How To Climb a Crucial Mineral Mountain? Come Collectively, Proper Now

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At 2026 Companion Discussion board, Business, Academia, Authorities, and Researchers Convene To Discuss U.S. Provide Strangleholds, Trendy Mining, and Optimism

For those who drive by way of one of many western-most factors of West Texas—about 85 miles east of El Paso County—you may spot a rounded brown mountain within the empty mud sprawl alongside Interstate 10. However even when you did word the humdrum mound, chances are high your mind would shrug off the reminiscence. Who cares a few bald hump of dust in a desert?

Greg Bowman does.

Bowman is the chief international coverage officer and head of exterior affairs for USA Uncommon Earth Inc., which just lately purchased an 80% stake in that mound, generally known as Spherical High Mountain. Why?

Beneath that nondescript floor lies the biggest identified U.S. deposit of uncommon earth parts—minerals that, together with their critical-mineral cousins, are mandatory for nearly all fashionable electronics, together with these utilized in our power methods, cell telephones and laptops, medical imaging and protection applied sciences, automobiles and airplanes, and even information facilities and synthetic intelligence. Greater than an eighth of the U.S. financial system is determined by corporations that can’t perform with out essential minerals.

“It’s making certain our very lifestyle,” Bowman mentioned in a keynote deal with on the U.S. Division of Vitality (DOE) Nationwide Laboratory of the Rockies’ (NLR’s) 2026 Companion Discussion board.

However in the present day, our “very lifestyle” is determined by imports. Greater than 80% of the nation’s essential minerals come from international sources, which management each provides and costs. A home provide chain may assist reduce each provide uncertainty and prices. However establishing that new chain, largely from scratch, is a craggy process (far craggier than that easy Texas mound). Hidden fragments of soiled rock can solely come collectively to kind MRIs, batteries, or autos if individuals come collectively. Geoscientists discover deposits, miners unearth ore, metallurgists and chemical engineers flip uncooked rock into high-purity metals, producers forge these metals into items, and recyclers get better minerals that will in any other case get misplaced in landfills.

“We all know how advanced that is,” Bowman mentioned. “To be globally aggressive, it takes all of us.”

That sort of cross-industry complexity—which extends from the lab bench to the market—is the precise type of problem the Companion Discussion board is designed to sort out.

This 12 months’s occasion—whose theme was “From Mine to Market: Crucial Minerals and Provide Chains for Vitality Methods”—introduced collectively individuals from nationwide and educational laboratories, established industries, startups, authorities companies, and accelerators. From Could 4 to six, they gathered on the laboratory’s Golden, Colorado, campus and joined talks, panels, workshops, aspect chats, and receptions.

Attendees talked U.S. mining bottlenecks, purple mud and uranium, synthetic intelligence, microbes and membranes, workforce gaps, power consumption, recycling, and rather more. Above all, they tried to reply one, huge query: Can the USA construct up its home provide of essential minerals?

“The time is correct now. The necessity is completely pressing,” Bowman mentioned. “The query is: How briskly can we transfer and how briskly can we do it, collectively?”

Come Collectively: To Get well a Uncommon Lead

In his welcome remarks, Jud Virden, director of the Nationwide Laboratory of the Rockies, echoed Bowman’s name: “The solely means we are able to do it quick,” he mentioned, “is to do it collectively.”

The “it” we have to do is create a reliable home pipeline for essential minerals, the 60 minerals or supplies the USA’ Division of the Inside think about “very important to the U.S. financial system and nationwide safety” however whose provides rely on worldwide—and probably susceptible or risky—provide chains. Provide chains may sound boring. However so is life with out smartphones, farms with out fertilizer, power methods with out semiconductors, and a rustic with no robust financial system.

As of 2024, China mines essentially the most essential minerals and refines essentially the most. (Minerals don’t come out of the bottom able to be fused into laptop chips: Uncooked rocks want processing earlier than they’re pure sufficient for merchandise.)

And but, from the mid-Nineteen Sixties to the Eighties, the USA led the manufacturing of uncommon earths, one subset of essential minerals. So, what occurred? Within the Nineteen Nineties, new laws upped working prices. The U.S. Bureau of Mines, which oversaw scientific analysis on mineral extraction, processing, and security was shut down. After that, the U.S. mining {industry} receded whereas different international locations raced forward.

