The world is hungry for more stuff: televisions, phones, motors, container ships, solar panels, satellites. That means the stuff required to make stuff is in high demand, and none more so than what are known as “critical minerals.”
These are a handful of elements and minerals that are particularly important for making the modern devices that run the global economy. But “critical” here doesn’t mean rare so much as it means essential — and alarmingly vulnerable to supply chain shocks.
In the US, the Geological Survey has flagged 50 minerals as critical to our economy and security. And including some among that larger group, the US Department of Energy is focused on 18 materials that are especially important for energy — copper for transmission lines, cobalt for cathodes in batteries, gallium for LEDs, neodymium for magnets in motors, and so on.
For governments, these minerals are more than just industrial components — they’re potential bottlenecks. If producers of these substances decide to restrict access to their customers as a political lever, if prices shoot up, or if more industries develop an appetite for them and eat into the supply, companies could go bankrupt and efforts to limit climate change could slow down.
That’s because these minerals are especially vital for so many clean energy technologies. They’re essential for the tools used to produce, store, transmit, and use electricity without emitting greenhouse gases. They’re vital to building solar panels, batteries, and electric motors. As the worldwide race for cleaner energy speeds up, the demand for these products is surging. According to the International Energy Agency, mineral demands from clean energy deployment will see anywhere from a doubling to a quadrupling from current levels by 2040.
But these minerals aren’t spread evenly across the world, which could leave some countries bearing most of the environmental burdens from mining critical minerals while wealthier nations reap the economic benefits and other countries get left out of the supply chain entirely.
“A world powered by renewables is a world hungry for critical minerals,” said UN Secretary-General António Guterres at a panel last year. “For developing countries, critical minerals are a critical opportunity — to create jobs, diversify economies, and dramatically boost revenues. But only if they are managed properly.”
Right now, the US is a major consumer of critical minerals, but not much of a producer — a fact that’s become an obsession for the Trump administration. The president has signed several executive orders aimed at increasing critical mineral production within the US by relaxing regulations and speeding up approvals for new critical mineral extraction projects. In Congress, lawmakers are mulling spending billions of dollars to build up a critical mineral stockpile similar to the strategic petroleum reserve.
Even as the US government takes those steps, the international trade war that the Trump administration itself launched has begun to disrupt the global supply of critical minerals. China is one of the largest producers of critical minerals, particularly rare earth metals like dysprosium and terbium, but it has imposed limits on some of its critical mineral exports in response to President Donald Trump’s tariffs, sending prices skyward.
The dawning awareness that the critical minerals everyone needs may not be readily available has led countries to redouble their efforts to find more of these materials wherever they can — in the ocean, across deserts, and even in space. In the near term, that means the world will need more mines to expand supplies of critical minerals.
And with the market for clean energy poised to expand even further, scientists are trying to find new alternative materials that can power our world without making it hotter. But it will take more time and investment before the plentiful can replace the precious.
Why we’re hooked on critical minerals
Since the list of critical minerals is long and diverse, it’s helpful to narrow it down. And one mineral stands out: lithium.
The IEA estimates that half of the mineral demand growth for clean energy will come from electric vehicles and batteries, mainly from their needs for this soft, light metal. Depending on how aggressively the world works to decarbonize, lithium use is projected to increase by as much as 51 times its current levels by 2040, more than 10 million metric tons per year.
That’s because lithium is still the best material to store and release energy in batteries across a variety of applications, from the tiny cells in wireless earbuds to arrays of thousands of cells packed into giant batteries on the power grid. As more cars trade gasoline engines for electric motors, and as more intermittent wind and solar power connect to the grid, we need more ways to store energy.
While lithium is not particularly rare, getting it out of the earth isn’t easy. There are only a handful of places in the world that currently have the infrastructure to extract it at scale and at a low enough price to make doing so worthwhile, even with ever rising demand.
The US produces less than 2 percent of the world’s lithium, with almost all of it coming from just one mine in Nevada. The US has about 20 major sites where lithium could be extracted, according to the US Geological Survey, but building new mines can take more than a decade, and the timelines have only been getting longer. Because of their costs and the long-lasting environmental damage they can cause, mining projects have to undergo reviews before they can be approved. They often generate local opposition as well, stretching out project timelines with litigation.
But the US is motivated to build this out and there are already new lithium projects underway in places like the Salton Sea in California and the Smackover formation across the southern US. These sites would extract lithium from brine.
Could the US replace lithium and other critical minerals with cheaper, more abundant substances?
