The Division of Minerals Sustainability focuses on the production and processing of critical minerals, developing an economically sustainable and secure domestic supply chain, and conducting technology innovations on new advanced mining technologies and solutions.
The program directly addresses the impediments to domestic mineral production by investing in technologies and approaches associated with mineral extraction, processing, reduction to metal, perceptions of impacts of mining, and refining. The program will focus on the following:
- Critical minerals processing to transform the recovery, purification, and reduction to metal of critical minerals sourced from abundant domestic feedstocks (e.g., domestic ores, mine tailings, impounded energy waste, industrial process streams)
- Carbon ore processing to produce high-value carbon-based materials (e.g., graphite, carbon fibers, and pitch) from coal
- Resource characterization technologies to accelerate the identification and estimation of tonnage, grade, and recoverability of U.S. domestic critical mineral resources.
- Advanced critical material recovery technologies to identify innovative technologies that can substantially reduce costs, waste, and resource use from new mining
American industries have become reliant on foreign countries for many of the most critical minerals and materials needed for advanced energy and defense technologies due to decades of underinvestment in domestic mineral production. The program focuses on approaches to accelerate mineral developments that are likely to secure local drive for minerals projects and it catalyzes collaboration and characterization of diverse mineral production options in regions across the U.S.
Programs and Initiatives
CARBON ORE RARE EARTH AND CRITICAL MINERALS (CORE-CM) INITIATIVE
The Minerals Sustainability Division has established the Carbon Ore Rare Earth and Critical Minerals (CORE-CM) Initiative to help address the feasibility of recovering, extracting, separating, purifying, and refining significant quantities of rare earth elements and other critical minerals and materials. The CORE-CM Initiative seeks to:
- Build broad-based regional coalition teams, including tribal nations and local communities;
- Investigate regional resources (e.g., materials, facilities, infrastructure, workforce), opportunities, and challenges;
- Catalyze regional economic growth and job creation; and
- Enable production of rare earth elements, critical minerals, and high-value, nonfuel, carbon-based products across 13 regions of interest.
ADVANCED CRITICAL MATERIALS EXTRACTION PROGRAM
The Minerals Sustainability Division is establishing an Advanced Critical Materials Extraction program that will help develop sustainable mining technologies by using a more surgical approach. This program will work with experts in drilling, geophysics, chemistry, biology, robotics, artificial intelligence, and other fields to develop technologies that can enable more "laparoscopic” approaches to mining, targeted to enabling at least a tenfold reduction in the amount of waste material produced on the surface at mine site.
CRITICAL MATERIALS COLLABORATIVE
Through the DOE-wide Critical Materials Collaborative (CMC), the program is coordinating complementary investments with other DOE offices to ensure future American mineral dominance across critical mineral and material supply chains.
FE Resources
Last Updated: September 19, 2025