/p>\n

Some of the companies\u2019 departures from Greenland were driven by new data that pared back reserve estimates or complicated the extraction process. Much of it was due to a crash in oil prices. In 2014, a wave of oversupply crushed the industry, cutting global prices by more than half<\/a>. The largest oil and gas companies, which depend on stable returns to fund steady dividend payments, pivoted away from frontier developments and invested what exploration budgets they still had in well-known prospects located in countries with oil-producing histories.<\/p>\n

The world\u2019s major oil companies have never reentered Greenland, leaving an opportunity for March GL.<\/p>\n

\"Tasiilaq Tasiilaq is the largest settlement on Greenland’s isolated eastern coast. (Yahoo Finance\/Jake Conley) \u00b7 Jake Conley <\/p>\n

\u201cIt would be a bit of a stretch [for the majors] to go and drop a lot of money on new exploration wells, just on the basis of seismic data that was shot in the \u201970s,\u201d Tom Liles, senior vice president of upstream research at industry intelligence firm Rystad Energy, told Yahoo Finance.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut certainly, I think you could envision a scenario where there is a big discovery that proves analogous to the [Alaskan] North Slope or the North Sea in some respects, there could be some interest in gaining a portfolio position there.\u201d<\/p>\n

March GL\u2019s assumptions on the oil reserves are based on seismic data, or underground radar readings, taken by ARCO in the 1980s, when the now-defunct company was first prospecting the basin. Price debated reshooting his own seismic data before drilling a well, but he told me he was counseled by colleagues in the field \u2014 including petroleum engineers who worked with ARCO at the time \u2014 that he would be better off skipping that step and going straight to getting a drill bit into the ground, which would provide reams of more accurate data.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf it was a guaranteed discovery and it was all definitely going to be there, then someone else would have done it,\u201d Saskia Goacher, an energy analyst at Welligence, told me. \u201cIt\u2019s still kind of up in the air whether it will actually be there.\u201d<\/p>\n

It will take years before any true assessment of Jameson Land\u2019s potential reserves can be made, and the seismic data Price\u2019s team is working from only covers half of the basin, leaving the rest unknown, he told me. Exxon, for instance, drilled the first of its wells in the Stabroek field, called Liza 1, in 2015 and raised its projections for recoverable oil by piecemeal until they hit 11 billion barrels in 2022.<\/p>\n

March GL, Price said, stands for March 2025, when the company was founded, and \u201cGreenland.\u201d<\/p>\n

Or, depending on the day, \u201cGood luck.\u201d<\/p>\n

We landed on Greenland at around 8 a.m. local time, but it could have been the middle of the night as the pilot touched the twin-engine plane down in between mountain peaks. In November, much of central and northern Greenland only experiences three to four hours of daylight.<\/p>\n

By the end of the month, the entire share of the island above the Arctic Circle, roughly two-thirds of its landmass, won\u2019t see the sun again until late January or early February.<\/p>\n

A skeleton crew of maybe five greeted us with smoked salmon and cucumber sandwiches inside the slight building adjacent to the runway at Kulusuk, a settlement of around 240 people in Greenland\u2019s southeastern corner, just as the sun began to breach the horizon. The plan had been to land in Kulusuk, fly north another couple of hours to Jameson Land and visit the sites Price and Duncan are prospecting for their first two oil wells, then fly west to the town of Tasiilaq, where contractors are preparing the Caterpillar (CAT<\/a>) and Hitachi Construction Machinery Co. (6305.T<\/a>) earth-moving equipment March GL will use to build a road from the coast to the company\u2019s prospective drilling site.<\/p>\n

\"Kulusk's Kulusk’s airstrip is manned by a small crew. (Yahoo Finance\/Jake Conley) \u00b7 Jake Conley <\/p>\n

But when we arrived in Kulusuk, the polite but short-spoken pilot who had flown us from Iceland said a trip to Jameson Land would be impossible. Not only was there a storm brewing further north, but daylight was limited, and he worried we wouldn\u2019t have time to arrive at Constable Point, see the drill site, and fly back to Kulusuk before sundown.<\/p>\n