Not easily. “Substitution is not impossible, but depends on which material,” Sophia Kalantzakos, who studies environmental science and public policy at NYU Abu Dhabi, said in an email. Some materials are truly one of a kind, while others have alternatives that need a lot more research and development before they can step in. For example, there are companies investing in lithium alternatives in batteries, but they also have to build up a whole supply chain to get enough of the replacement material, which can take years.
And it’s not enough to mine critical minerals; they need to be refined and processed into usable forms. Here again, China leads, operating 80 percent of the world’s refining capacity. The bottom line is that there’s no immediate, easy answer to the critical mineral supply crunch right now. But there might be solutions that emerge in the years to come.
How can we get around critical mineral constraints?
These challenges have spurred a wave of research and development. Engineers are already finding ways to do more with less. Automakers like Ford, Tesla, and the Chinese company BYD are increasingly turning toward lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries as an alternative to conventional lithium-ion cells. Not only does the LFP chemistry use less lithium for a given energy storage capacity, it also uses less of other critical minerals like nickel and cobalt, lowering its cost. The batteries also tend to be more durable and stable, making them less prone to catastrophic failure.
The US Department of Energy has invested in ways to make lithium-based batteries more efficient and easier to manufacture by redesigning the structure of battery components to store more energy.
Researchers are also investigating battery designs that avoid lithium altogether. Chemistries like aluminum ion and sodium ion, as their names suggest, use different and far more abundant elements to carry charges inside the battery. But they still have to catch up to lithium in terms of durability, safety, performance, and production scale.
“I think this lithium-ion technology will still drive much of the energy transition,” said Rachid Amui, a resource economist who coauthored a United Nations Trade & Development report on critical minerals for batteries. It will likely be decades before alternatives can dethrone lithium. Eventually, as components wear out, recycling could help meet some critical mineral needs. But demand for technologies like batteries is poised to see a huge jump, which means the world will have no choice but to grow its fresh lithium supplies.
There is some good news, though. Mining is getting more efficient and safer. “There’s so much autonomous technology now being developed in the mining industry that is making mining safer than we could have ever imagined 15, 20 years ago,” said Adam Simon, a professor of earth and environmental science at the University of Michigan. That’s helping drive down costs and increase the efficiency of mineral extraction. The number of known sources of lithium is also rising. KoBold Metals, a mining firm backed by Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, is using AI to locate more critical mineral deposits all over the world.
The Energy Department is also throwing its weight behind domestic innovation. The department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, which invests in long-shot energy ideas, is funding 18 projects to increase domestic production of critical minerals. The program, dubbed MINER, is aiming to develop minerals that can capture carbon dioxide.
“Through programs like MINER and targeted investments in domestic innovation, we’re working to reduce reliance on foreign sources and lay the groundwork for an American energy future that is reliable, cost-effective, and secure,” said Doug Wicks, a program director for ARPA-E, in a statement to Vox.
There’s also a global race to secure more mineral supplies from far-flung places, all the way down to the bottom of the ocean. On parts of the seafloor, there are vast fields of nodules made of nickel, cobalt, lithium, and manganese. For mining companies, the argument is that mining the seafloor could be less damaging to the environment than drilling or brine extraction on land.
But the ocean floor is anything but a desolate place; there’s a lot of life down there taking many forms, including species that have yet to be discovered. One of the most lucrative areas for sea mining, the Clarion-Clipperton Zone in the Pacific Ocean, happens to have a rich ecosystem of sponges, anemones, and sea cucumbers.
Another factor to consider is that pulling up rocks from the bottom of the sea is inevitably expensive. The Clarion-Clipperton Zone can reach 18,000 feet deep. Hauling those minerals up, shipping them to shore, and refining them adds to their sticker price.
“I think it’s interesting and needed because of the [research and development] that it stimulates,” Simon said. “But economically, there’s no company right now who could actually mine the lithium in those clays from the bottom of the ocean.”
There are even companies that have proposed mining critical minerals from asteroids. One company, AstroForge, has already launched a test spacecraft into deep space. That’s an even dicier business proposition since working in space is even more expensive than trying to mine the bottom of the ocean. But space mining technology is a moonshot — still gestational and decades away from even returning a sample. The companies behind these proposals say that humanity’s hunger for these minerals is only growing and it’s prudent to start taking steps now toward building up supplies of raw materials in space.
But for the time being, there’s no easy way around it: powering a greener world means we will still need to extract far more critical minerals to turn away from fossil fuels and toward clean energy. Otherwise humanity will continue extracting and burning coal, oil, and natural gas, further heating up the planet.
