Local Climate Action
The renewable energy transition needs a number of raw materials for batteries, electric motors and general electrification, which are mined from the earth as minerals and then processed into a purer form for manufacturing. Mines and processing plants can take years to develop, and many of the current supply chains are controlled by China and bogged down in the current trade and tariff wars.
Will lack of these materials slow down the U.S. energy transition? It can be hard to tell, since the new market demand has also spawned a fog of urgency and hype in hopes of attracting public and private investment for a range of projects.
The Biden administration began planning to rebuild U.S. capacity for producing critical materials in the Energy Act of 2020. In 2023 the Department of Energy (DOE) completed an assessment of the materials needed for the energy transition, classifying them as critical if they had a “high risk of supply chain disruption” and “served an essential function in one or more energy technologies.”
To make the United States more self-sufficient in materials and renewable energy products, funding incentives for mining, processing and manufacturing were added to the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL), both passed in 2022.
How far did this process get and what is the situation today in 2025? We looked into four kinds of materials: copper, lithium, the transition metals nickel, manganese and cobalt, and graphite, a mineral made of carbon.
A similar demand for rare earth elements was covered in an article in the Spring newsletter.
After decades of globalization, U.S. domestic mineral production is at a low
The United States is in a difficult position. In the 20th century, the country mined and processed all of these needed minerals, but starting in the 1980s globalization led to out-sourcing to other countries. Cheap labor and fewer environmental regulations were the incentives to let others do the destructive, polluting work of mining and mineral processing.
China stepped in to fill the gap, following its long-term strategy to build mines, refining plants, and factories making products needed for renewable energy. Critical materials production became concentrated in China, while mineral production in the United States stagnated. Old mines were worked out and American processing plants became antiquated and mired in environmental lawsuits.
Meeting new demand for materials – the Biden blueprint
The materials discussed in this article are all considered by the 2023 DOE Assessment to be “critical” or “near critical” in the next 10 years for developing the renewable energy transition. Some barriers to steady supply chains are geopolitical (how well are we getting along with China?) while others stem from long-term lack of investment in developing new industries.
There are also supply paths we hopefully will choose to avoid because of high negative social and environmental costs — such as using products from the Congo cobalt-mining industry, deep-sea nodule mining or building mines in the worst locations.
Almost all new mineral mining and processing projects come with environmental justice harms since mining typically destroys natural landscapes, ore-processing pollutes, and the jobs can be difficult, dangerous and low-paid.
However, destructive as new mines are, this is nothing compared to the damage done by the fossil fuel industry. One analysis determined that fossil fuel use through 2040 would need 535 times the amount of mining as digging up (over the same time period) the minerals needed for renewable energy to keep warming below 2°C.
Each material has its own story, degree of abundance, and supply chain. Here are details about a few of them.
Copper for Electrification
It’s estimated that the world will need to double the amount of copper in use by 2050 to accomplish the energy transition. Copper is a common metal, very good at conducting electricity and heat, and crucial to the goal of “electrifying everything.” It’s needed for wiring in everything from computer chips to long-distance transmission lines. Its thermal properties make it excellent for heat pump coils and it’s often used for plumbing in buildings.
The United States produces about half of the copper that it uses annually, and gets most of the rest from Chile, Canada and Peru. More than two thirds of U.S. copper comes from Arizona, where the Morenci mine is the largest in the world. Another huge copper mine has been proposed near Phoenix by the Resolution Copper company on a piece of National Forest land called Oak Flat. A bid by local Apache tribes to stop this mine was just rejected by the Supreme Court.
Materials for Lithium-Ion (NMC) Batteries
The rechargeable lithium-ion battery has been a society-changing invention, as acknowledged by the Nobel Prize in chemistry awarded in 2019. It took several decades to develop, mostly in academic labs, and is now used for everything from cell phones to EV batteries to grid energy storage.
A large lithium-ion battery needs a lot of mined material. It has two electrodes: the anode (negative) and the cathode (positive) separated by an electrolyte made of a lithium compound through which electrons can move when the battery is charging or discharging. The anodes in most Li-ion batteries are made of graphite which makes up 10% of the battery’s total weight. The most common lithium battery is known as the NMC battery because its cathode (25% of total weight) is made from a combination of the metals nickel, manganese and cobalt.
