Last year, the Trump administration appeared to give up on the future of renewable energy entirely. It launched an all-out war against offshore wind; threw up byzantine regulatory hurdles to block renewables on public land; and effectively gutted the Biden Administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, consigning the law’s landmark solar, wind, and EV tax credits to the dustbin of history. Last month, the administration went a step further by repealing the Endangerment Finding — a 2009 rule that served as the basis for most emissions regulation. Meanwhile, China’s rapid transition to renewables continued apace, and reports indicate that the country’s emissions may have peaked in 2024. Much of the world appears to be following China, as the United States fell back on reviving the coal industry, ratcheting up natural gas production to power a wave of data centers, and spooking investors with erratic behavior.
But even as the Trump administration shoots down emerging clean-energy technology, it has rushed to secure critical minerals — the raw materials that are crucial to renewable energy and emerging military technology — and the United States has spearheaded a number of actions meant to break China’s hold over the critical mineral supply chain. Some experts say that the administration’s emphasis on national security is the likely point of its rush for critical minerals. But if the Trump administration stockpiles more of the minerals than the Pentagon uses, or if the mining industries don’t come together in the course of Trump’s second term, others believe that the president’s efforts could ultimately support renewable energy under a future administration.
“Currently, [critical mineral policy is] being deployed to advance a bellicose nationalism,” said Lorah Steichen, the research manager at the Transition Security Project, a nonprofit that investigates the US and UK military industrial complexes as climate and economic threats. “Which is clearly in opposition to a just energy transition.”
On February 2, President Trump and the US Export-Import Bank, or EXIM, announced an initiative called Project Vault — a $12 billion public-private partnership to stockpile critical minerals, meant to insulate the United States from supply shocks. It will consist of $2 billion in private capital and a $10 billion EXIM loan: companies such as Boeing, General Motors, and Alphabet are expected to participate in the program and will be able to draw from the stockpile, provided they replenish the material they use.
“In theory, the project can already be used for clean energy,” said Bryan Bille, a policy and geopolitical principal at Benchmark Minerals. Even if the current administration focuses on directing much of the stockpile towards the military, Bille explained, it will still be focused on ramping up US battery capacity to serve the data center boom.
A few days after the stockpile was announced, the administration held a “Critical Minerals Ministerial” in DC with representatives from over 50 countries, where Vice President J.D. Vance proposed a special trade zone that would use tariffs to determine price floors and allow participating countries more stable access to critical minerals. The administration recently announced that it would also use AI to set price floors in some cases, specifically when dealing with minerals like gallium — 95 percent of which the United States imports from China. Because the market is currently so distorted by its single supplier, Peter Cook, a climate and energy analyst at the Breakthrough Institute, explained, AI could help determine the actual cost of producing gallium, which is essential to semiconductors and other electronics.
But whether any of this lasts is dependent on critical mineral policy being codified into legislation, said Cook, pointing to the Securing America’s Critical Minerals Supply Act, which is currently in the Senate. “The key is if something like Project Vault is going to be durable beyond a single administration,” said Cook. “I think there’s certainly a possibility for [clean energy and national security stockpiling] to complement each other, instead of cannibalizing each other.”
Wu Changqing/VCG via Getty Images
These actions are just the latest in Trump’s year-long effort to break China’s dominance over the critical minerals and rare earths market. Currently about 80 percent of rare earth imports in the United States came from China and the Trump administration has worked aggressively to break this market stranglehold through trade deals, taking equity-stakes in several mining companies (which have been called into question by House Democrats), holding a summit to secure the AI supply chain, and even defying international law by exploring deep sea mining in international waters.
But securing minerals alone is not enough to oust China as the world’s rare earth and critical minerals heavyweight. The United States still lacks the processing power to mold those minerals from raw materials, and killing the IRA subsidies squashed a stream of demand, making it difficult to diversify the mineral supply chain, explained Tom Moerenhout, a professor at Columbia University, who leads the Critical Materials Initiative at the Columbia Center on Global Energy Policy.
“The short-term bottleneck is getting these [processing facilities built],” said Cook. “But the real bottleneck is going to be just overall supply from a geologic perspective.” In other words, even if mines were to be up and running tomorrow, the United States might not have access to a sufficient supply of critical minerals.
To complicate matters, there isn’t an absolute overlap between the minerals needed for green energy and those needed for defense production. Antimony, for example, which the administration has made a point of seeking out, is used in military technology, but not solar panels or EV batteries. And, in recent weeks, conservatives appear to have made an abrupt about face on clean technology, likely spurred by the extreme energy demands of data centers. How this will play out in the long run remains unclear.
Experts agree that building up resilient supply chains and infrastructure could be helpful, should a future administration return the country’s focus to a clean transition. But a robust, domestic network of mining and mineral processing will require a fundamental shift in how we think about and plan for mineral extraction and extractive zones as well.
“Everybody is criticizing China for this dominance, but it was created by the West,” said Raphaël Deberdt, a postdoctoral fellow at Copenhagen Business School who studies mining anthropology. “We offshored industries that we thought were too polluting. The dominance of China in terms of processing is the result of basically 40 years of the West not wanting that done in their countries.”
Nevertheless, an effective green industrial policy, Steichen, of the Transition Security Project, explained, is not just about reducing risk in the supply chain or providing the right incentives, but also minimizing the volume of extraction. “None of that is possible as long as critical mineral strategy is premised on national security and mineral military expansion,” she said. The data center explosion has put the need for increased mineral recycling into sharp relief, as the chips and servers required for operation need to be replaced every few years — creating tons upon tons of e-waste, much of which is not recycled.
A 2024 report in Nature Computational Science estimated that the rapid adoption of large language models will generate 2.5 million tons of e-waste a year by 2030. “If we’re using public money, there should also be attention to labor, environmental, and community standards,” Steichen said. “As well as some of the potential problems around reinforcing US resource nationalism.” The United States disposes of an enormous amount of critical minerals in mine wastewater, and the Energy Department’s research arm, ARPA-E, is currently working on ways to recover usable material from that waste. But regardless of how many solar panels the U.S. is able to build domestically, Steichen underscored that a truly effective green industrial policy will require global climate cooperation.
