The Trump administration’s push for greater energy production in the United States will go beyond drilling for oil and gas to include the expansion of mining and refining for what have been deemed critical minerals.
While speaking before a joint session of Congress on March 4, President Donald Trump said that he would “take historic action to dramatically expand production of critical minerals and rare earths here in the USA,” pledging a new initiative “later this week,” which is still being anticipated.
This follows several executive orders issued by Trump since the beginning of his administration, which called for more domestic production of critical minerals.
The first two orders, “Unleashing American Energy” and “Declaring a National Energy Emergency,” were issued on Jan. 20. In them, Trump criticized “our nation’s diminished capacity to insulate itself from hostile foreign actors” in the production of essential resources.
A subsequent order in February sought to boost American production of copper. In this order, the president said that “the United States faces significant vulnerabilities in the copper supply chain, with increasing reliance on foreign sources for mined, smelted, and refined copper.”
These orders seek to increase domestic production by expediting the permitting process, providing federal grants and tax incentives, and implementing tariffs on imports.
“This is a really good objective, and it’s long overdue,” Mark Mills, executive director of the National Center for Energy Analytics, told The Epoch Times. “Any increase will reduce our import dependence.”
A 2023 report by the National Mining Association, an industry advocacy group, found that the United States was “100 percent net import reliant” for 12 of the 50 minerals considered in 2022 to be critical, and “an additional 31 critical mineral commodities (including 14 lanthanides, which are listed under rare earths) had a net import reliance greater than 50 percent.”
In anticipation of Trump’s latest executive order, NioCorp, a Colorado-based mining company, announced that it was ready to start construction of its Elk Creek Critical Minerals Project in Nebraska, where it will mine niobium, scandium, titanium, and rare earths essential to U.S. defense.
“America is ready to mine, baby, mine in order to reduce our dangerous dependence on China and the other nations of the BRICS cabal,” Mark Smith, CEO of NioCorp Developments, said in a statement, referring to the intergovernmental association of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, among other countries that joined later.
Among the requests NioCorp made of the Trump administration are low-interest loans for permitted projects, funding from the Defense Department, streamlining the permitting process, and setting “reasonable limits on litigation timelines.”
The mining firm stated that it takes an average of 29 years to get a mine up and running in the United States, and “only Zambia is worse.”
Soil containing various rare earth elements for export at a port in Lianyungang, China, in a file photo. STR/AFP via Getty Images
Dependence on China
According to an analysis by the law firm King & Spalding, minerals are deemed to be critical according to three criteria: if they are essential to economic or national security, if they are vulnerable to supply-chain disruption, or if they are essential components in the manufacture of semiconductors, advanced batteries, or renewable energy.
The list of qualifying minerals includes cobalt, graphite, lithium, nickel, platinum, and rare-earth elements such as neodymium and dysprosium, according to the report. These minerals are used in products including batteries, catalytic converters, hydrogen fuel cells, magnets, jet engines, guidance systems, satellites, submarines, and communications technologies.
According to the 2025 Geological Survey conducted by the Department of the Interior, however, China dominates in the production of 30 out of 44 critical minerals. And, recently, China has cut off shipments of some of these minerals to the United States.
“In December 2024, China implemented export bans on antimony, gallium, and germanium, expanding existing export restrictions that were put in place in December 2023 on certain strategic materials and technologies,” the survey reads. “Export restrictions only applied to the United States.”
China not only dominates the extraction of minerals but also controls much of their refining.
“Refineries are utterly essential for the minerals industry,” Mills said. “Even the current U.S. mining of rare earths—those rare earths have to be shipped elsewhere to be refined, and to a significant extent, to China.”
According to Reuters, the Trump administration is considering constructing mineral refineries on U.S. military bases, particularly for material inputs of fighter jets, submarines, and bullets.
Mineral production entails several stages, as detailed in a 2022 report by Rodrigo Castillo and Caitlin Purdy of the Brookings Institution. First, raw minerals are mined from deposits and separated from extraneous rock and other materials. Then, the extracted minerals are transported, often by ship, to smelters and refiners, mostly located in China.
At this stage, chemical refining and processing transforms the minerals into ultra-pure, fine particles that can then be used to manufacture products such as cathodes, anodes, and collectors, which ultimately become components in batteries for phones, energy storage, and electric vehicles (EVs).
A 2020 report, written by Mills for the Manhattan Institute, states that an average EV battery requires approximately 25 pounds of lithium, 30 pounds of cobalt, 60 pounds of nickel, 110 pounds of graphite, 90 pounds of copper, and 400 pounds of steel, aluminum, and plastic components.
“This means that accessing about 90,000 pounds of ore requires digging and moving between 200,000 and over 1,500,000 pounds of earth—a rough average of more than 500,000 pounds per battery,” the report reads.
Lithium-rich lepidolite near Pala, Calif., on Dec. 27, 2024. John Fredricks/The Epoch Times
Environmental and Tribal Objections
During the Biden administration, subsidies and tax incentives were made available in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act and the 2022 Presidential Determination under the Defense Production Act for minerals used in the production of wind turbines, solar panels, car batteries, and electricity-transmission lines. However, the Biden administration often worked with conservationists and native tribal groups to ban the actual mining of these minerals.
In 2023, then-Interior Secretary Deb Haaland banned drilling and mining projects within a 10-mile radius of the Chaco Culture National Historical Park in New Mexico.
Bureau of Land Management then-Director Tracy Stone-Manning hailed the move as “an important step in ensuring Indigenous voices help inform the management of our public lands,” in an official statement following the ban.
Also in 2023, the Biden administration banned mining on 225,000 acres in Minnesota’s Iron Range, the location of taconite, copper, nickel, cobalt, and platinum elements. In 2024, Haaland barred drilling and mining on 28 million acres of public lands across Alaska, citing the land’s cultural and economic value to Alaskan native tribes.
New mining projects, even under the Trump administration, will likely face resistance from environmental groups and local communities.
According to a 2023 report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), based on data from the Environmental Protection Agency, abandoned hard-rock mines have contaminated 40 percent of America’s rivers and 50 percent of its lakes.
“Many of the companies that abandoned their mines did so long ago and those companies may not even exist anymore,” the GAO stated. “As a result, the federal government, which owns the land, may be on the hook for cleanup costs.”
The GAO cites examples, including the Questa mine in northern New Mexico, which extracted metals used in steel production. The mine contaminated local groundwater with lead, arsenic, and other pollutants, threatening the nearby village of Questa, and will cost an estimated $1 billion to clean up.
Earthworks, an environmental group, stated on its website that “Marginalized and Indigenous communities are disproportionately impacted by mining” and that it “stands in solidarity with communities fighting mining injustice.”
Another impediment to new investment in mineral production in the United States is declining prices for these commodities. Despite predictions that demand for critical minerals would overwhelm supply, given global efforts to transition electricity production to wind and solar, and to transition transportation to electric vehicles, prices for these minerals have fallen in recent years.
In 2024, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) reported a decline of 40 percent to 60 percent in the value of critical minerals used to make lithium-ion batteries produced in the United States.
“Prices for the battery materials, principally cobalt, lithium and nickel, fell due to oversupply by dominant producers including China,” the USGS stated.
Kevin Stocklin
Reporter
Kevin Stocklin is an Epoch Times business reporter who covers the ESG industry, global governance, and the intersection of politics and business.
