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If you want to decarbonize concrete, it helps to understand the incredible scale of the problem.

To say that concrete poses a decarbonization challenge would be an understatement. Cement production alone is responsible for somewhere between 5 and 10% of global CO2 emissions [0], roughly two to four times more than aviation, a fact that even the construction industry is finally coming to grips with.
And yet the real problem with decarbonizing concrete isn’t the scale of its emissions, it’s the scale of concrete itself. There is simply a preposterous amount of the stuff. Contemplating concrete is like contemplating the universe — awesome, in the old God-fearing definition of the word.
Before we get into the jaw-dropping amount of concrete we produce every year, it’s worth briefly discussing how the stuff is made, and thus where its emissions come from.
Concrete is formed by mixing together cement (mostly calcium silicates), aggregates (such as sand and gravel), and water into a liquid slurry. The cement reacts with the water, forming a paste that binds the mixture into a single solid mass. Beyond concrete’s high strength and low cost, it’s these liquid beginnings that make concrete so useful. It can easily be formed into any shape and leveled with the help of gravity so you can walk on it or park a car 10 stories up on it. Essentially all modern concrete is also reinforced with steel bars, which provide tensile strength and arrest cracks.
So what about the emissions? Roughly 70-90% of the embodied carbon in concrete comes from manufacturing just the cement [1]. Partly this is because making cement is an energy-intensive process — limestone and clay are put into a kiln and heated around 2500 degrees Fahrenheit. But it’s also because the chemical reaction that turns the limestone into cement (known as calcination) releases CO₂ as a byproduct. Roughly 50-60% of cement’s carbon emissions are due to calcination [2], and thus wouldn’t be addressed by moving to less carbon-intensive electricity sources, like green hydrogen.
Now for the good stuff. Again, the most important thing to understand about concrete is the scale of its production. The world produces somewhere around 4.25 billion metric tons of cement annually (though estimates vary) [3], which works out to about 30 billion tons of concrete produced each year [4].
How much are 30 billion tons?
One way of looking at it is we produce around 4 metric tons, or just under 60 cubic feet (roughly a cube 4 feet on a side), of concrete for each person on the planet each year.
Another way of looking at it is to consider the total amount of mass, full stop, that civilization ingests each year. Estimates here vary quite a bit, but it seems to be in the neighborhood of 100 billion tons [5]. So of the total volume of material that gets extracted and used each year — including all mining, all oil drilling, all agriculture and tree harvesting — around 30% of it by mass goes toward making concrete. The amount of concrete produced each year exceeds the weight of all the biomass we use annually, and all the fossil fuels we use annually.
Total civilization annual material extraction, via Krausmann et al 2018. This is up to 2015, and has now exceeded over 90 Gt/year, with another ~8 Gt/year of recycled material.
Another way of looking at it is that the total mass of all plants on Earth is around 900 billion metric tons. So at current rates of production, it would take about 30 years to produce enough concrete to exceed all the Earth’s plant (dry) biomass.
Because humans have been producing concrete for a while, and because concrete tends to last a long time, we seem to be on the cusp of this happening. Elhacham et al 2020 estimate that total human-created mass (roughly half of which is concrete) reached the total weight of all Earth’s biomass sometime in 2020. Eyeballing their graph, concrete alone will exceed the total weight of all biomass sometime around 2040.
Anthropogenic mass vs biomass during the 20th century, via Elhacham et al 2020
In a pure mass-flow sense, human civilization is basically a machine for producing concrete and gravel (and to a lesser extent bricks and asphalt).
So civilization uses a lot of concrete. Where is it all going?
China, mostly. In recent history, China has been responsible for roughly half the world’s cement production, and by implication, concrete use [6]. The U.S., by comparison, only uses 2%, with Europe using another 5%.
Cement production by region, via Sanjuan et al 2020. Since cement production roughly tracks consumption (see here and here), we can also use this as a rough guide toward where concrete is used. Note that this gives yet another value for total global cement production of 4.65 Gt
Here’s another view from around 2010, showing what this has looked like over time (data after 2010 is a projection).
Cement consumption by region, via Altwair 2010
This gets summarized in the oft-repeated statistic that China used more cement in three years than the U.S. did in the entire 20th century.