The Inflation Reduction Act has stimulated massive investment in new factories to produce anodes, cathodes and batteries.
Lithium
The United States produces about 75% of the raw lithium it uses and imports the rest from Chile and Argentina. However, we do not produce anywhere near as many lithium-ion batteries as we need, instead importing about 70% of them from China. Investment is needed to ramp up American lithium mining, as well as battery manufacturing, since Chinese lithium and batteries have been targets of tariffs and export bans.
Lithium mining in this country is about to expand greatly. There is currently only one lithium mine in the country, in Nevada, but three projects funded by Biden administration grants and loans will begin in the next two years: Two hard-rock mines are proposed — Rhyolite Ridge and Thacker Pass, both in Nevada, and one brine extraction project at the Salton Sea in California.
All projects have faced local opposition but have survived lawsuits. The Salton Sea Hell’s Kitchen geothermal/lithium project was just given fast-track status by the Trump administration. It has the potential to become one of the largest lithium-mining operations in the world.
The price of lithium world-wide has been volatile, affecting investment, but the diversity of markets and types of lithium-ion batteries keeps the industry resilient. When a slump occurred in EV sales, one newly expanded factory in Michigan switched from making EV batteries to grid-scale batteries.
Nickel, Manganese and Cobalt
Cobalt is mostly mined in small mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) where 80% of the world’s reserves are located. Most of the DRC’s cobalt processing plants are owned by Chinese companies, and in 2023 almost all of the DRC’s cobalt was sold to China for manufacturing batteries. Mining in the Congo is infamous for its dangerous conditions, child labor, community destruction and pollution and has long been a factor used to stigmatize electric vehicles.
Competing with Congolese cobalt is difficult and overproduction there has caused problems for investors. One of the only known cobalt deposits in the United States is in the Salmon Mountains of Idaho, where a new mine opened in 2023. It closed almost immediately when the global price of cobalt dropped due to high production from the Congo. The Australian company operating the mine has since gone into bankruptcy.
The most likely scenario is that new batteries will be designed that do not use cobalt, but it can also be recycled from old lithium-ion batteries.
Nickel is the fifth most common metal on earth and several countries mine and process it. Fifty percent of global nickel comes from Indonesia, where mining has been very destructive to the rainforest and nickel smelters use energy from coal-fired plants. The United States has plenty of nickel reserves, but only one mine, not enough to support the battery industry. The Department of Defense (DoD) recently announced a grant in 2023 to open the new Talon Mine in Minnesota to replace the aging Eagle Mine in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
Manganese: The largest reserves of manganese are in South Africa, which is also the world’s largest producer. The United States does not have much manganese, and the likelihood of supply chain disruptions may increase. A DoD grant was made in 2024 to produce high-grade manganese and other metals at a mining and processing project in Hermosa, Arizona. There is plenty of manganese in the world, but more production investment is needed for stability.
Cobalt, nickel and manganese are not rare elements and an adequate supply for the energy transition is possible, but their prices can be volatile and in some cases the destructive sources of the material are unacceptable.
Graphite
While cathode materials in Li-ion batteries vary, the anodes are always made out of some form of graphite — about 80 lbs of it is needed for an EV battery. Graphite is a naturally-occurring crystalline form of carbon widely used in making steel and for other important industrial materials.
The top exporter of both natural graphite and battery anodes is China, and trade in graphite has been caught up in trade wars between the United States and China.
Battery anodes manufactured in the United States and Europe usually use synthetic graphite, which is made at high temperatures from fossil fuels like petroleum coke. A new synthetic graphite factory is being built in Georgia with the help of a BIL grant by Chicago-based Anovion Technologies.
False solutions
The global transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy was always going to be a bumpy ride. Fossil fuel prices have varied wildly in the last 20 years due to political factors, the pandemic, and now wars. Prices of the materials needed for renewable energy are also volatile as supply, investments and trade wars ebb and flow.
Whenever opportunities for public and private money open up, so do opportunities for propaganda, catastrophism and outright scams.
In the Trump administration there has been pressure to add materials to the critical list for the commercial gain of donor industries. Other industries use the imperative of climate change to push poor solutions that would destroy irreplaceable landscapes, or they expand production but continue to use inefficient, dirty technology without updating it.
