The Science Enabling a Steady Supply of Critical Minerals

Modern life is built on critical minerals and materials. These elements are key ingredients in the technologies that enable a high quality of life, such as the chips and batteries powering our electronics, the medical devices that diagnose and treat diseases, and the infrastructure of the nation’s power grid. The materials are also used to manufacture defense technologies, fuels and chemicals, aerospace vehicles, and automotives.  

Although the U.S. has geological resources of many critical minerals and materials (CMMs), some key commodities are only found in challenging forms, either scattered in trace amounts, chemically mixed with other elements, or both. The extraction, separation, and refining processes needed to convert these raw materials into purified products ready for manufacturing are expensive, complex, and energy intensive.

Building strong domestic supply chains to support the growing demands of U.S. industries involves solutions beyond simply “mining more.” New technologies and approaches are needed to better process conventional CMM sources and to harvest from unconventional sources, like lithium-based clays and recycled products, which are not being tapped to their full potential.

Scientists at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) are addressing these challenges on all fronts. Drawing on expertise in chemistry, Earth sciences, materials science, technoeconomic analysis, artificial intelligence, process scaling, and biology, teams are developing tools and techniques that will allow industrial partners to identify new critical mineral sources and efficiently extract and process elements from rock, soil, and water — or to recover valuable materials from used products and industrial waste streams.

“The central obstacle to critical materials production in the U.S. is the cost, which is elevated by the processes needed to transform mined or collected materials into purified product, especially when we have to work from unconventional raw materials,” said Robert Kostecki, director of Berkeley Lab’s Energy Technologies and Systems Division. “A reliable domestic supply requires breakthrough technologies i.e., new ways to separate, concentrate, and process the resources we actually have here at a globally competitive cost.”

Peter Nico, director of the Energy Geosciences Division, added, “Finding new sources of critical minerals and designing and optimizing new techniques for extraction and recovery requires a huge range of scientific expertise, and those approaches must work for industry in the real world. Berkeley Lab exists to bring researchers together to work on a problem collaboratively, and bring a solution to fruition. We’re moving the needle on critical minerals, which have become a huge priority for the country’s energy security.”

These ongoing projects represent Berkeley Lab’s expanding portfolio of research, which promises to accelerate all phases of the critical minerals pipeline, from acquisition of raw material to separation to product development and recycling.