But since China has a much larger population than the U.S., we can get a more intuitive understanding of this by looking at cement consumption per capita. Here’s per capita consumption sometime around 2015:
Per capita cement consumption by country, via Globbulk
We see that the official numbers from China make it a huge outlier in cement consumption, using around eight times as much per capita as the U.S. However, in per capita terms, some Middle Eastern countries exceed it. Saudi Arabia is higher, and Qatar, which is somewhere over 2,000 kg/capita, is so high it doesn’t even show up on the graph. It’s the combination of China’s huge population and its huge per-capita consumption that make it such an outlier in concrete production.
The official Chinese numbers are so huge, in fact, that some analysts suspect that they’re inflated, either by manipulating the data or by producing construction projects that don’t have actual demand (or both). The graph above also includes a more “realistic” estimate (which is still 3x as high as U.S. per-capita use).
What does all this concrete construction mean in practical terms? Well, China has somewhere around 50-60% of the floor space per capita as the U.S. does, or roughly as much living space per capita as most European countries [7]. This is the result of a massive trend toward urbanization over the last quarter century. Urbanization rates went from around 25% in 1990 to 60% in 2017, a period in which China’s population also increased by 250 million. In other words, in less than 30 years over 550 million moved into Chinese cities, and they all needed somewhere to live. By building enormous numbers of concrete high rises, in under 20 years China quintupled its urban residential floor space and doubled its residential floor space overall.
Residential floor space in China over time, via Pan 2020
Beyond China, we see high per capita rates of cement use in the rest of Southeast Asia, as well as the Middle East [8].
One reason you see this volume of concrete use in lower-income, urbanizing countries is that concrete construction is comparatively labor-intensive to produce. The materials for concrete are extremely cheap, and much of its cost in high-cost labor countries (such as the U.S.) is from the labor to produce it — building and setting up the formwork, laying out the reinforcing, placing the embeds, etc. If you’re a country with a lot of low-cost labor, this is a pretty good trade-off.
In addition to the current largest users of concrete, one trend to keep an eye on long-term is India’s concrete use. If India ever proceeds on a path of mass urbanization similar to China (as some folks speculate it will), we could see a massive uptick in global concrete output — India’s urbanization rate of 34% is around where China was in the late 1990s. A shift in India toward a per capita cement consumption more consistent with the rest of Southeast Asia (say around 600 kg/capita) would increase worldwide cement consumption by about 13%, and it does seem as if India’s cement use is trending upward.
By contrast, one thing clear from this data is that the U.S. actually uses an unusually low amount of concrete. Per capita, it uses as little as any other Western country, and far, far less than some — like, surprisingly, Belgium.
So we’ve seen where it gets used in the world. Can we go deeper and look at specifically what concrete is being used for?
This will vary significantly depending on the region and the local construction tradition. In the U.S., we have roughly the following breakdown (via the Portland Cement Association):
Overall, roughly half of our concrete gets used in buildings — about 26% goes into residential buildings, 2% in public buildings, and 16% into commercial buildings. The other half gets used for infrastructure — streets and highways, water conveyance and treatment tanks, etc. Because most construction in the U.S. is just one- or two-story buildings (mostly wood for residential buildings and steel for commercial ones), concrete in buildings is probably mostly going into foundations, slabs on grade, and concrete over metal deck, though there’s probably a substantial amount going into concrete masonry units as well.
But the U.S. has a somewhat unusual construction tradition, where the vast majority of our residential construction, both single-family homes and multifamily apartments, is built from light-framed wood. In other places, it's much more common to use concrete. For instance, the U.K. uses closer to 80% of its concrete for buildings, with most of that going toward the superstructure, the concrete frame that holds the building up. China, which has urbanized on the back of huge numbers of concrete residential high rises, probably devotes an even larger share of its concrete to residential construction.
Understanding how much concrete the world uses, and where it’s being used, is important if you want to use less of it.
The scale of the industry is particularly important to keep in mind. For instance, you often see enthusiasm for the idea of replacing concrete buildings with mass timber ones. But assuming you could substitute all the world’s concrete for an equal volume of wood [9], you’d need to more than triple the total annual volume of global wood harvested [10], which puts a somewhat different spin on the issue.
