ENABLING MINERAL RECOVERY FROM UNCONVENTIONAL SOURCES: FEDERAL R&D TO TRANSFORM AMERICA’S CRITICAL MINERAL DEPENDENCE INTO DOMESTIC ABUNDANCE

The US Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Lab (NETL), with sites in Pittsburgh, PA, Morgantown, WV, and Albany, OR, inherited the R&D Mission of the US Bureau of Mines following the agency’s closure in 1996. NETL has led the way toward domestic production of rare earth elements (REE) for nearly a decade by investing in early-stage R&D to unlock unconventional mineral resources. NETL focuses federal R&D on efforts to assure that the mines of the future will not carry a heavy environmental and societal burden like the mines of the past. NETL invests in technological solutions that valorize waste material from diverse feedstocks, like oil and gas produced water, basinal brines, combustion residues, and acid mine drainage. These feedstocks represent opportunities to capture critical commodity values while ensuring environmental co-benefits. Co-benefits could help decouple the CM supply from the commodity price because inherent domestic subsidies associated with environmental and societal benefits are a counterweight to foreign subsidies and will help the US critical mineral supply remain resilient against market manipulation. NETL’s approach also leverages American technological leadership in the energy sector to develop in situ approaches to recovering resources. NETL’s past efforts unleashed the shale revolution, leading to unconventional hydrocarbon technologies that alleviated US dependence on foreign fossil energy sources. NETL’s approach is a bet that federal R&D can similarly transform critical mineral recovery. If NETL is successful, as these unconventional technologies gain adoption and industrial application drives down unit cost curves, the unconventional feedstocks will deliver on the promise of domestic mineral abundance.