The Arthur L. Irving Institute for Energy & Society

Clean energy technologies like solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries are often seen as a clean break from the extractive industries of the fossil fuel era. That perception obscures a basic fact: these technologies depend on critical minerals like lithium, nickel, and cobalt, pulled from the ground just like oil and coal. If the last century of energy and geopolitical policy was shaped by hydrocarbons, the next will be shaped by minerals.

That dependence has taken on new urgency as AI data centers, electrification, and the reshoring of manufacturing drive a historic surge in electricity demand. We confront a hard geological reality: the United States does not control the minerals it needs to power its own energy transition. Reconciling that dependency with the urgency of climate change may require the climate movement to make peace with an industry it has long opposed: mining. That's the inconvenient truth that set the tone for a panel convened on September 23 to discuss critical minerals, energy security, and the fragility of the modern energy supply chain. The discussion was held under the Chatham House Rule, so comments below are not attributed to individual speakers.

A Panel of Experts

The conversation was moderated by Roger Ballentine, President of Green Strategies and former Chairman of the White House Climate Change Task Force under President Clinton. He was joined by four panelists: Giulia Siccardo, Managing Director and Regional Leader of Norththe int America at Quinbrook and a Distinguished Industry Fellow at Dartmouth's Irving Institute, who previously led the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains; Mansoor Barati, the Gerald R. Heffernan Chair in Materials Processing and Director of the Centre for Metallurgical Processing and Sustainability at the University of Toronto; John Corrigan, Vice President of Policy, Trade, and Industrial Strategy at the Silverado Policy Accelerator; and Danielle Spalding, Senior Vice President of Corporate and External Affairs at Cirba Solutions, a battery recycling company operating across North America.

An Expanding Definition of Energy Security

The panel opened by redefining the term at the center of the discussion. Energy security used to mean diversifying away from OPEC oil. Today, it also means guaranteeing access to the roughly 50 minerals—lithium, nickel, cobalt, graphite, and rare earth elements—that batteries, magnets, and grid equipment require. According to International Energy Agency estimates, it would take roughly a decade and tens of billions of dollars to build a rare earth supply chain outside of China. That timeline is notably dwarfed by the hundreds of billions of dollars U.S. tech giants are now committing every year to build data centers. The mismatch between how fast mineral supply chains can grow and how fast demand is growing, panelists agreed, is the defining supply chain challenge of this moment.

The China Factor

Any conversation about critical minerals eventually comes back to China, which controls a majority of the global critical mineral supply chain. China's advantage is both geological and industrial. The country refines an estimated 85 to 90 percent of the world's rare earths and roughly 70 percent of its cobalt, even though it mines only a fraction of global reserves. Panelists stressed that mining is only the first link in a much longer chain, and that the U.S. and its allies need to build refining and processing capacity to build supply chain security.

China has tightened export controls, first in 2023 and again through 2025, restricting gallium, germanium (of which it controls roughly 80 percent of global production), and rare earth magnets. Panelists described these moves as calibrated pressure—a way to remind Washington and its allies of their dependence without triggering a full-blown conflict. The goal now, several argued, is to build a functioning "ex-China" market: a trading system among allied nations robust enough that materials can be bought on commercial rather than political terms.

Recycling as the Overlooked Supply Chain

While mining takes decades to scale, recycling offers a faster, if partial, fix. The goal, as one panelist put it, is "resilience without reliance." We can recover lithium, nickel, and cobalt from spent batteries and consumer electronics rather than mining new material from the ground. Cirba Solutions recently completed a multiyear qualification process with General Motors that now allows GM to build vehicles using batteries containing recycled cobalt and nickel.

Still, recycling is not a complete substitute for mining. On today's trajectory, recycled content could meet about 40 percent of battery material demand by 2040. This leaves a significant gap that virgin extraction must fill. The bottleneck, panelists noted, is not collection but refining capacity. An estimated 85 percent of "black mass"—the shredded material recovered from used batteries—is still processed abroad, much in China.