Most other materials would have emissions as bad or worse than concrete if they were used on the same scale.
Consider, for instance, railway ties. In the U.S., these are still largely made out of wood, but in many places they have been replaced with concrete ties. And some places are considering changing from concrete ties to plastic composite rail ties instead. It’s hard to know the exact embodied emissions without a lot of specific details about the materials and supply chains used, but can we ballpark how much a plastic tie uses compared to a concrete one?
Per the Inventory of Carbon and Energy database, concrete varies between 150 and 400 kg of embodied CO2 per cubic meter, depending on the properties of the mix, with an “average” value of about 250. Plastics mostly have embodied emissions of about 3-4 kg of CO2 per kg of plastic, or about 3,500 kg per cubic meter (assuming a density of about 1,000 kg per cubic meter). So per unit volume, plastic has somewhere around 10 times the embodied emissions of concrete.
We can also do a more direct comparison. Consider a beam spanning around 20 feet and supporting a vertical load of 21,000 pounds per linear foot. The lightest U.S. standard steel section that will span this distance is a W16x26, which weighs about 236 kg and will have embodied carbon emissions of around 354 kg.
A concrete beam of the same depth, supporting the same load and spanning the same distance, will be 10.5 inches wide by 16 inches deep, with three #10 steel bars running along the bottom. This beam will have about 190 kg of embodied emissions from the concrete, and about another 230 kg of embodied emissions from the steel rebar. This is about 20% more than the steel beam, but in the same ballpark — and over half the “concrete” emissions are actually due to the embedded reinforcing steel.
This is arguably a nonrepresentative example (most concrete, such as in columns or slabs, will have a much lower ratio of steel), but the basic logic holds: Concrete is unusual in its total volume of use, not how emissions-heavy it is as a material. Most material substitutes that aren’t wood, recycled materials, or industrial byproducts that can be had for “free” won’t necessarily be much better when used at the same scale. In some ways, it’s surprising that the carbon emissions from concrete are as low as they are.
Of course, this calculus is likely to change over time — as electricity sources change over to lower carbon ones, you’re likely to see the embodied emissions of materials drop along with it. And since cement releases CO2 as part of the chemical process of producing it, concrete will look increasingly worse compared to other materials over time.
One potential option is to find ways of changing the cement production process to be less carbon-intensive. The easiest option is to just replace manufactured Portland Cement with some other cementitious material. Industrial byproducts such as blast furnace slag, silica fume, and fly ash, often have cementitious properties and don’t have a “carbon penalty” (since they’d be produced regardless.) Materials like these can potentially eliminate large volumes of cement in a concrete mix, and they’re a key part of current low-carbon concrete strategies — even “normal” concrete mixes tend to utilize these to some degree. But the total volume of these materials is limited by the extent of various industrial processes. And for things like fly ash (which is a byproduct from coal plants) and slag (which is a byproduct from CO2-emitting blast furnaces), we can expect production to decline over time.
Another option is to take advantage of the fact that concrete will naturally absorb CO2 over time, a process known as carbonation. Even normal concrete will absorb roughly 30% of the CO2 emitted during the production process over the course of its life. Companies like Carbicrete, Carboncure, Carbonbuilt, and Solida all offer methods of concrete production that allow the concrete to absorb CO₂ during the production process, substantially reducing embodied emissions. Interestingly, these producers mostly claim that their concrete is actually cheaper than conventional concretes, which would obviously be a massive tailwind for the technology’s adoption.
It’s not obvious what the best path forward is for addressing concrete carbon emissions (like with most things, I suspect it’ll end up being a mix of different solutions), but understanding the parameters of the problem is necessary for solving it.
Note: A version of this article originally appeared in the author’s newsletter, Construction Physics, and has been repurposed for Heatmap.
[0] - This figure varies depending on the source. Chatham House provides a frequently cited estimate of 8%. We can also ballpark it — roughly 0.93 pounds of CO₂ gets emitted for each pound of cement produced, around 4.25 billion tons of cement are produced annually, which gets ~3.95 billion tons of CO₂, and total annual CO₂ emissions are in the neighborhood of 46 billion tons, getting us a bit less than 9%.
