Energy Independence Hinges on Critical Minerals Access

Critical minerals are essential to the nation’s clean energy transition, but their availability in the U.S. is threatened by domestic scarcity and a supply chain that is concentrated largely in China and a small number of other foreign countries.

Critical minerals have become a linchpin for modern industries and technologies, underscoring their importance in economic growth, innovation, and energy independence. They are vital for clean energy technologies like wind turbines, solar panels, and especially electric vehicle (EV) batteries, which rely heavily on critical minerals like cobalt, nickel, and manganese. Beyond energy, critical minerals are integral to defense, aerospace, electronics, telecommunications, and other major sectors.

As demand surges, concerns about supply chain vulnerabilities are mounting. Most critical minerals are concentrated in just a few countries, creating a precarious dependence that could lead to heightened geopolitical tension and potential resource shortages.

This scarcity presents a significant obstacle in the push for clean energy transition and energy independence—goals that are increasingly tied to U.S. national security. Known deposits are predominantly located outside the United States, with China firmly in the driver’s seat of the global supply chain, controlling key stages from sourcing to refining. This leaves the U.S. under increasing pressure to strengthen its ability to identify, resource, and refine the minerals meaningfully, and utilize them in the manufacturing of in-demand products.

Understanding the locations and quality of critical mineral deposits worldwide is essential for the United States to regain its footing in this competitive arena. To this end, efforts are underway to map untapped mineral deposits both domestically and internationally. Such mapping will serve as a crucial foundation for addressing a range of challenges in the race to counter China’s dominance in the supply chain, including prioritization (identifying and targeting economically viable deposits); targeted technology and infrastructure investments (finding new efficiencies in extraction and refining; expanding viability); and political maneuvering (negotiating deals and alliances with mineral-rich nations).

However, mapping hinges upon the collection and synthesis of extremely disparate geospatial data—a challenging, largely manual, and time-consuming process. As time is of the essence, AI-based data fusion techniques can and should be applied to speed progress.

Geospatial data related to critical minerals is often collected in disparate formats and stored in on-and-offline repositories of varying ownership. Sources also vary greatly in sample location, year of collection, type of data, degree of information collected, and spatial resolution. Manually synthesizing this disparate data is a difficult and time-consuming task. However, using AI-powered data fusion techniques, it’s possible to accomplish this synthesis within a much shorter timeframe, creating single data products from disparate sources, and allowing them to be sorted, analyzed, and visualized rapidly as needed.

With publicly available data from the United States Geological Survey (USGS), Booz Allen has successfully employed machine learning and other data fusion techniques to predict cobalt concentrations across the mainland U.S. This analysis leveraged point mineral samples, lithologic information, aeroradiometric data, and anomalies in Earth’s magnetic and gravitational fields.

With this effort, we demonstrated data fusion’s potential to quickly produce data products that yield powerful insights into mineral concentrations across a given geographic area. The wider use of such techniques can accelerate progress in understanding where and in what concentrations critical minerals are located around the world.

Further applying AI into the process is possible and can be done to:

• Generate new data products for critical mineral assessment models
• Support critical mineral assessment modeling directly (e.g., building more computationally efficient models and accelerating pattern detection for USGS scientists and researchers)
• Support physical science research by identifying new factors relevant to critical mineral concentration modeling and integrating these factors into subsequent models

As this baseline knowledge improves, it is essential that relevant entities—federal agencies, industry, and research organizations—are ready to leverage it to inform and prioritize efforts to strengthen domestic critical mineral posture.

Equipped with the data, tools, and processes to better understand the likely locations, quantitative concentrations, and other features of domestic and international critical mineral deposits, officials in government and industry will be better positioned to assess the current state and strategically prioritize the investments necessary to ensure optimal U.S. access.

Areas of strategic research and investment will include targeted exploration and mining, technology and infrastructure investment, and international alliances.

An improved ability to predictively map critical mineral concentrations is merely the foundation for the more complex subsequent process of deciding which deposits warrant serious exploration for mining investment. Considerations for this prioritization must include:

• How best to estimate the economic and environmental cost and potential secondary impacts of recovering a given deposit based on the current state of technology and infrastructure, and ecological conditions?
• How will those costs change as technology becomes cleaner and more efficient and infrastructure becomes more robust?
• What is the role of emerging technologies including AI and quantum sensing in assessments, and how should the research around these be prioritized?
• What environmental, political, geological, and other conditions must a given deposit meet in order to be economically recoverable under current market conditions?
• As the market evolves, how will fluctuations in mineral value expand or contract the conditions in which a given deposit is economically viable for mining?
• To what extent are advances in technology likely to impact and mitigate those expansions and contractions in viability?

To answer such complex questions, agencies and industries must be equipped with the right expertise and data, and command of the right analysis tools. For example, using data from critical mineral predictive mapping efforts such as USGS’s EarthMRI, researchers could build models to assess whether a given mineral deposit is economically and sustainably recoverable or will be in the future. Assessed environmental impacts may include anything from greenhouse gas emissions to impacts on regional wildlife, water supplies, and overall ecosystems. In addition, this would include the impact of mining on regional communities and economies including any trade-off analyses. 

As assessment technology improves to become more efficient, more of the nation’s domestic critical mineral deposits may become viably recoverable. Concurrently, as domestic capacity to refine critical minerals and use them in manufacturing improves, the resulting improved supply chain efficiencies could positively impact mining viability. Identifying and prioritizing the technology and infrastructure improvement efforts with the most potential for positive impact will require a solid understanding of:

• The location and relative quality of domestic deposits
• The technology landscape: established technologies, new technologies, promising experimental and developing technologies, and opportunities for needle-moving innovation
• The current state of refinement and manufacturing infrastructure and the most promising avenues for improving it
• The political and market forces influencing viability, how they are likely to change, and the likely impacts of those changes

Navigating these complexities to identify, encourage, and make the most impactful technology and infrastructure investments will require bridges between government and industry, teaming with the right experts, and developing the right analysis tools powered by data fusion and AI.

The same research and data fusion techniques that empower predictively mapping domestic concentrations of critical minerals can be applied globally, providing essential baseline data for international agreements that secure U.S. and allied access to untapped mineral deposits as they become available for exploration and potential mining.

To effectively prioritize efforts in establishing these alliances, it is crucial to possess a comprehensive understanding of the current relationships and sensitivities between the U.S. and nations that are likely to have viable critical mineral supplies, as well as the relationships between any such nations and U.S. rivals. Furthermore, knowledge of on-the-ground conditions within any such nation—such as political circumstances, environmental concerns, and infrastructure—will be essential, as these factors can significantly influence mining viability. Lastly, knowledge of global critical mineral supply chain infrastructure and its geographic variations will be vital for evaluating mining potential. Succeeding in the face of such complexities will require advanced expertise supplemented with powerful analytic tools.

Mitigating China’s growing dominance of the critical mineral supply chain and ensuring resilient U.S. access to these increasingly essential raw materials will require an enormous marshaling of resources and investment. This effort must be strategically guided by expertise, alliances, and advanced analytical tools. Leveraging AI-powered data fusion to enhance today’s deposit-mapping efforts will not only provide researchers and decision makers with a strong foundation for their ongoing work, but it will also set the stage for long-term optimal access and energy independence for the United States.