This is where the panel's inconvenient truth came into sharpest focus. If "drill, baby, drill" was the political shorthand of the fossil fuel era, panelists suggested, the clean energy movement may need its own uneasy corollary: "process, baby, process." The point was to acknowledge that batteries, turbines, and solar panels can't be recycled into existence. Some minerals must be mined first. Responsible, well-regulated domestic mining, several panelists agreed, is a precondition for meeting clean energy goals at the speed the transition demands.

Capital Is a Real Constraint

Geology is one obstacle. Capital is another. Building refining and recycling capacity requires patient capital, and private investors need to see large, reliable offtake agreements before committing funds. Public capital, such as through Department of Energy grants and potentially Pentagon offtake commitments, can de-risk early projects enough to attract private investment.

Canada was repeatedly cited as a model of agility, having borrowed elements of U.S. industrial policy while moving faster on permitting and public-private coordination. Critical minerals, several panelists pointed out, currently make up only about a quarter of a battery's total cost. This means that even a significant premium for secure, domestic sourcing may be a price worth paying.

Is There a Technological Solution?

Can technology simply engineer around scarcity? The panel was skeptical of near-term technological solutions. Battery chemistries do shift over time. For example, natural graphite, still roughly two-thirds sourced from China, is increasingly being replaced with synthetic graphite made from petroleum coke in the U.S. and Canada or silicon. But no chemistry shift eliminates critical mineral dependence outright; it just moves it around.

The bigger failure, panelists suggested, is America's inability to scale lab breakthroughs into commercial facilities. This gap was attributed to risk-averse capital markets and thin domestic metallurgical infrastructure. The U.S. holds nickel resources theoretically sufficient for hundreds of millions of electric vehicles, but almost entirely in hard-rock ores that require processing technology the country hasn't scaled up.

The Workforce Gap

Higher education moves on timescales that don't align with market shifts. Faculty tenure, curriculum approval, and accreditation cycles take years to change, while critical mineral markets shift with each new tariff, export ban, or geopolitical event. The mismatch has left the U.S. without a real pipeline for training accredited mining or metallurgical engineers. Both fields fell out of favor for the same reasons: as U.S. mining and heavy manufacturing declined starting in the 1980s, enrollment dropped, accreditation became harder to justify, and universities redirected resources toward computer science and other higher-demand majors.

The result is a talent gap at every level. On the trades side, the reshoring of manufacturing and the buildout of grid infrastructure have created acute shortages of welders and electricians, rooted in the decline of vocational and apprenticeship programs in U.S. high schools over decades. On the engineering side, the industry needs chemical and mining/metallurgical engineers who understand both the theory and the practical challenges of building and operating rare earth refining and battery recycling facilities.

There are efforts to narrow the gap. The Department of Energy-backed Battery Workforce Initiative, launched in 2022 with automakers and community colleges, trains workers for battery manufacturing roles. But that doesn't touch the upstream mining, refining, or metallurgical expertise the broader supply chain requires. The U.S. needs to build three distinct talent pipelines at once—skilled trades, process engineering, and extractive metallurgy—using an education system that spent the last forty years dismantling all three.

Strategic Solutions

Asked about stockpiling minerals the way nations once stockpiled oil, the panel was unenthusiastic. Many processed minerals degrade over time, and government warehousing is a blunt instrument compared to functioning markets. The more elegant fix, several suggested, isn't a strategic reserve but a strategic mindset: treating critical minerals not as commodities to trade opportunistically, but as the foundation of national industrial strategy that is as fundamental to national security as energy itself.

The panel closed without resolving the tension it opened with: whether America can align permitting timelines, capital markets, and workforce development quickly enough to match the pace of surging energy demand. But the inconvenient truth the panel started with only grew sharper by the end: there is no clean energy transition without expanded mining and recycling processes, and the movement that has long opposed extraction may have to make peace with it.