[1] - Per Circular Ecology, ~70-90% of emissions are from the cement production process, depending on the type of concrete and what the rest of the supply chain looks like.
[2] - This seems to vary depending on where the cement is being made — in Myanmar, for instance, it’s around 46%.
[3] - Another number where the sources often don’t agree with each other, see here, here, and here for estimates on annual cement production.
[4] - Concrete is roughly 10-15% cement by weight, depending on the strength of the mix, what other cementitious materials are being used, etc. An average value of 12.5% yields 34 billion tons, which we’ll knock down to account for other uses of cement (masonry mortar, grout, gypsum overlay, etc.) This roughly tracks with estimates from PCA (“4 tons of concrete produced each year for every person on Earth”), and from the now-defunct Cement Sustainability Initiative, which estimated 25 billion tons of concrete against 3.125 billion tons of cement in 2015.
[5] - See here, here, and here for an estimate of total civilization mass flow. This doesn’t (I believe) include waste byproducts, which can be substantial — for instance, it doesn’t include the ~46 billion tons of CO₂ emitted each year, or the 16 billion tons of mine tailings, or the 140 billion tons of agriculture byproducts (though this last number is difficult to verify and seems high).
[6] - We see something similar with cement as we do with other bulky, low-value materials, in that it's made in lots of distributed manufacturing facilities relatively close to where it’s used. See here for a map of cement plants in the U.S. around 2001, for instance.
[7] - For China’s total floor space, see here (most sources seem to agree with these numbers). For U.S. floor space, see my Every Building In America article. For per-capita living space in Europe, see here.
[8] - The often high rates of cement use by middle-income countries have led some folks to develop a U-shaped cement consumption theory of industrial development — that countries start out using a small amount of cement, use more as they get richer and build up their physical infrastructure, and then eventually transition to using lower volumes of cement again. The Globbulk paper spends considerable time debunking this.
[9] - It’s not actually obvious to me what the substitution ratio would be. In strength-governed cases, you’d need proportionally more timber than concrete, but in other cases (such as replacing concrete walls with light-framed stud walls), you’d probably use less. Obviously, you can’t substitute all concrete for wood, but you can probably switch out more than you think — there’s no reason you couldn’t use wood foundations instead of concrete ones in many cases, for instance.
[10] - 30 billion tons of concrete is roughly 12.5 billion cubic meters, and total annual wood products produced is currently around 5.5 billion cubic meters.
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On the cobalt conundrum, Madagascar’s mining mess, and Antarctica’s ‘Greenlandification’
Current conditions: Severe storms are sweeping through the central Great Plains states this weekend, whipping up winds of up to 75 miles per hour • Freezing temperatures are settling over Kazakhstan and Mongolia • A record heat wave in Australia is raising temperatures as high as 113 degrees Fahrenheit.
Nearly two dozen states signed onto two lawsuits Thursday to stop the Trump administration from ending the $7 billion grant program that funded solar panels in low-income communities. The first complaint, filed Wednesday, seeks monetary damages over the Environmental Protection Agency’s bid to eliminate the so-called Solar for All program. A second lawsuit, filed Thursday, seeks to reinstate the program. Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes told Reuters the cancellation affected 900,000 low-income households nationwide, including some 11,000 in Arizona that the state expected to see a 20% spike in bills after losing access to the $156 million in funding from Solar for All. California would lose $250 million in funding. The litigation comes days after Harris County, which encompasses most of Houston, Texas, filed suit against the EPA over its own loss of $250 million due to the program’s termination. Earlier this month, a coalition of solar energy companies, labor unions, nonprofit groups, and homeowners also sued the EPA over the cancellation.
It remains to be seen whether other countries are willing to balk at the Trump administration’s push to gut key carbon-cutting policies. But at least in theory, later today, the drafting group for the International Maritime Organization, the United Nations agency overseeing global shipping, will vote on an emissions pricing mechanism meant to slash greenhouse gas output from an industry that still relies on some of the most heavily polluting fuels. The scheduled vote comes a day after President Donald Trump pressed the international body to reject the proposal, calling it “the Global Green New Scam Tax on Shipping” and vowing to ignore the rules.
