Onshoring the Mineral Supply Chain: Structural Constraints, Policy Tools, and Research Gaps

Critical minerals, such as lithium, nickel, graphite, and rare earth elements, are vital components of defense, energy, and transportation technologies. As demand for these technologies and their minerals grows, the geographic reality of where they are extracted, processed, and manufactured has drawn increasing attention. Though the United States has some mineral reserves and strategic industrial policies for certain base metals, its participation in the mineral supply chain has declined over the past century, and market concentration in foreign supply has increased concerns about exposure to supply disruptions.In response, recent administrations have established priorities around critical minerals and taken steps to mitigate supply risk, with the current administration taking a much more active role in advancing its critical minerals policy goals, including unprecedented investments in individual critical mineral mining and refining projects.We present new data that highlight the market and economic challenges to onshoring the critical mineral supply chain, noting the large technical, geographic, and economic differences across minerals. We then discuss workforce, infrastructure, and social license challenges to increasing domestic production, along with the various federal efforts to ensure secure access to mineral supply. Finally, we present a framework for how investments can be prioritized to maximize the efficacy of federal expenditures and reduce supply risk and how policies can be evaluated in their support of these efforts. We conclude by identifying research gaps and proposing directions for future work to support evidence based industrial policy and improve the resilience, competitiveness, and social legitimacy of the federal critical minerals strategy.