The Critical Minerals Picture Book

To effectively develop a national critical minerals policy agenda, policymakers can no longer afford to think about mining and metals in broad and general terms.

With no less than 60 minerals now listed by the Department of the Interior’s U.S. Geological Survey as critical minerals, policymakers and staff must start considering what America’s objective should be for each given supply chain. The overarching goal of the federal government over the next ten to fifteen years should be to remove as many minerals from the critical minerals list as possible, rather than continue adding to it.

For each commodity, strategies should account for current U.S. strengths and weaknesses along that supply chain, understand shared links between certain minerals whose production may be intertwined, and group minerals into categories based on similar goals or characteristics.

This booklet seeks to provide a first-order national strategy outline for each of 22 different critical minerals including rare earths, together with high-purity polysilicon, steel, and molybdenum. In total, our overview covers 38 USGS-designated critical minerals, more than half of the 60 entries on the 2026 USGS list.

We hope this publication can serve as a valuable resource for policymakers, researchers, and business leaders contemplating the path towards greater American critical mineral supply chain security. Success will equip our nation with powerful technologies that can unlock energy abundance, economic power, and a brighter future for the environment and for the American people.

Critical Minerals: Markets Both Big and Small

Inside the bin of “mineral commodities” are a wide assortment of ores, metals, and chemicals of different qualities and market volumes. A producer of fiber optic cable will use a micrometer-thick coating of germanium, and computer chip fabs make semiconductors by layering one atom of hafnium at a time. Meanwhile, in just two weeks, the U.S. makes enough aluminum cans to stretch to the Moon and beyond.

The most appropriate policy tools for bolstering U.S. supply security will change based on commodity market size. Each total market in turn reflects various geologic resources, industrial processes, end-use technologies, and market dynamics, many of them crucial for national strategic needs and to the livelihoods of American businesses and workers.

Setting Specific Goals for Specific Minerals

America’s potential to seize global mineral leadership depends on many factors including the quantity of domestic deposits, the presence of key downstream industries, and the mineral’s overall strategic value. The nation requires some minerals that it is not sufficiently endowed in to produce at scale, while abundant geologic resources for other minerals could allow the U.S. to not only become self-sufficient but also to recapture shares of global markets.

We divide the 25 minerals covered in this booklet into four categories based on domestic prospects and national importance. Accompanying each category is a simple goal statement that we hope can better orient a U.S. critical minerals strategy towards a set of clear, well-defined visions.