The maritime shipping industry accounts for about 3% of global emissions. But the impact of shipping fuels is substantial. As Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer wrote in December, a study found that, when the IMO began enforcing rules to remove a toxic pollutant, sulfur dioxide from shipping fuels, the planet’s temperatures spiked. That’s because, in addition to inflaming the heart and lungs, triggering asthma attacks, and causing acid rain, sulfur dioxide can also reflect heat back into space, artificially cooling the Earth. When that fuel went away, the warming effects of all the carbon in the atmosphere became more apparent.
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The Department of Defense canceled a tender to buy cobalt, in what the trade publication Mining.com called “a fresh sign of the challenges facing Western countries trying to bolster domestic supplies of the battery metal.” In mid-August, the Defense Logistics Agency first sought offers for up to 7,500 tons of the bluish metal used in batteries and alloys for jet engines over the next five years, in a contract worth as much as $500 million. It was, according to Bloomberg, the U.S. government’s first attempt to acquire the metal since 1990. When no deals came in by the original due date of August 29, the offer was extended to October 15. But a notice published on a government website Wednesday indicated that the offer had been pulled. The move marks an apparent setback for the Pentagon’s effort to stockpile critical minerals, as I reported in this newsletter earlier this week.
While the funding doesn’t produce raw cobalt from mining, as I reported for Heatmap last month, the DLA has backed an Ohio-based startup called Xerion that’s commercializing a novel approach to processing both that metal and gallium, another mineral over which China has tightened export controls recently. It’s not alone. As Heatmap’s Katie Brigham wrote last month, “everybody wants to invest in critical mineral startups.”
The British rare earths processor Pensana has canceled plans for a refinery in East Yorkshire, England, in favor of investing in an American project instead. The company spent the past seven years developing a $268 million rare earths mine in Angola. One of the largest of its kind in the world, the project is scheduled to begin delivering raw materials in 2027. To turn that ore into industrial-grade materials, Pensana had planned to build a processing facility at the Saltend Chemicals Plant near Hull, England, that would have turned the metals into powerful magnets. The project won about $6.7 million in support from the British government. But Pensana’s founder and chairman, Paul Atherley, told the BBC that was “nowhere near enough.” He compared the deal to the Trump administration’s direct investment of billions of dollars into MP Materials, the country’s only rare earths mine. Pensana instead announced plans to work with the U.S. refiner ReElement to develop a domestic American supply chain, and plans to list its shares on the Nasdaq. As I wrote in Tuesday morning’s newsletter, the world’s top metals trader warned this week that the West’s mineral weakness is a lack of refining capacity, not mining. “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.”
But even the increased supply of ore from overseas projects could be in jeopardy. I have a scoop this morning in Heatmap that highlights the geopolitical challenges U.S. mining projects face overseas. On Sunday, following weeks of youth-led protests over electricity and water outages, Madagascar’s military overthrew its government in a coup. Now the new self-declared leaders have pulled support for Denver-based mining developer Energy Fuels’ plans for a giant mine that would produce rare earths, uranium, and other metals. The so-called Toliara mine, worth an estimated $2 billion, had won approval from the previous government last winter. But a consultant on the ground in Madagascar’s capital of Antananarivo told me the new leaders had “announced the definitive cancellation” of what was previously described as the future “crown jewel” of an economy where 75% of people live on less than $3 per day and less than 40% of the population has access to electricity.
As recently as the 1990s, the Greenland Ice Sheet and the Arctic were melting at a measurable pace thanks to global warming, but Antarctica’s ice cap seemed securely frozen. But, as Inside Climate News reported Thursday, “not anymore.” New satellite data and field observations show the only unpopulated continent is thawing at an alarming rate, leading to what some scientists are now calling the “Greenlandification” of Antarctica, turning it into an environment that’s melting at a rate closer to the Arctic.
There’s little question as to what is causing the meltdown. More than 100 countries now experience at least 10 more “hot days” per year than a decade ago, when the Paris climate accord was first drafted, according to new data analysis from the research groups Climate Central and World Weather Attribution published Thursday in the Financial Times. In 10 countries, the warming over the past decade added roughly a month of additional “hot days.”