If we got stuck at Constable Point overnight, he said, there was no deicer at the site to prepare the plane for a flight south in the morning. Instead, we boarded a helicopter to Tasiilaq, cruising over the landscapes that keep settlements on the island geographically isolated.<\/p>\n

In the air over Greenland, outside of the settled regions, mountain ranges reach as far back as the horizon, cut by glaciers that have spent millions of years carving the landscape. The sky glows blue and yellow before reaching pitch-black darkness once the sun goes down, leaving only stars and the Northern Lights to illuminate swaths of the unsettled wilderness.<\/p>\n

Greenland is more than twice the size of Texas, but there are fewer than 100 miles of roads throughout the island, and none of them connect Greenland\u2019s towns to each other. All travel must be by air or sea.<\/p>\n

Tasiilaq, a town of less than 2,000 permanent residents, is the largest settlement on Greenland\u2019s remote east coast. Its port is a key pipeline for supplies that are delivered along the town\u2019s waterways, but those waters freeze over the winter, typically around the end of November. Once winter sets in, no ships \u2014 and no deliveries \u2014 will get in or out of Tasiilaq until the ice melts, usually in late May.<\/p>\n

March GL\u2019s difficulty with its earthmoving equipment in Tasiilaq, delayed by the frozen waters off the coast, are visible proof of the precarity of operating in Greenland, where weather is less of a nuisance and more of a legitimate operational risk. And these delays, in part, also explain why the world\u2019s largest oil companies have, for the past decade, largely ignored Greenland\u2019s hydrocarbon potential despite a large body of evidence suggesting the land is oil-rich.<\/p>\n

Price is attempting to pull off his company\u2019s Jameson Land exploration during a period of de-risking for the largest players in the oil and gas sector. The majors, focused on cost-cutting and dividend payments, have laid off thousands of staff<\/a> in the last year and cut back on their exploration efforts, instead focusing on finding new barrels by drilling more wells around existing hotspots in a process known as a \u201ctieback.\u201d<\/p>\n

If Price and Duncan\u2019s first set of wells yields the results they are hoping for \u2014 commercially recoverable reserves counted in the billions of barrels of oil \u2014 the majors\u2019 reluctance toward Greenland is likely to change, several analysts said. The risk is not extracting the oil once a field has been established, but in taking the shot on the unknown and hoping for success.<\/p>\n

\"Tasiilaq Tasiilaq is full of Greenland’s signature brightly colored buildings. (Yahoo Finance\/Jake Conley) \u00b7 Jake Conley <\/p>\n

March GL is already in conversation with some of the world\u2019s largest energy companies, Price said, and his company has invited them to visit the site once March GL begins drilling. Some of those companies\u2019 exploration managers, he told me, came to Jameson Land as young geologists early in their careers, and they are closely watching Price and Duncan\u2019s success or failure.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is an exploratory project; it\u2019s in the Arctic,\u201d Price said. \u201cOnce we have success here, they will come and they will be very interested in potentially partnering with us.\u201d<\/p>\n

Such a move by an oil major would essentially be required for Price\u2019s scheme to work, multiple analysts told Yahoo Finance, due to the sheer scale of infrastructure needed to extract massive volumes of oil. But if that were to happen, the Jameson Land basin would likely see a steel city spring up on its shores.<\/p>\n

Storage tanks, pipelines, processing facilities, and power plants would all need to be built. In the deep waters of the nearby Scoresby Sund fjord system, a port big enough to berth crude oil tankers may be erected. Power plants will be required to electrify the operation.<\/p>\n

For the crew, there will be need for a town like that built at Los Alamos. Airports, helipads, medical facilities, and a tangle of winterized roads would be necessary. As in Alaska\u2019s Prudhoe Bay, where there once was nothing, a sprawling metal jungle could emerge.<\/p>\n

