Critical Minerals, Critical Moment: Rebuilding Supply Chains from What We Already Have

E nergy resilience depends on secure and reliable supplies of the critical minerals, metals, and elements that power modern energy technologies.This need is driving renewed research in separations science, materials processing, recovery technologies, and AI-enabled discovery and automation.People often lump "critical minerals", "critical metals", and "critical elements" together, but each term refers to something slightly different.Critical minerals generally refer to non-fuel minerals that are both essential to manufacturing and at risk of supply chain disruptions.In such a way, critical minerals are a policy term used by government agencies to identify minerals or elements that are strategically important for energy technologies.Critical elements are basic chemical building blocks whose reliance on limited or complex processing infrastructure makes them vulnerable to supply disruptions. 1,2Criticality describes how important a material is to national priorities, and how vulnerable its supply chain is to disruption.As new energy, data, and manufacturing technologies emerge, the list of critical elements changes too, with new materials becoming important as demand grows.Researchers, engineers, and entrepreneurs are working across the critical minerals supply chain to identify new deposits, develop cleaner extraction methods, recover valuable elements from mine waste, and design energy technologies that use fewer scarce inputs. 1,3Yet, the central challenge is not mining alone.It is increasingly a material processing and recycling challenge: how to transform ores, mine waste, manufacturing scrap, electronic waste, and end-of-life products into the high-purity materials or components required for modern energy technologies. 3s demand grows for batteries, solar panels, and data centers, waste valorization and resource recovery are becoming increasingly important to the energy landscape and to the research