The good climate news, reported by Bloomberg: the Bay Area startup Rondo Energy has turned on the world’s largest industrial heat battery, a giant cubic structure that heats clay bricks with electricity from a 20-megawatt solar array to generate steam.
The bad climate news? That steam is used to force more oil out of the ground as part of Holmes Western Oil Corp.’s enhanced oil recovery system.
The mitigating factors to consider: The battery replaced a natural gas-fired boiler at the Kern County, California, facility. And proponents of enhanced oil recovery say the approach meets lasting demand for petroleum by extracting more fuel from existing wells rather than encouraging new drilling.
Denver-based Energy Fuels was poised to move forward on the $2 billion project before the country's leadership upheaval.
As the Trump administration looks abroad for critical minerals deals, the drama threatening a major American mining megaproject in Madagascar may offer a surprising cautionary tale of how growing global instability can thwart Washington’s plans to rewire metal supply chains away from China.
Just days after the African nation’s military toppled the government in a coup following weeks of protests, the country’s new self-declared leaders have canceled Denver-based Energy Fuels’ mine, Heatmap has learned.
The so-called Toliara mine was supposed to be the “crown jewel” of one of the world’s least developed economies, a megaproject designed to patch Madagascar into a new global supply chain meant to reroute trade in metals needed for everything from state-of-the-art weapons to electric vehicle batteries away from China.
Last December, Energy Fuels, the Denver-based rare earths and uranium miner, won approval from the Malagasy government to move forward on its Toliara Project, a critical minerals mine with a value analysts estimated at $2 billion. But on Thursday morning, the new president of Madagascar’s National Assembly “announced the definitive cancellation” of the project, Luke Freeman, a geopolitical consultant with 25 years of experience in Madagascar, told me by email.
Kim Casey, Energy Fuels’ head of investor relations, dismissed the legitimacy of the coup leaders’ decision in an emailed statement. The company is “watching the events in Madagascar closely, and like the rest of the world we are waiting to see how things unfold,” the statement said.
“At this time, governing bodies and areas of responsibility in Madagascar remain unclear,” she went on. “Any statements made by any individual politicians or others amid this crisis have no legal effect, nor should they be taken to represent official Madagascar government policy or the opinions of the majority of local communities.”
Still, Casey left open the possibility that the mine could be postponed. If the coup “results in any delays in our development plans for the Toliara Project,” she said, “Energy Fuels has multiple projects around the world which are advancing at the same time.” Investors seemed less confident. The company’s stock, which had soared by nearly 500% over the past six months, plunged 8% on Wednesday, and another 13% on Thursday afternoon.
Even if the project goes under, it’s unlikely to impact U.S. mineral supplies, Neha Mukherjee, a rare earths analyst the London-based battery-metals consultancy Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, told me. The mine did not have any public offtakers yet, but Energy Fuels announced plans last year to send uranium ore from the project to the White Mesa Mill in Utah for processing.
“Toliara remains at a very early stage and is still working towards a final investment decision, so immediate on-ground impacts are likely to be limited,” she told me in an email. But she warned that “investors and potential offtakers” may “take a more cautious approach until there’s greater clarity on the political environment.”
It is no accident that, despite its unique culture that blends influences from Africa and Asia, Madagascar is a place known to many Americans primarily as the setting of a series of fictional movies about cartoon animals that aren’t even native to the island nation off southeast Africa. More than 75% of the island's 32 million people live on less than $3 per day, and poverty levels have barely declined over the past decade. Less than 40% of its people have access to electricity.
On Sunday, sweeping month-long youth protests over power and water outages, dubbed a “Generation Z revolution,” evolved into a more traditional type of insurrection when an elite arm of Madagascar’s military overthrew the government in what the African Union denounced as a coup.
The upheaval highlights the challenges ahead for U.S. companies as Washington attempts to reduce its dependency on China, which controls most of the world’s mining and processing of key metals such as rare earths and lithium.
The Biden administration sought to get around the issue by making minerals extracted from countries with which the U.S. had free trade agreements eligible for the Inflation Reduction Act’s most generous electric vehicle tax credits. That strategy put a particular focus on allies with vast mining industries, including Australia, Chile, and Canada.