Costs could balloon. And it\u2019s not only analysts that think a maturing Jameson Land project would require backers with more resources than Price\u2019s March GL.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe hope that some of the big guys [would come] in and take over because they are the ones that can facilitate this in a proper way,\u201d J\u00f8rgen Hammeken-Holm, the permanent secretary of Greenland\u2019s Ministry of Business, responsible for overseeing mineral resources and energy, told Yahoo Finance.<\/p>\n

Oil and gas are not Greenland\u2019s only natural riches. The island, still largely unblemished, also holds beneath its surface a massive amount of minerals and metals crucial to the global economy. In the far northern region of Greenland, less than 500 miles from the North Pole, the Citronen Fjord is home to what is believed to be one of the largest undeveloped deposits of zinc on the planet.<\/p>\n

To the West, licenses have been granted for potential extraction projects focused on graphite and the feedstock ores used to produce titanium, while others have proposed prospects focused on rare earth metals. In the South, miners plan to dig for gold. Eastern Greenland is oil territory.<\/p>\n

\u201cGreenland\u2019s known and proven quantities of critical minerals, rare earths and oil could well provide the industrial building blocks necessary for an advanced global economy,\u201d said James Kiernan, chairman of the company operating Greenland\u2019s only active mining project, Lumina Global.<\/p>\n

Kiernan\u2019s private credit firm, Cordiant Capital, has provided backing to Lumina, which has spent the past decade operating in Greenland and currently runs the only commercially operating mine on the island. Lumina\u2019s operations at a mining site in the southeastern corner of Greenland extract and export tens of thousands of tons of anorthite, a mineral used to manufacture glass and ceramics.<\/p>\n

Anorthite is also used as a feedstock for the industrial production of cement and alumina, the primary chemical compound used to smelt aluminum. As in Greenland, where the environment can seem almost alien, anorthite is abundant in the crust of the moon.<\/p>\n

Though the Greenlandic government has granted a litany of mining licenses over the years, only a few have ever been developed, and Lumina\u2019s anorthite mine is the only one of those still standing. Many licensees surrender their rights before ever breaking ground, stymied by the same logistical hurdles that make oil and gas production unattractive to major global companies concentrated on low-risk opportunities.<\/p>\n

With a population of less than 60,000, labor is in short supply, and most projects are fly-in, fly-out rotations of weeks at a time. Delivery of food and equipment is complex. Weather can keep crews stuck at a remote site for weeks longer than planned. The start-up costs are leagues higher than elsewhere in the world.<\/p>\n

But the promise of economic development is enticing for many Greenlanders. When, in 2009, the island passed laws establishing its right of self-governance from Denmark, a requirement that half of any income above a certain threshold Greenland receives from its subsoil resources be deducted from the grants it receives from the Danish government was written into the act<\/a>, chipping away at Greenland\u2019s dependence on the European nation.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is a strong drive for activity within the minerals sector because that could lead up to more sovereignty or autonomy,\u201d the Greenland Business Association\u2019s managing director Christian Keldsen, who was involved with now-dormant offshore oil drilling projects in Greenland earlier in his career, told Yahoo Finance. \u201cThese are our rocks, this is our soil.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Kulusuk, Kulusuk, in the southeastern corner of Greenland, is tucked between mountains. (Yahoo Finance\/Jake Conley) \u00b7 Jake Conley <\/p>\n

The locals, Keldsen told me, have been especially supportive of resource development, even as the government has pushed back and moved to lean toward environmental protection and renewable energy sources. Between flights, Price and Duncan described to our Air Greenland helicopter pilot, a gray-haired and brisk man named Jergen, what they were hoping to accomplish. The Greenlandic people, Jergen said, had been watching oil and gas developments closely for years, hopeful that one would come to fruition and begin generating tax revenue and royalties for the locals, at one moment telling Price to \u201cplease find oil.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve seen for many, many years that Greenland would like to get independence, and in order to get independence, you have to be economically supporting your political system,\u201d Christiansen, the Greenland analyst, said.<\/p>\n

