The Pentagon Is Stockpiling Critical Minerals

Current conditions: The Northeastern U.S. is facing winds of up to 80 miles per hour • The remnants of Typhoon Halong are lashing the Alaskan villages of Kipnuk and Kwigillingok with powerful winds and storm surge • A heat wave in South Korea is bringing higher average temperatures this week than in July.

THE TOP FIVE

1. The Pentagon is stockpiling $1 billion in critical minerals

The United States military is stockpiling up to $1 billion of critical minerals as part of a global effort to counter China’s dominance over the metals necessary for sensitive industries including advanced manufacturing and defense. A Financial Times analysis of public filings from the Pentagon’s Defense Logistics Agency showed that the Trump administration has accelerated procurements in recent months as Beijing has cracked down on exports of rare earths and other metals, over which Chinese companies enjoy a tight grip over global supplies. The Department of Defense is “incredibly focused on the stockpile,” a former agency official told the newspaper. “They’re definitely looking for more, and they’re doing it in a deliberate and expansive way, and looking for new sources of different ores needed for defence products.” Among the companies that received funding from the so-called DLA, as I reported last month, is the Ohio-based startup Xerion, whose pioneering method for processing cobalt is now being applied to gallium.

The Trump administration has been on a partial-nationalization spree in recent months to secure mineral supplies. In July, the U.S. military became the largest shareholder in MP Materials, the lone company producing rare earths in the U.S. Last month, the Department of Energy overhauled a loan to Lithium Americas’ Thacker Pass project to take a stake in what will become one of the world’s biggest lithium mines. Earlier this month, President Donald Trump took a share of the Alaskan mining startup Trilogy Metals, as I reported in this newsletter. Reuters reported that the administration is also considering buying shares in Critical Metals, the company looking to develop rare earths in Greenland.

2. Clean hydrogen won’t be mainstream by 2040, McKinsey estimates

Mega-constulancy McKinsey & Company published a new report on the energy transition Monday, modeling different scenarios for the energy mix of the near-future. None of those scenarios includes clean hydrogen in a significant role. The fuel “is not yet cost competitive at scale, so it is expected to play a limited role in the energy mix,” the report says. Unless governments mandate its use, the analysis found, fuels such as clean hydrogen “are not likely to achieve broad adoption before 2040.” By contrast, fossil fuels are projected to retain between 41% and 55% of the global energy mix by 2050

The report shows hydrogen with a growing but still tiny share of energy usage in 2050.McKinsey

In a sign of where hydrogen may be in its development, another report published Tuesday morning by the California Hydrogen Business Council listed “raising awareness” and “understanding hydrogen” as the first two steps in laying the groundwork for the safe usage of the fuel. The trade group’s 66-page analysis concluded that, while hydrogen “is a hazardous material,” it “can also be used safely” and that “safety should not be viewed as a barrier, but as a catalyst for innovation and acceptance.”

3. Europe’s flagship green steel project is struggling to raise money

Stegra, the Swedish low-carbon steel startup that aims to use clean hydrogen in its production process, is “scrambling to survive as it struggles to resolve a growing funding gap,” the Financial Times reported Monday. One of Europe’s highest-profile green industrial projects, the company was founded by the same Swedish financiers as the bankrupt battery maker Northvolt. Stegra now needs to raise more than $1.7 billion to build its plant as costs tripled in the past three months, unnamed sources familiar with the financing told the newspaper. Northvolt went under in March despite raising $15 billion in debt, equity, and government funds, signaling how quickly costs can cripple a company’s capacity to continue operating.

While the U.S. steel industry is already cleaner than many countries’ due to its dependence on scrap material rather than iron produced with coal, the Trump administration has slashed funding for green steel, including Cleveland-Cliffs nation-leading effort to produce green steel with clean hydrogen. Yet the “golden share” President Donald Trump claimed for the U.S. Government in U.S. Steel as part of his approval for Japanese rival Nippon Steel’s takeover deal this summer could give a future administration the legal grounds to require the American steelmaker to go green, as Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin reported.

4. The world’s top metal-trading boss: The West needs refining, not mining

Commodities trading giant Trafigura, the world’s largest metals dealer, issued a stark warning to Western countries looking to dig new ores out of the Earth to compete with China. “Mining is not critical,” Trafigura CEO Richard Holtum said in London on Monday, according to Mining Journal. “ True supply chain security comes from processing investment, not just extraction.” China refines roughly 65% of the world’s copper, 70% of its lithium, and 90% of its rare earths. “Western nations are fighting the wrong battle,” Giacomo Prandelli, a commodities trader and analyst, wrote in a post on LinkedIn in response to Holtum’s speech. “They obsess over mining permits while China and Indonesia dominate the midstream, turning raw ore into refined metals that power the global energy transition.”

Investments in refining minerals, however, are costly. While the Pentagon’s purchases of metals guarantees at least one buyer, the Trump administration’s elimination of tax credits for electric vehicles eliminated a key source of demand that would have promised more offtakers for refined metals, representing what Matthew called “the paradox Trump’s critical minerals crusade” back in January.

5. Sodium-ion battery startup Alsym rolls out its lithium rival

After raising $78 million in a Series C round last April, sodium-ion battery startup Alsym Energy has rolled out its first battery designed for stationary storage that the company says will be cheaper than lithium-ion systems from day one, Heatmap’s Katie Brigham reported this morning. “I believe we are farthest ahead than anyone else in that space today in the United States,” Alsym’s co-founder and CEO Mukesh Chatter told her. Since the U.S. has vast sodium reserves, Chatter said the company’s America-made batteries will be cheaper than anywhere else. But either way, the company’s cells “will be cost-competitive with the leading lithium-ion chemistry right off the bat,” Katie wrote, with the overall system 30% cheaper because the battery’s thermal stability and ability to perform at high temperatures makes costly cooling systems moot. While sodium-ion cells are less energy dense than lithium-ion, getting rid of the entire HVAC system makes the batteries can operate in “space-constrained environments such as commercial or residential buildings.”

THE KICKER

In California, zero-emission vehicles represented 29.1% of new car sales in the third quarter of 2025, the highest quarterly sales ever recorded in the state, Governor Gavin Newsom’s press office announced Monday. “This comes despite the efforts by the Trump administration to derail the ZEV industry and raise the cost of a clean car.” The spike could also be a result of it. Across the country, Americans scrambled to buy electric vehicles at a record clip to secure federal tax credits before the September 30 expiration date set under Trump’s landmark tax law.