However in the present day, the DOE Workplace of Crucial Minerals and Vitality Innovation’s mission is targeted on rebuilding a U.S. mining and refining {industry} and a home provide chain for essential minerals to assist the event of each power and protection applied sciences.

If the nation can not construct these applied sciences with out international provide chains, it dangers paying exorbitant costs to import what it wants—or, worse, not constructing them in any respect.

Come Collectively: To Launch a Crucial Comeback

Crucial minerals manufacturing requires quite a lot of new warehouses. The 2026 Companion Discussion board audio system and panelists mentioned a number of hurdles. For one, the {industry} consumes a lot of water and power (one Minnesota mine, a panelist shared, runs on as a lot power as Minneapolis).

Extra power means greater prices (think about paying the power payments for each Minneapolis resident and firm). As one panelist put it: “Vitality value is absolutely the secret.” Newer applied sciences could also be extra power environment friendly, however they’re typically dearer and could be seen as a riskier alternative for established mining corporations with tight revenue margins.

“The primary of something isn’t tried and true,” mentioned Steve Wilson, the chief know-how officer of ReThink Milling, throughout a panel known as “Rising Processing and Precision Mining.” The mining {industry} tends to choose tried and true. The work could be hazardous (even when, as one other panelist mentioned, “We do issues higher in the USA than anyplace else on this planet”). Typically change can value greater than capital.

One other {industry} hurdle is separations: Crucial minerals have to be separated from undesirable sand, mud, quartz, silicon, sulfur, and no matter else comes with them. And completely different minerals—and even completely different mineral sources, like exhausting rock, clay, saltwater brine, or mining waste—usually require completely different processing steps and gear, which could be costly to include into an working refinery.

Even after refiners isolate sufficient of the specified mineral—reaching, say, 90% purity, which is perhaps high-quality for some merchandise—they don’t at all times disclose what makes up the final 10%. Slightly arsenic won’t muck up a pc chip, however even a hint of iron may.

For each causes, corporations are likely to go for mineral sources they know and belief—the tried and true. They’re typically hesitant to put money into new formulation even when it may gain advantage them long run.

And separations aren’t the one problem separating the USA from international competitors. U.S. mineral deposits are scattered throughout the nation. Researchers, miners, refiners, and producers could be simply as scattered (the {industry} has not been set as much as sync up). U.S.-produced minerals should compete with low-cost imports. And even when corporations could possibly be enticed to pay a bit extra for “Made In America,” the USA isn’t making sufficient mineral consultants to maintain up.

“There’s an enormous mind drain occurring within the minerals workspace,” mentioned Peter Luthiger, the senior advisor for water and science within the U.S. Division of Inside, who delivered a Lightning Discuss at this 12 months’s Companion Discussion board. One {industry} panelist mentioned three of his 5 course of engineers received their coaching abroad.

Which means experience is additionally scattered—and scarce.

Come Collectively: To Capitalize on Crimson Mud, Algae, and Mineral Substitutes

However this 12 months’s Companion Discussion board introduced these scattered consultants collectively in a single room. About 264 individuals drove or flew in; they included college professors, CEOs and startup founders, provide chain specialists, researchers, commerce commissioners, and federal strategists.

They usually all got here with concepts.

For instance, the USA doesn’t want to outmine its rivals. The nation may get essential minerals from different sources, like digital waste, seawater, and purple mud (an industrial byproduct).

About “25% of fabric that {industry} companions take out of the bottom leads to a waste pile,” mentioned one panelist. There may be worth in that waste—if we are able to extract it. Luthiger and his colleagues on the Division of the Inside created a map of minable waste sources throughout the USA (“Map, child, map,” Luthiger mentioned, repeating a message the Secretary of the Inside Doug Burgum coined in February 2025). Greater than half of the 60 essential minerals could possibly be pulled from these sources, which must be cleaned up both means. Why not glean and clear?

Companion Discussion board individuals mentioned the right way to do exactly that: For instance, Abhishek Roy and different Nationwide Laboratory of the Rockies researchers are constructing higher membranes—minifilters that may separate essential from not—that might assist industries get better essential minerals whereas slicing power and prices.

Others on the laboratory and elsewhere are looking for supplies that may sub in for hard-to-get essential minerals with out compromising product high quality. One firm, Niron Magnetics, is engaged on iron-nitride-based everlasting magnets—that are mandatory for power applied sciences, army {hardware}, and information facilities—to bypass the necessity for internationally managed neodymium, praseodymium, and dysprosium.

