If Every Mineral Is Critical Then None Are

It’s official, coal is now a ‘mineral’, at least according to an executive order, announced in April. The Trump administration established the ‘mineral’ designation, at least in part, to be able to extend critical mineral benefits—priority attention for permitting facilities, financial aid, and more—to coal, and other pet commodities like gold and potash.

But the Trump administration is not alone in trying to game the critical mineral system. Before the last critical mineral list was set in 2022, stakeholders clamored to get their commodities included, encouraging policymakers to pay more attention to what makes it onto the list and less on actually designing policies that can properly support critical mineral supply chains. The third critical mineral list is overdue and now the prospect of some backdoor route through the Oval Office will only make things worse.

Industry stakeholders and policymakers alike have long-perceived a critical mineral designation as a shortcut to special treatment. This is unsurprising since bipartisan interest has materialized federal support for critical minerals while the minerals sector as a whole has seen less attention. The Trump administration first attached benefits to a critical mineral designation in 2017, calling to increase supply chain activity for any mineral commodities that made the list. As a result, both the 2018 and 2022 critical mineral lists inspired countless comments advocating the inclusion of one mineral commodity or another to secure favorable treatments like streamlined permitting and access to geologic data. Members of Congress themselves have called to include certain minerals and have even attempted to force potash and phosphate onto the list through legislation.

But, continually adding to the critical minerals list in response to stakeholder lobbying only dilutes limited federal resources intended to prioritize minerals of greater concern. Effective U.S. critical mineral policy arguably needs to be more targeted, not less.

Critical mineral supply chains pose unique challenges that require unique solutions. Critical mineral policy must reflect the underlying, statutory understanding that critical minerals are import-dependent mineral commodities at higher risk of supply chain disruption—not simply any mineral commodity considered important at a given political moment. The criteria for designating critical minerals considers specific metrics such as net import reliance, concentration of global production in relatively few countries, and supply chain vulnerabilities, looking beyond the general volatility that all mineral markets inevitably experience.

Ultimately, the goal of critical mineral policy should be to remove critical minerals from the list—not designate mineral commodities for special treatment in perpetuity. Policymakers should be tailoring critical mineral policy specifically to reduce U.S. strategic risks. Meaningfully securing the supply chain for a critical mineral means that the targeted policies meant to address supply risks have succeeded. Ideally, that critical mineral would eventually fail to qualify when the Department of the Interior develops a future U.S. critical minerals list.

Policymakers should apply support precisely to where supply chains are most susceptible to disruption. Attention to even just a single facility can greatly reduce nationwide vulnerability. As a prime example, a series of project grants and tax credits expanded the Mountain Pass rare earth operation to process mined carbonatite ore that Mountain Pass previously had to ship to China. The facilities these incentives helped construct not only completed the domestic rare earth magnet supply chain, but also reduced the global concentration of rare earth processing in China.

Strategic initiatives like the expansion of the Mountain Pass operation become less viable if a limited pool of resources must support irrational increases in the number of covered mineral supply chains. Nevertheless, policymakers have attempted to secure critical mineral benefits like mapping campaigns, financial assistance, or even just the prospect of future policy support for politically-favored mineral commodities. Such shortsighted actions risk perpetuating supply chain risks merely to support already established commodities.

Legislative proposals, for instance, have attempted to amend the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act to prioritize permitting of all mining projects where the law specifically directs priority to critical mineral projects. Pressure from legislators already resulted in the Permitting Council abandoning rulemakings aiming to limit FAST-41 mining project eligibility to just mines that would produce critical minerals.

The Trump administration’s Executive Order 14241 further deprioritized permitting critical mineral projects by establishing so-called ‘Transparency Projects’ in the FAST-41 program for critical minerals plus the selection of other commodities dubbed ‘minerals’ like gold, potash, and, later, coal. The exact nature of this new project designation remains unclear, but it appears to pressure the Permitting Council into unofficially prioritizing pet projects of the administration while declaring them critical mineral projects. This order not only draws limited permitting attention from critical mineral projects, but also dilutes other forms of policy assistance such as a newly dedicated fund executed by the Development Finance Corporation.

Applicable critical minerals also receive tax credits equal to 10% of production costs under the 45X provision of the Inflation Reduction Act. Analogous frivolous additions to this list would raise the cost of the credit considerably, illustrating the quantitative impact of carelessly expanding critical mineral designations. Adding coal to the 45X applicable critical mineral list alone, for example, would imply over $1 billion in lost federal tax revenue each year.

Meanwhile, recent proposals have called for the creation of a government entity that can use tools like price supports to prevent domestic facilities from closing when prices crash due to disruptive trade practices. Estimates indicate that such a program would require a standing budget of roughly $1.3 billion just to cover 8 critical minerals during low prices for 1 year. Expanding coverage to all of the 30 critical minerals produced domestically may itself prove too costly let alone supporting all domestic mineral supply chains of any kind.

Stakeholders may see a critical mineral designation as a means of growing the economies of their favored mineral commodities. However, successfully reducing critical mineral risks does not always require building new mines or even increasing domestic production. The U.S. simply does not possess sufficient quantities of some critical minerals geologically speaking. In these cases, research into manufacturing processes could lower the material intensity of critical minerals used in finished products like chromium or manganese in steel or find substitutes altogether like synthetic graphite from coal waste. Improved recycling efficiencies can also make the most out of critical minerals that the U.S. must import like tantalum, tin, and tungsten. Ultimately, the U.S. may need to employ these types of initiatives in addition to establishing trade agreements with foreign partners for many critical minerals.

If policymakers want to grow mineral supply chains for general economic purposes, then they should pursue sector-wide policies. Attempting instead to use critical mineral benefits for this may distract critical mineral policy from its priority of reducing risks. Note too that even though sector-wide policies can benefit critical minerals, they may not address the unique vulnerabilities a critical mineral faces. So policymakers should not solely pursue support for the minerals sector overall and expect that it will sufficiently stabilize critical mineral supply chains.

Seeking a critical mineral designation to pursue unrelated goals discourages policymakers from designing separate policies that can more appropriately address non-critical mineral issues. The Trump administration's interest in coal, for example, may reflect legitimate concerns over the economic future of the dwindling coal mining communities in the U.S., but adding coal to the critical minerals list would not really solve those problems. Conflating coal with critical minerals only distracts from more effective ways of managing a resource with increasingly obsolete energy applications like focusing on coking coal or synthetic graphite production instead. Indeed, maintaining the integrity of critical mineral policy does not exclude support for non-critical minerals. It does, however, require separate policies appropriate for their intended purposes even if that means forgoing quick access to critical mineral benefits in the near term.

Meanwhile, U.S. critical mineral policy must grow much further beyond a mere list. As we have previously written, a coherent U.S. critical minerals strategy must decide upon concrete goals for each priority mineral then allocate targeted policy efforts towards achieving these goals. To succeed in this, policymakers must understand that their ultimate objective is a shrinking, ever-smaller critical minerals list, not an ever-growing one.