Driving the lack of environmental concern from many of Greenland\u2019s locals is the fact that these resource developments \u2014 oil wells on Jameson Land, mines in the far north, and others \u2014 are so far removed from population that they are unlikely to affect local subsistence hunting and fishing activity, Hammeken-Holm told me.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt doesn\u2019t make me worried. It\u2019s going to be set up in the middle of nowhere. It\u2019s going to be a city without any connections,\u201d he said. Hammeken-Holm pointed to the territory’s strict environmental protection policies for extraction projects as further reasoning for his security.<\/p>\n

Yet, the world\u2019s interest in Greenland\u2019s resources hasn\u2019t come without pushback. In 2007, an Australian company called Energy Transition Minerals (GDLNF<\/a>) applied for a license to explore a patch of earth in southern Greenland, known as Kuannersuit in Greenlandic, or the Kvanefjeld deposit. Originally prospected in the 1950s for its uranium stores, the site is one of the world\u2019s largest undeveloped deposits of rare earth minerals, which have become a crucial geopolitical sticking point amid the ongoing trade war between the US and China.<\/p>\n

Eight years later, in 2015, Energy Transition Minerals submitted a plan to build an open pit mine<\/a> focused on rare earth minerals, with plans to extract uranium as a co-product. But the project faced intense scrutiny from locals in the nearby town of Narsaq worried that uranium development so close to home would create significant radioactive waste posing steep health and environmental hazards.<\/p>\n

In 2021, before the mine could be developed, the Greenlandic government passed laws banning the exploration<\/a> and exploitation of resources that exceeded defined uranium content limits. Because the deposits at the Kvanefjeld deposit are above those limits, Energy Transition Minerals hasn\u2019t been able to develop the site, which remains the subject of an active court case.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat was a bit of an issue, the risk of contamination so close to the project,\u201d Keldsen said. The further away from anywhere where there\u2019s a relevant resource hunting ground or where people are living, Keldsen told me, the more supportive \u2014 or in some cases, indifferent \u2014 Greenland\u2019s people are likely to be.<\/p>\n

\"Greenland's Greenland’s mountains have been cut by glaciers over millions of years. (Yahoo Finance\/Jake Conley) \u00b7 Jake Conley <\/p>\n

There is also an expectation among Greenlanders that they will benefit from the extraction of resources from the island, Keldsen said.<\/p>\n

For generations, hunting and fishing have been Greenland\u2019s primary industries, providing the subsistence to support local communities. But large-scale industrial projects have remained an untouched development in Greenland despite its abundance of natural resources, in part because the territory does not have the expertise or capital to kickstart large-scale mineral extraction.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt means that someone else is being allowed to make money off our resources,\u201d Keldsen told me. In return, \u201cThere should be some income, there should be jobs created.\u201d<\/p>\n

Under the agreement made between March GL and the Greenlandic government, the territory will receive a sliding scale of payments from Price\u2019s company, rising as March GL hits certain profit margins from a 3.75% royalty to a royalty of 15%. The scheme is known as an \u201cR-factor\u201d system, a model widely used by governments with frontier resource land, such as Egypt, Algeria, or Alaska.<\/p>\n

Because the royalty payments don\u2019t begin until the company running the extraction activity has reached a certain level of profitability, the system encourages exploration that is both high-risk and highly capital-intensive in the initial stages. If the project turns into a windfall, the host government can capture a greater slice of the profits.<\/p>\n

The scheme also accounts for market instability without needing renegotiation. If oil prices were to suddenly jump while Price\u2019s company is extracting crude oil, Greenland\u2019s share of the profits rises in tandem with March GL\u2019s profitability. If oil prices fell, the payments due to Greenland automatically scale down. At current prices, 13 billion barrels of crude oil would be worth more than $800 billion.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat potential revenue stream is the closest revenue Greenland has to independence,\u201d Price said. \u201cIt could be the genesis for transforming their country.\u201d<\/p>\n

