How the US Can Mine Its Own Critical Minerals – Without Digging New Holes
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How the US Can Mine Its Own Critical Minerals – Without Digging New Holes

Rare earth elements are tiny yet essential parts of many of the technologies you use every day.

Yuanzhi Tang and Scott McWhorter
Medium, 2025
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Headlines warn that the United States depends on China for critical raw materials or rare earths. China has flexed its muscles by leveraging supply restrictions in trade negotiations. However, the United States potentially has abundant domestic sources of some rare earths. The task is to get to them. To that end, professors Yuanzhi Tang and Scott McWhorter of the Georgia Institute of Technology, writing in Medium, detail innovations in locating, extracting, and processing these critical materials. Public policymakers, financiers, and those whose businesses depend on rare earths need to know.

Summary

The United States’ dependence on critical minerals is an urgent “security concern” in today’s international political climate.

The United States’ shortage of rare earths is a serious vulnerability. Critical minerals such as “lithium, cobalt, nickel, graphite…(and) gallium” are essential to technology and, therefore, to contemporary life.

Other, even more obscure elements are also necessary. For example, some industrial and military magnets require neodymium; MRI machines use gadolinium; and some forms of energy production, notably nuclear reactors and wind and solar, require cerium. Clean energy initiatives depend on these resources.

However, the United States depends on imports for as many as four out of five units of these rare minerals, and must import all it needs from other nations. In 2024, America imported all of its gallium and natural graphite, 80% of its ...

About the Authors

Yuanzhi Tang is Professor of Biogeochemistry at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where Scott McWhorter is a Distinguished Fellow in the Strategic Energy Institute.

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