And nonetheless different researchers are engineering algae to separate and extract minerals from seawater and microbes to mine for copper (each kinds of so-called biomining). “Any time you deploy our know-how, you’re getting extra copper on website,” mentioned Liz Dennett, founder and CEO of Endolith, which makes use of biology and machine studying to enhance copper restoration from heap leach operations (mining practices that historically use chemical compounds to dissolve and accumulate minerals from piles of uncooked mined rock).

However maybe the largest hurdle the USA’ essential minerals {industry} faces proper now could be disconnection. If lab work by no means escapes the lab, it’s a bit just like the proverbial tree falling in a forest: Would anybody even discover?

Fortunately, NLR is constructing a bridge from lab to {industry}. Companion Discussion board attendees received a uncommon likelihood to tour the laboratory’s Vitality Supplies and Processing at Scale (EMAPS) facility. The constructing, which is presently beneath building, will probably be a 60,000-square-foot area designed for collaboration. Each researchers and {industry} companions can carry new applied sciences—from early-stage novelties to well-vetted tech that’s prepared for scaling—to the ability’s high-hazard excessive bays, membrane heart, biosafety lab for biomining, and electronics labs and check out them out till they’re tried and true.

“There are going to be wonderful issues popping out of that constructing,” Luthiger mentioned.

One other wonderful factor, digital twins, may additionally assist researchers and {industry} companions combine novel applied sciences into well-loved processes. Digital twins replicate real-world operations, like mines and processing vegetation, in a digital sandbox so customers can swap novelties out and in to search out which of them may reduce their power or water consumption, prices, and uncertainty. “Quicker, cheaper, much less dangerous scale up,” mentioned Josh Schaidle, a laboratory program supervisor at NLR.

This so-called “compute first” method may lend velocity to the U.S. essential minerals {industry} development—a strategy to dash, relatively than jog, earlier than leapfrogging the competitors.

The DOE’s Genesis Mission may additionally assist assist cross-institution groups that use synthetic intelligence to establish optimum methods to mine and refine. One group at NLR has already used robotics and machine studying to hunt for proteins that may bind to essential minerals and pull them out of messy feedstocks. AI and the laboratory’s supercomputer helped them analyze tons of of 1000’s of proteins to focus on 30 various kinds of metals—all in simply an hour.

“That’s what we want: velocity and scale,” keynote speaker Bowman mentioned.

Scale additionally comes from, sure, partnerships. In his opening remarks, Laboratory Director Virden introduced two new partnerships, made official by way of two memorandums of understanding between the Nationwide Laboratory of the Rockies and the Colorado Faculty of Mines and the College of Utah, respectively. The establishments plan to share amenities, college, and extra to assist the nation construct a stronger provide chain and workforce.

Come Collectively: And Don’t Cease Believing

As Virden walked onto the Companion Discussion board stage to welcome this 12 months’s attendees, “Don’t Cease Believing” performed over the café’s sound system.

“We’re at an extremely necessary second in time proper now,” Virden mentioned. Scaling a global mineral mountain is perhaps daunting, however the Companion Discussion board convened the correct individuals for that process—the individuals who may construct new consultants (by way of new diploma applications), new mines, new processes and applied sciences, new bridges, and new funding to bolster these bridges, too.

“By no means earlier than have we been in an period of a lot assist,” Bowman mentioned. “And, fairly frankly, optimism.”

Like Virden, Bowman is a believer. In his speak, the keynote speaker defined how USA Uncommon Earth Inc. turned the Spherical Desk Mountain’s essential minerals repository right into a viable operation—one thing that nobody thought could possibly be accomplished. The corporate plans to mine and course of in Texas, troubleshoot new applied sciences and processes in Colorado, and manufacture magnets (for every thing from medical imaging to aerospace and protection purposes) in Oklahoma.

USA Uncommon Earth is likely one of the first to construct a mine-to-magnet pipeline inside U.S. borders, and, Bowman mentioned, this sort of success is barely doable when science is paired with industrial objective—when individuals from each worlds come collectively to construct a wholly new one.

“That’s energy,” Bowman mentioned.

By Caitlin McDermott-Murphy, NLR