Siting of mines can be a bitter pill for environmentalists: The huge Oak Flat Arizona copper mine and the Thacker lithium mine will destroy beautiful landscapes that have spiritual significance for nearby tribes.
One mining proposal that falls clearly on the “No” side is deep-sea mining of mineral nodules. These nodules are fist-sized lumps of rock formed by precipitation from sea water over millions of years. They occur on ocean floors in international waters and contain manganese, copper, nickel, cobalt and other minerals. All proposed mining processes would involve destroying the seabeds and the rich and complex animal life in the nodule fields. Most techniques will probably also emit plumes of sediment, impacting micro-organisms in the ocean in unknown ways over very large areas. Economic expense and permitting uncertainties may kill this idea naturally.
New paths for materials supply
Projects that recycle materials are also being built. For once, market winds are behind the idea of building a circular, sustainable economy, where it’s more economical to recycle than to constantly exploit the earth for new materials as the paradigm of the oil age demands. Steady-state and sustainable economists have long promoted this: increased recycling could begin to deal with our huge solid waste problem and reduce destruction of even more of the planet with new mines.
Recycling is considered a significant and growing source of materials for the energy transition and can reduce the need for mining. Some materials are easier to reclaim and reuse than others.
There is already a robust copper-recycling industry — about one third of copper used in the world is recycled, saving 85% of the energy needed to extract new copper from a mine. China dominates copper recycling globally, but a new facility will open this year in Georgia to recycle scrap copper rather than ship it overseas. Cobalt and nickel have similar properties and are also very recyclable.
More domestic lithium-ion battery recycling would improve problems with supply chains and critical materials bottlenecks. A Stanford life-cycle analysis also showed that there are great environmental benefits to recycling batteries — more than a 50% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, and 75% lower energy and water use when compared to mining new metals. Although recycling rates are pretty low right now (5% globally is the most quoted number), at least one pilot project is operating in Texas.
Graphite is trickier to recycle than metals, and is often downgraded to lower-value uses like filler for roadbeds. Lower energy recycling processes are being explored, like direct salvage and reuse of battery anodes to using chemical processes to reprocess the graphite rather than high heat.
The use of geochemical processes and chemical solutions to replace heat are also being developed to modernize mining and ore processing so that they are more energy-efficient and much less polluting. There is a good discussion of this in an episode of the popular Volts podcast.
Constant innovation is the engine of the energy transition
Biden’s IRA and BIL were carefully planned to accelerate the energy transition but the Trump administration’s stance is to reverse this progress in order to support fossil fuels. Many tax credits and rebates available for solar or wind systems are being cut in the current administration’s budget, but projects having to do with manufacturing batteries, expanding critical minerals and refining were either too far along to stop now, or do not seem to be a target.
Although solar and wind projects are particular targets of the Trump administration, mines and battery plants don’t seem to be. Mining projects have been approved, and federal tax incentives will still be in place for another year at least, even for solar projects. After that, there is likely to be a slowdown in new projects.
Innovation in battery technology is still a frontier field and batteries using many different materials are still in the research and development phase. Lithium, cobalt, nickel and graphite demand may decrease in the future depending on which new experiments are successful. Many of these research projects are funded by companies or private investment money and not dependent on support from the federal government.
The Lithium-Iron Phosphate (LFP) Battery
An already existing major competitor to the NMC battery is the LFP battery which uses no nickel or cobalt. Instead it has a cathode made from lithium iron phosphate and is safer, cheaper and has a longer life-cycle than the NMC battery. Most new EVs in China now use LFP batteries; by 2022, Tesla was already using LFP batteries for half of its new cars, and a newly expanded battery plant has just started production of them in Michigan.
Technology for the energy transition is changing rapidly but we now know roughly which technologies will get us there. The Biden administration laid the groundwork — stimulating the buildout of new industrial capabilities and supply chains that the transition needs. And a welcome observation from the past few years has been that innovation will diversify the range of materials required and how they are produced. The pressure to supply huge quantities of a few materials is easing off and destructive mining can be kept to a minimum even as we try to reach a low-carbon future as fast as possible.