Satish Rao, Managing Director at Clareo, joined a panel on critical minerals at the Defense TechConnect Summit in Washington DC (18-21 November 2025), moderated by Rio Tinto. These reflections are informed by the panel discussion and broader conversations at the event.
The strategic reality
One clear theme from the summit’s discussions was that every defense prime is well aware of the increasing risks of securing critical minerals, and all have teams actively improving supply chain resilience. What remains uncertain is the role primes should take, considering that many critical minerals are sourced through their supplier, i.e. Tier 2 or 3 suppliers and component manufacturers.
This uncertainty exists against a stark backdrop. China has spent three decades establishing strategic choke points across critical mineral supply chains — commodity by commodity, deliberately focusing on the midstream where value is added: processing, refining, and conversion. This is exactly where the US and its allies are most exposed.
The challenge is not a resource gap. It is an industrial-capacity gap created intentionally by a long-term competitor.
Consider copper, recently added to the US Critical Minerals list (November 2025). China has vastly expanded smelting and refining capacity and now undercuts global competition by charging near-zero conversion fees. Western smelters face closure or major restructuring as margins collapse. As smelting disappears in the West, so does the capability to turn ore into usable metal – the very definition of strategic vulnerability.
Lithium follows a similar pattern. China’s control of lithium processing gives it the power to influence global prices, including flooding the market during oversupply periods. This drives prices so low that Western midstream projects struggle to secure funding. Promising lithium conversion ventures in Australia, the US, Canada, and Australia are stalling because Chinese producers can manipulate the market to unprofitable levels at will.
The US response cannot be piecemeal. It requires a coordinated strategy to rebuild and modernise the midstream through next-generation technologies that can compete on cost, environmental performance, and flexibility.
The roadmap: Five priorities for defense-ready supply chains
1. Treat critical minerals as a strategic, cross-enterprise issue
The availability of critical minerals products goes well beyond a procurement issue because their impact of constrained supply extends to engineering, manufacturing, risk management, and long-term competitiveness. Defense prime contractors and their suppliers need to map the entire value chain, to identify potential risks and vulnerabilities to the availability and affordability of critical minerals.
This means elevating the issue from operational risk to strategic risk, and assessing exposure to geopolitical shocks, price volatility, and concentrated midstream capacity abroad. Clareo works across the value chain to map these exposures and develop targeted strategies to build resilience.
2. Rebuild the midstream with next-generation technology
The path forward is not to replicate legacy infrastructure. It is about deploying advanced technologies such as electrochemical processing, modular refining systems, and low-impact recovery technologies that can compete on cost and meet environmental standards.
Allied nations like Canada, Australia, Chile, Argentina, and others are essential partners in building distributed midstream capacity. Securing supply via allies in the near term (2025-2040) while building domestic capability creates resilience that single-source strategies cannot deliver.
3. Bridge the innovation ‘valley of death’
Innovation in minerals often fails in the pilot plant, not in the lab. The TRL 6-8 gap is where technologies transition from demonstration to commercial deployment. And that’s the real bottleneck. Promising startups and lab projects might succeed at bench scale but often stumble at pilot stage because there is no clear pathway to scaling up.
The solution is shared proving grounds. We envisage permanent, multi-party sites where miners, national laboratories, and technology providers can test under real conditions. Pre-competitive consortia organised by commodity (copper, lithium, rare earths, nickel, and so on) can address common technical challenges such as impurities, energy consumption, waste management, and permitting before companies compete in final product markets. This is a space where Clareo can serve as an integrator between consortia members, industry needs, and demonstration pathways to speed up the journey from proof-of-concept to deployment.
Venture funding alone will not fix this, since these commodities represent capital-intensive, long-horizon industries. Structured co-investment between venture capital, strategic corporates, and public agencies, where each takes risk appropriate to their role, is essential.
4. Align policy tools to de-risk scale-up
Policy should reward deployment, not just fund R&D. Different minerals require different policies and tools. For example:
- For copper (high-volume, long-cycle, permitting-constrained): coordinated permitting processes, production tax credits for refined copper produced domestically, and trade tools that ensure finished copper products flow smoothly back to the US.
- For lithium (smaller volume, midstream-constrained, investment-fragile): time-limited ‘Contracts for Difference’ offering floor price guarantees to de-risk refining investments; advance market commitments securing public or OEM-backed offtake for compliant lithium; and strategic reserves purchasing spodumene or lithium carbonate during downturns to buffer producers.
- Across all minerals: innovation-linked permitting that fast-tracks projects demonstrating measurable environmental and efficiency benefits; expanded DPA Title III and DOE Loan Programs Office tools supporting modular demonstration-scale facilities; and data and traceability standards making sustainability into a market advantage rather than a compliance burden.
The Key Minerals Forum’s Minerals Resilience Framework illustrates how these levers apply differently depending on miner archetype and mineral volume characteristics.
5. Form cross-sector consortia NOW
Programs and funding are starting to materialize. The question is whether industry can move quickly enough to seize these opportunities.
DOE’s Mine of the Future Proving Ground initiative offers US$80 million for field-scale testing of next-generation mining technologies under real conditions, including workforce development components. The Mines & Metals Capacity Expansion program provides up to US$275 million for pilot systems recovering critical minerals from existing industrial by-products and waste streams at 1:50 scale or larger.
These form part of a nearly US$1 billion DOE push to scale domestic critical mineral processing and manufacturing. The Critical Minerals & Materials Accelerator supports early-stage maturation, but needs a Phase 2 designed for demonstration-scale deployment (TRL 6-8), integrating DOE funding opportunities with DPA Title III and other mechanisms.
The actionable step: form a small consortium now – miner, national lab, technology provider, and OEM – and position the consortium to apply for active and upcoming funding opportunities. It will be essential to link lab capabilities to industry needs and demonstration pathways.
Global implications
US Defense supply chain security in the short- to medium-term depends on allied nations’ mining and processing capacity. The policy shifts emerging from Washington signal where investment and partnerships will flow over the coming decade.
For mining and minerals operators globally, traceability and sustainability standards are becoming market differentiators rather than merely compliance tasks. Those ready to supply diversified, resilient midstream capacity to Defense and energy programs will see increasing demand, as long as they can demonstrate provenance, environmental credentials, and the reliability that secure supply chains demand.
Mineral independence will not come from a single major breakthrough. It will result from hundreds of small, coordinated successes throughout the value chain. While the US government starts to make available programs and funding to encourage critical minerals production, the key question is whether resource industries in the US and allied nations can move quickly enough to rebuild what took China 30 years to master.