While President Donald Trump has phased out the tax credits, his administration has tried to broker deals across the world with developing countries whose resources China has largely monopolized in recent years. In May, Trump signed a deal with Ukraine to secure revenues from its as-yet largely untapped minerals once the war with Russia ends — a precondition for his administration’s continued assistance in the effort to repel the Kremlin’s invasion. A month later, Trump negotiated a peace deal between the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda, pausing a bloody conflict and setting the stage for the U.S. to secure new contracts for raw materials in the war-torn but resource-rich part of central Africa.
The administration’s ongoing pressure on Denmark to cede its autonomous territory of Greenland to the U.S. is widely considered a play for the Arctic island’s minerals. Earlier this month, Reuters reported that the administration is considering buying a stake in Critical Metals, a company prospecting for rare earths in Greenland.
Washington’s appetite for critical minerals could even redraw world maps in the next few years.
Under the terms of a peace agreement that ended a decade-long civil war in the 1980s, Bougainville, a breakaway island off Papua New Guinea, is slated to hold a referendum in 2027 over whether to become an independent nation. Polls suggest the overwhelming majority of voters will support secession. In the U.S., a former investment banker turned novelist named John D. Kuhns has taken up the cause of Bougainville’s independence, advocating that Washington support the would-be republic whose biggest economic asset is a shuttered Rio Tinto copper mine that the autonomous government wants to reopen — potentially with U.S. help.
Trump is also weighing recognizing the breakaway region of Somalia’s independence as Somaliland, which has functioned as a sovereign nation with an internationally praised democracy for more than three decades, in a bid to secure deals to mine its mineral riches. Senator Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican, called on Trump to grant Somaliland recognition as recently as August.
But the most promising potential region for critical minerals may be the one sandwiched between America’s two greatest rivals. In September 2013, then-President Joe Biden huddled with the leaders of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York. From that summit came the C5+1, a partnership between the U.S. and the five Central Asian nations to work on critical minerals. Weeks after Trump returned to office, Secretary of State Marco Rubio affirmed the Trump administration’s support for the partnership in a call with his Uzbek counterpart.
After Australia and Canada, the Central Asian republics represent the “lowest-hanging fruit” for developing a U.S. critical mineral supply chain, said Pini Althaus, a veteran mining executive making deals in the region. The countries are relatively stable, have recently enacted business reforms meant to invite U.S. companies to work there, and — as a means of safeguarding their independence from Moscow and Beijing — are eager to make deals with the U.S., he said.
“We are at least a couple of decades away from having a domestic supply chain in the United States that can meet all of our critical mineral needs,” Althaus told me. “Practically speaking, we don’t have enough of these materials in the U.S., so we must partner with allied countries. Central Asia offers a lot of these opportunities.”
These days, however, political instability isn’t unique to developing countries. The Trump administration is supposed to host a meeting of the C5+1 in Washington as early as next month, Althaus said — that is, if the ongoing government shutdown is resolved.
In a press conference about the newly recast program’s first loan guarantee, Energy Secretary Chris Wright teased his project finance philosophy.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright on Thursday announced a $1.6 billion loan guarantee for American Electric Power to replace 5,000 miles of transmission lines with more advanced wires that can carry more electricity. He also hinted at his vision for how the Trump administration could recast the role of the department's Loan Programs Office in the years to come.
The LPO actually announced that it had finalized an agreement, conditionally made in January under the Biden administration, to back AEP’s plan. The loan guarantee will enable AEP to secure lower-cost financing for the project, for an eventual estimated saving to energy consumers of $275 million over the lifetime of the loan.
“These are the kind of projects where we’re going to partner with businesses to make our energy system more efficient, more reliable, ultimately lower cost,” Wright said on a call with reporters.
And yet in the past few months, the department has also canceled loan guarantees and grants for other transmission projects that were expected to provide those same benefits — including the Grain Belt Express, an 800-mile line set to bring low-cost wind power from Kansas to the Chicago metropolitan area in Illinois.
