It’s not just drill, baby, drill (for oil) — it’s mine, baby, mine. Along with the shots at wind energy and the previous administration’s climate policy, President Donald Trump’s blizzard of energy and environmental policy announcements and executive orders on Monday included a boost to the domestic mining and refining of critical minerals.
The directives outlined a strategy that would promote both the extraction and, crucially, the processing of critical minerals in America and would look skeptically at importing them — especially from China.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio focused on Chinese mineral dominance as a national security threat in his confirmation hearing earlier this month, telling the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that China has “come to dominate the critical mineral supplies throughout the world … Even those who want to see more electric cars, no matter where you make them, those batteries are almost entirely dependent on the ability of the Chinese and the willingness of the Chinese Communist Party to produce it and export it to you.”
The German Marshall Fund has estimated that China makes up 60% of the supply of critical minerals and 85% of the processing capacity. The United States Geological Survey’s list of 50 critical minerals includes commonly used metals like aluminum, as well as a number of metals and minerals crucial for batteries and green energy technology like cobalt, lithium, graphite, and manganese.
While new reserves of lithium are constantly being discovered, China dominates refining of the metal, with 60% market share for refining battery-grade lithium, according to S&P. And the Trump administration’s interest in critical minerals may not be limited to the (current) boundaries of the United States; it is also one reason why the president is so interested in Greenland, which likely has massive stores of rare earth metals, including uranium.
In the executive order “Unleashing American Energy,” President Trump called for agency heads and relevant Cabinet officials to “identify all agency actions that impose undue burdens on the domestic mining and processing of non-fuel minerals and undertake steps to revise or rescind such actions,” along with specifically directing the secretary of Energy and the secretary of the Interior to make “efforts to accelerate the ongoing, detailed geologic mapping of the United States,” and “ensure that critical mineral projects, including the processing of critical minerals, receive consideration for Federal support,” respectively.
He also directed Cabinet officials not directly involved with energy and resources policy to lend their weight to the American critical mineral effort.The United States trade representative and secretary of Commerce were tasked with looking at overseas critical mineral projects to see if they’re “unlawful or unduly burden or restrict United States commerce” and to examine “the national security implications of the Nation’s mineral reliance and the potential for trade action,” indicating that Trump administration may likely continue a version of the Biden administration’s tariffs and restrictions on imports of Chinese critical minerals.
Critical minerals also showed up in executive orders where President Trump declared a “national energy emergency” and an order specific to resource exploitation in Alaska. In the emergency declaration, minerals were included alongside energy as areas whose “identification, leasing, development, production, transportation, refining, and generation capacity of the United States are all far too inadequate to meet our Nation’s needs.” In the Alaska order, “Unleashing Alaska’s Extraordinary Resource Potential,” minerals were listed alongside “energy, timber, and seafood,” as the “abundant and largely untapped supply of natural resources” that the state possesses, even as the order was largely specific to oil and gas projects like liquefied natural gas and oil drilling.
The Trump administration’s interest in critical minerals is not unique. The Biden Administration also pursued a domestic critical minerals policy, including approving and lending money to lithium mining operations.