The term \u201cwildcatting\u201d dates back to the Civil War period, when poorly collateralized banks established in the American West and willing to print paper currency in an era with no national banking system were said to be engaged in \u201cwildcat banking,\u201d a derogatory term meant to imply risk and unreliability. Over time, the term was co-opted by the hydrocarbon industry, applied to the oilmen who ventured beyond known land and took the risk of drilling for oil in untamed wilderness.<\/p>\n

When Price talks about the project, he speaks with an unshakable faith that the oil he\u2019s hoping to find will be there, that the reserves will contain the volumes he\u2019s planning for, and that he will be the one to discover it.<\/p>\n

But it is still, at its core, a wildcat prospect.<\/p>\n

The weeks between our trip to Greenland and the publication of this story are another case in point.<\/p>\n

Shortly after the US military\u2019s removal of Nicol\u00e1s Maduro from Venezuela, Katie Miller, a former Trump administration official and the wife of Trump\u2019s key advisor, Stephen Miller, posted a cartoon of Greenland covered in an American flag<\/a> on X, captioned: \u201cSOON.\u201d<\/p>\n

If we don’t do it, Russia or China will take over Greenland, and we’re not gonna have Russia or China as a neighbor,” Trump said in his comments at the White House on Jan. 9.<\/p>\n

\u201cI would like to make a deal the easy way, but if we don\u2019t do it the easy way, we\u2019ll do it the hard way.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"President President Donald Trump answers reporter questions during a meeting with oil executives in the East Room of the White House, Friday, Jan. 9, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo\/Alex Brandon) \u00b7 ASSOCIATED PRESS <\/p>\n

\u201cThis is the Western hemisphere, and American dominance is going to continue under this president,\u201d White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in comments to the press<\/a> on Jan. 7, noting that President Trump \u201ckeeps his options open\u201d and therefore would not rule out potential military force in Greenland.<\/p>\n

Responding to the White House\u2019s statements over control of Greenland \u2014 including a refusal by Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio to rule out militaristic action \u2014 Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said such a move would trigger a breakdown<\/a> of international relations.<\/p>\n

\u201cI will also make it clear that if the US chooses to attack another NATO country militarily, then everything stops, including NATO and thus the security that has been established since the end of the Second World War,\u201d Frederiksen said to Danish broadcaster TV2 on Jan. 5<\/p>\n

On Jan. 8, Denmark\u2019s ambassador to the US and Greenland\u2019s chief representative to the US met with members of the White House National Security Council<\/a> about Trump\u2019s renewed push for potential annexation, according to the Associated Press.<\/p>\n

“Greenland\u2019s return to the headlines is no coincidence, and the intensity of this debate confirms that energy security and national security are now inseparable,” Price told Yahoo Finance last week.<\/p>\n

In September 2025, Price\u2019s team took the arduous route to Jameson Land to finalize decisions over where they plan to install their first wells. Difficult and tiring as it is, Price and Duncan, the petroleum engineer, believe the journey was worth it.<\/p>\n

The two men are steadfast in their conviction that every time they visit the peninsula, they are standing on one of the largest untapped hydrocarbon reserves in the world, projected to hold billions of barrels of oil that have never been recovered.<\/p>\n

On Jameson Land, rolling lowlands stretch for miles in each direction, covered in a layer of vegetation that has thrived in the basin\u2019s weather-protected region. The ground, a rust-colored mossy carpet, bends and bounces back into shape underfoot.<\/p>\n

As they stood near the proposed drill sites in September, Duncan bent down and touched the shimmery liquid pooled beneath his feet, seeping out of the mossy ground. He stood and brought his hand close to his face, rubbing the fluid between his fingers. The petroleum engineer had, by this point in his life, spent more than 40 years working on oilfields and was intimately familiar with the substance.<\/p>\n

\u201cBeautiful,\u201d he said. \u201cSmells like crude.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jake Conley is a breaking news reporter covering US equities for Yahoo Finance. Follow him on X at @byjakeconley or email him at jake.co<\/a>nley@yahooinc.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Click here for in-depth analysis of the latest stock market news and events moving stock prices<\/a><\/p>\n

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