RELEASE: Breakthrough Institute Briefs Congress on Critical Mineral Stockpiling, Releases Report

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Earlier today, The Breakthrough Institute hosted Members of Congress and the media for a briefing on the findings of a new report that analyzes current U.S. critical mineral supply chain vulnerabilities and identifies key lessons for designing an effective national strategic critical mineral reserve program.

The report, entitled, “Taking Inventory of Critical Mineral Stockpiling: a Supply Chain Analysis”, adopts a mineral-by-mineral approach to assess the merits of a national mineral resource reserve that acts as an active market player, relative to a more passive physical strategic stockpiling approach. We conclude that the nation’s greatest priorities involve filling missing capabilities in downstream processing—a need best served by the de-risking and market development functions of an active reserve.

Key findings include:

• The U.S. needs to build projects more than it needs to build stockpiles - Our analysis emphasizes how U.S. geologic resource constraints and supply chain bottlenecks in mining, processing, and manufacturing greatly complicate physical stockpiling efforts, highlighting the far higher importance of targeted industrial policy to fill gaps in domestic supply chain capabilities.

• Physical stockpiling would not be the primary benefit from a new national mineral reserve - The primary benefit of any new federal mineral reserve program would stem from its role as a market actor for de-risking domestic mineral and processing projects through price supports, rather than from the accumulation of physical reserves sufficient to, say, support the U.S. semiconductor or battery sectors through a period of crisis.

• The current national defense stockpile is not the answer - The NDS by its narrow statutory design does not possess the flexibility or scale necessary to cover the entire needs of important U.S. economic sectors or to serve as a market actor proactively buying and selling materials.

The briefing summarized the report before hosting a discussion between Breakthrough’s Seaver Wang, the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Gracelin Baskaran, Employ America’s Skanda Amarnath, Norsk Hydro’s Scott Gemperline, and United Steelworker’s Roy Houseman. Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks provided opening remarks.

You can read the full report here.

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Media Contact:
Seaver Wang, PhD.

Director, Climate and Energy

seaver@thebreakthrough.org