The Trump administration announced this week the U.S. government would work to build a $11.7 billion stockpile of critical minerals. That’s the headline; the subtext is more intriguing.
The stockpile initiative, branded as Project Vault, is the latest attempt by the administration to secure supplies of critical minerals for U.S. manufacturers and what President Donald Trump says will ensure “American businesses and workers are never harmed by any shortage.”
It follows recent investments from the administration into rare earth producers, including equity stakes in miners USA Rare Earth and MP Materials.
Individually, they can be interpreted as an administration taking steps to calm a part of the market that has been roiled by its own trade wars. Collectively, they’re an admission, however tacit or subconscious, that the future relies on electric technologies, including electric vehicles and wind turbines.
In his announcement, Trump alluded to the world’s dependence on China for a slew of critical minerals. Over the last year-plus, China has wielded its dominance to counter tariff threats from the Trump administration, restricting exports of rare earth metals and lithium battery materials to the United States. Eventually, China relented, but the episode made clear who held the trump card.
The spat also revealed just how integral critical minerals are to modern economies. Trump likened the new stockpile to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve maintained by the Department of Energy, which was set up in the wake of the oil embargo in the early 1970s.
“Just as we have long had a strategic petroleum reserve and a stockpile of critical minerals for national defense, we’re now creating this reserve for American industry, so we don’t have any problems,” Trump said.
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The oil reserve isn’t going away, but it’s not as important as it once was, diminished by productive U.S. oil wells and the increasing share of the energy market taken by solar, wind, and batteries. (Solar and wind continue to dominate new electric generating capacity, while more than 25% of new cars sold worldwide were EVs or plug-in hybrids.)
It’s not clear exactly which minerals will …