Critical Clarities
The groundwork for expediency has been laid, said Avadh Nagaralawala, an Arizona-based mining automation consultant.
“The EV transition, modernization of the grid, and national security priorities are all creating urgency that didn’t exist in quite the same way before,” he told The Epoch Times.
Nagaralawala cited the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the 2022 CHIPS & Science Act and Inflation Reduction Act, and the Obama-era establishment of a Department of Defense fund to subsidize reopening Mountain Pass Mine in California by MP Materials—until this summer, the nation’s only rare earths mine—as pivotal precursors.
“That said, the hurdles remain steep,” he said. “The U.S. isn’t short of resources; it’s short of refining, recycling, and permitting speed. That’s where the race will be won or lost.”
It wasn’t until Trump’s first term that a clear federal priority to define, source, and develop a critical mineral supply chain impervious to CCP market manipulation emerged.
In December 2017, Trump issued an executive order requiring an all-agency focus on securing minerals and metals needed for economic development and national defense.
The order was spurred by USGS’s 2017 report documenting that the nation was 100 percent import-reliant on 20 minerals, a 250 percent increase since 1954.
The Trump administration directed the USGS to define “critical minerals,” how domestic industries need them, and where they can be mined and processed.
In 2018, USGS published its first Critical Minerals List, identifying 35 minerals “considered critical to the economic and national security of the United States.”
Trump, in a September 2020 executive order, declared “a national emergency due to ... dependence on critical minerals from foreign adversaries, particularly China,” directing agencies to secure domestic supply chains.
In December 2020, Congress adopted The Energy Act of 2020, which defines a critical mineral as one essential to the U.S. economy or national security, with a supply chain vulnerable to disruption, without which the absence would have significant consequences.
The bill requires USGS to update its critical minerals list every three years beginning in 2022, and orders the Department of the Interior (DOI) to track “reliance on critical minerals ... from foreign adversaries” after publishing initial findings mandated by the 2020 executive order.
While President Joe Biden rescinded 72 of Trump’s 220 executive orders during his White House term, he retained the critical mineral actions.
In 2022, USGS published its first three-year Critical Minerals List update: the nation was now import-reliant on 50 “mineral commodities,” up from 35 in 2018.
In 2024, DOI published its first import-reliance report mandated under Trump’s 2020 order. Among the findings is that the United States imported 80 percent of rare earths, 100 percent of gallium and graphite, and up to 76 percent of lithium, nickel, and cobalt.
Following his 2024 reelection, Trump declared a national energy emergency and issued his Unleashing American Energy order to “ensure a more secure, predictable, and affordable supply of critical minerals and materials,” according to a statement by the Department of Energy.
The president followed with a March executive order requiring agencies to expedite projects by streamlining permitting, opening more federal lands for mining, and including critical mineral development under the Defense Production Act.
In April, he signed an executive order to kickstart deep-sea mining within the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf, directing the DOI to establish permitting and licensing processes.
On Aug. 26, USGS published its second three-year updated Critical Mineral List. While arsenic and tellurium, among 50 commodities on 2022’s list, are recommended for removal, the proposed new version includes six new entries, bringing the list to 54.
Exiger’s Lemke noted the new list is the first “significant change to these lists in a number of years, adding copper, potash, silver, silicon, radium, and lead,” and marks a clear “whole-of-government list” with USGS taking the lead from parallel Pentagon and DOI lists.
Nagaralawala said “classification ... is a good start.”
“But the capacity of smelting, refining, and recycling will determine whether this policy shift delivers real energy and security resilience,” he said.
For that to happen, Lemke said, it will require a “whole-of-industry” approach in investing, and government commitment in, if not subsidizing, at least supporting markets that can weather CCP manipulation.
Christensen said, “We’re exploring how that might work.”
“Something has to be done,” he said, specifically citing the need for antimony, a key battery mineral not mined in the United States since 1982. Processors in China control half the global market for it.
“So how do you walk away from [China’s] level of control?” Lemke said. “I know some in government and in industry are saying, ‘How do we create this market here?’ We’re supporting some of that work right now.”
Momentum and Markets
Exiger, founded in 2013, is the “largest provider of supply chain technology” to the U.S. government and a key participant in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Open Price Exploration for National Security (OPEN) project.
“We’re utilizing AI to look at structural price models for these minerals, costs to produce within China, costs to produce within the United States, and starting to provide some data to the level of manipulation that you see,” Lemke said.
He said the driving question is: “Where can U.S. industry or U.S.-allied industry be successful” in developing markets less vulnerable to CCP manipulation?
The OPEN project is orchestrated through the Critical Minerals Forum, created in November 2024 and funded by the agency through 2029.
More than 30 mining companies, manufacturers. and investors have joined.
“You’re starting to see where it’s not government control, but this kind of government-backed industry,” Lemke said, noting that while the Pentagon subsidizes MP Materials’ operations at Mountain Pass, there’s burgeoning industry investment elsewhere, such as Apple “with their own $500 million investment” in mineral sourcing.
Since July, it’s more than a subsidy. The Department of Defense has set a floor price for minerals and materials pivotal in manufacturing magnets with a $400 million investment in MP Materials, which has opened a second processing plant in Texas.
Among Exiger’s roles is identifying where supply chain vulnerabilities are now and where they could be depending on varied scenarios.
“Do we have enough diversified, multiple sources coming online that can refine these products to the grade and requirements needed for some high-tech applications?” Lemke said. “In other words, we need not just to be able to refine, for example, copper. but to refine it to certain grades so it can be used in different applications.”
It’s a whole-of-government-and-industry effort to provide “visibility down from a part to the hole-in-the-ground,” he said. That lack of visibility “has really been one of the bottlenecks in enabling investment.”
Under Trump, a flood of money is galvanizing existing programs such as the Defense Industrial Base Consortium, the U.S. Permitting Council, and the Department of Energy’s Critical Minerals and Materials Accelerator.
In August, the department proposed shifting $1 billion from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act programs into critical mineral projects.
On Aug. 13, the Department of Energy announced awards of up to $50 million for “American industry-led partnerships to prototype and pilot innovative critical materials processing technologies;” $250 million for “producing valuable mineral byproducts;” $135 million for demonstration projects “that enhance domestic supply chains for rare earths;” up to $500 million for critical mineral and materials projects; and $36 million to recover critical minerals from industrial wastewater.
Many question if these initiatives can overcome China’s market domination without direct subsidization. Christensen wonders, too.
“Those are things I think need to be explored because we’re playing against an opponent that is not confined to market forces. [China] will manipulate the price of their own product just to get it out there, just to keep others out of the marketplace,” he said.
“If you play by market rules—the rules we all learned in economics 101, in our first-ever business class in high school—if we play by those rules, China isn’t ... and we'll lose every time.”
Lemke is more optimistic.
“The quickest way to spin-up this industry is to get the large players together and have them, one, quantify their need, two, make the direct investments needed [through] this process of osmosis, things filtering down. hoping the demand signals come down,” he said.
It’s an existential challenge few Americans understand.
“It’s a battle not just in the highways, in the streets,” Lemke said. “It’s in the alley.”