“We don’t care about authorship,” Wright told reporters, acknowledging that the AEP loan was conditionally approved by the Biden administration. “Not all of them were nonsense. The ones that are in the interest of the American taxpayers, in the interest of the American ratepayers, and there’s a helpful role for government capital — we’re happy to support those.”
When asked specifically why AEP’s proposal met his criteria while the Grain Belt Express didn’t, Wright first made an argument about cost. “I have nothing against the Grain Belt Express,” he said. “I suspect it’ll still be developed. But it’s far more expensive on a per mile basis since it’s a brand new transmission line.”
His subsequent comments, however, hinted at a more significant shift in approach. He went on to argue that the project came with an unacceptable amount of risk since the developers didn’t have buyers yet for the power coming down the line. It was trying to “close on arbitrage,” he said, by buying up cheap wind power that was stranded in Kansas and bringing it to a larger market. “It’s a more commercial enterprise,” he said. “That’s done with private entrepreneurs and private capital.”
It’s important to note that the Grain Belt Express loan guarantee would have been issued under an innovation-focused program within the Loan Programs Office that was specifically geared toward higher risk projects that banks won’t otherwise touch. The AEP project is part of a different program focused on more mature technologies, with a goal of reducing the cost of major utility infrastructure upgrades to ratepayers.
When I floated Wright’s comments by Jigar Shah, the former head of the Loan Programs Office under the Biden administration, he was flummoxed. “It’s nonsensical,” he said. To Shah, taking Wright’s risk aversion to its logical conclusion would mean, for instance, that the office should not fund any nuclear energy projects. “If this becomes a new standard, that means nuclear is dead in the United States,” he said.
AEP is the first developer to secure a loan guarantee under the Energy Dominance Financing Program, Congress’ new name a Biden-era program within LPO that offered loan guarantees to utilities to “retool, repower, repurpose, or replace energy infrastructure.” Initially called the Energy Infrastructure Reinvestment Financing Program and created by the Inflation Reduction Act, it focused on projects with climate benefits, like making efficiency upgrades to power plants or installing renewables on the site of a former coal plant.
In the Biden administration’s view, AEP’s project would “contribute to emissions reductions by supporting existing and new clean generation by expanding transmission capacity in the regions in which they operate.”
Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act rebranded the program and removed any requirements that projects reduce emissions. On Thursday’s call, Wright seemed to imply that it wasn’t just the Biden-era loan program that had been renamed. “The Loan Program Office is being rechristened the Energy Dominant Financing — it is the rechristening of the same department,” he said in response to a question about the office’s remaining loan authority. The Department of Energy did not respond to my request for clarification.
None of that means that the potential emissions benefits from AEP’s project won’t materialize. Limited transmission capacity is one of the biggest obstacles for bringing new wind and solar power online, and reconductoring could also reduce line losses, making the overall grid more efficient.
The transmission project — which includes plans to rebuild some power lines and reconductor others — will ultimately increase capacity by more than 100%, a spokesperson for AEP told me. The first phase will involve upgrades to about 100 miles of wires across Ohio and Oklahoma, while future phases will tackle lines in Indiana, Michigan, and West Virginia, with the intent of meeting growing demand from data centers and manufacturing development, according to a press release.
When reporters asked Wright about the other conditional loan guarantees the Biden administration had issued under the Energy Infrastructure Reinvestment program that are still pending, the secretary stressed that he was looking for applicants that had identified a clear set of projects they would implement. “Many were done in a hurry, without really even having the projects that the loans would be associated with identified. You can end up with a grab bag of projects without a lot of say for where the money went,” he said.
Wright accused the Biden administration of failing to ask applicants to detail the impact the projects would have on taxpayers and ratepayers — a key question his colleagues are now asking.
Shah disagreed with that portrayal. The whole point of the program was to reduce interest rates for utilities and require them to pass on the benefit to ratepayers. All of the projects awarded conditional commitments met that bar, he said.
He warned that if the Trump administration didn’t honor the remaining conditional commitments to utilities under the program — all 10 of them — it risked losing the trust of any new companies it attempts to make similar deals with.
“Most of the nuclear projects that they’re looking to chase are not going to get closed until 2028. And so what signal are they sending? That projects that get approved in the last year of an administration are not going to be honored in the next administration?”