A Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) report released in February argues the United States should treat critical minerals as an innovation race rather than a mining contest, warning that conventional projects alone will not move fast enough to blunt China’s leverage over key supply chains.
The report, “Leapfrogging China’s Critical Minerals Dominance,” calls for a strategy that pairs traditional mining and processing with faster-to-deploy approaches, including materials engineering, recovery from legacy mine tailings and industrial byproducts, and expanded recycling of end-of-life electronics. At a CFR event Monday, Assistant Secretary of Energy Audrey Robertson described a reorganization inside the Department of Energy aimed at consolidating the department’s work across that pipeline.
“What we did was bring together mining, processing, refining, pilot scale, R&D and commercialization into one office,” Robertson said, adding that the consolidated entity is now the Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation.
Robertson framed the challenge as spanning the full value chain, from extraction technology to magnets and said the administration is trying to compress the timeline. “This administration has gone on Trump time to solve this problem and that means faster than the speed of light,” she said.
Federal push for minerals innovation
The report’s authors, CFR senior fellow Heidi Crebo-Rediker and Silverado Policy Accelerator’s Mahnaz Khan, argue innovation offers a route to reduce exposure to chokepoints that will remain vulnerable even if new mines and refineries come online. Crebo-Rediker told the audience the goal is additive, not a substitute for conventional supply development, describing innovation as “an additional prong” alongside a strategy focused on traditional mining, processing and manufacturing.
Recycling and recovery drew repeated attention during the discussion, including the export of battery scrap and other feedstocks that speakers said can flow back into Asian supply chains. Robertson described “urban mining” as a near-term opportunity that still runs into permitting and infrastructure barriers. She pointed to the handling of black mass, the shredded lithium-ion battery material that contains metals such as lithium, cobalt and nickel.
“We already have fairly sophisticated aggregation techniques for Black Mass, what we would call it, but they get loaded onto barges and sent over to Asia,” she said, adding that processing remains “chemically intensive, water intensive, power intensive.” Even so, she predicted momentum. “I think you will see significant gains in the output from recycled black mass and material in the coming 12 months.”
Speakers also stressed that the bottleneck is not limited to ores and chemical separation. During a portion of audience Q&A, Jonah Glick-Unterman, chief of staff at magnet producer Vulcan Elements, said equipment constraints could slow efforts to build a domestic supply chain because much of the specialized machinery used to manufacture magnets is produced overseas.
Glick-Unterman added that while China produces most of the world’s magnets, “they make virtually 100% of the equipment.” Robertson said machinery gaps are on the department’s radar. “So absolutely, the equipment, not just for magnets, but for the entire supply chain is on our investment map 100%,” she said.
Innovation and financing challenges emerge
A panel that followed widened the focus to financing and the constraints that can stall new technologies between lab validation and commercial deployment. Nathan Ratlidge, founder and CEO of Alta Resource Technologies, said supply risks extend beyond mines and refineries to the broader web of inputs needed to build and operate facilities. “By depth, I mean there’s a whole supply chain problem,” he said. “Where are your parts coming from? Where’s your sulfuric acid coming from? Where’s your exotic acid coming from?”
Ratlidge also warned the timeline will be unforgiving. “There are break glass moments,” he said, adding, “There are 90 days of resources left in some facilities for critical supply chains.” He argued innovation can drive speed and cost improvement, pointing to the shale boom as a parallel. “The same opportunity exists in mining today,” he said, adding, “Speed is key.”
Sarah Sewall, executive vice president of national innovation strategy at In-Q-Tel, described the organization’s Compass fund as an attempt to invest in technologies that private markets may overlook relative to national security needs. “Compass was founded on the premise that the private sector is great at what it does, but it pursues profit,” she said. “Profit is not necessarily the same thing as what you need in the national interest.”
Khan said China’s policy direction reinforces the urgency of building alternatives, warning that export controls and market behavior can shift quickly. She said Beijing has historically responded to emerging competitors by flooding global markets with cheaper supply that can undercut new producers. “We know China’s playbook,” she said. “China’s playbook is that once a country scales a certain critical mineral, they start dumping rare earth magnets, or start dumping critical minerals and rare earth magnets.”
Robertson said she views success as building an innovation pipeline that supports domestic manufacturing over time, even if the work remains unfinished by the end of her tenure. “So when I leave here, we probably won’t be done baking the cake, but it will be nearing the oven,” she said.
