“We’re only producing a few commodities,” says Elizabeth Holley, a professor of mining engineering at the Colorado School of Mines. “The question is: What else is in those rocks?”

The answer: a lot.

In a study published today by the journal Science, Holley and her colleagues aimed to quantify what else is in those rocks. They found that, across 70 critical elements at 54 active mines, the potential for recovery is enormous. There is enough lithium in one year of U.S. mine waste, for example, to power 10 million electric vehicles. For manganese, it’s enough for 99 million. Those figures far surpass both U.S. import levels of those elements and current demand for them.

Critical minerals are essential to the production of lithium-ion batteries, solar panels and other low- or zero-carbon technologies powering the clean energy transition. Where the United States gets those minerals has long been a politically fraught topic.

The vast majority of lithium comes from Australia, Chile and China, for example, while cobalt comes predominantly from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. While securing a domestic supply of rare or critical materials has been a U.S. policy goal for decades, the push has intensified in recent years. Former president Joe Biden’s landmark climate legislation, the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, included incentives for domestic critical mineral production, and this year, President Donald Trump signed an executive order invoking wartime powers that would allow more leasing and extraction on federal lands.

“Our national and economic security are now acutely threatened by our reliance upon hostile foreign powers’ mineral production,” the order read. “It is imperative for our national security that the United States take immediate action to facilitate domestic mineral production to the maximum possible extent.”

Trump also made critical minerals a cornerstone of continued support to Ukraine. Meanwhile, China recently expanded export controls on rare earth metals, underscoring the precarious nature of the global market.

Holley’s research indicates that increased domestic by-product recovery could address this instability. Even a 1% recovery rate, it found, would “substantially reduce” import reliance for most elements. Recovering 4% of lithium would completely offset current imports. “We could focus on mines that are already corporate and simply add additional circuits to their process,” Holley says. “It would be a really quick way of bringing a needed mineral into production.”

This latest research is “very valuable,” says Hamidreza Samouei, a professor of petroleum engineering at Texas A&M University who wasn’t involved in the study. He sees it as a great starting point for a multipronged approach to tackling the by-product problem and moving toward a zero-waste system. Other areas that will need attention, he says, include looking beyond discarded rock to the “huge” amounts of water that a mine uses. He also believes that the government should play a more aggressive policy and regulatory role in pushing for critical mineral recovery. “Mining is a very old-fashioned industry,” Samouei says. “Who is going to take the risk?”

The U.S. Department of Energy recently announced a by-product recovery pilot program, and the Pentagon took a $400-million stake in the operator of the country’s only rare-earth metal mine. At the same time, Congress recently repealed large chunks of the Inflation Reduction Act, which would have driven demand for critical minerals, and has slashed federal funding to the U.S. Geological Survey and the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, among other research arms.

The general thrust of the Science study is “not new,” says Isabel Barton, a professor of geological engineering at the University of Arizona. “It is a very hot topic in mining these days.”

The attention is contributing to a burgeoning shift in thinking, from an intense focus on the target mineral to consideration of what else could be produced, including critical minerals. “There are some that are probably relatively simple. There are others that are heinously difficult to get to,” Barton says, and whether a mineral is recovered will ultimately come down to cost. “Mining companies are there to make a profit.”

Figuring out the most economically viable way forward is exactly the next step Holley hopes this research will inform. By-product potential varies considerably by mine, and the analysis, she says, can help pinpoint where to potentially find which minerals. For instance, the Red Dog mine in Alaska appears to have the largest germanium potential in the country, while nickel could be found at the Stillwater and East Boulder mines in Montana.

“The [research and development] funding on critical minerals has been a little bit of a scattershot,” Holley says. “Our paper allows the development of a strategy.”

This article originally appeared in Grist. It has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style. Grist is a non-profit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future.

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The Phillips 66 refinery south of Los Angeles is slated to close by the end of this year, an announcement the company made last fall, two days after Governor Gavin Newsom signed legislation giving the state more authority to regulate such operations. This spring, Valero said it will close its Bay Area facility in 2026, citing in part a record US$82-million fine for air pollution that was more than 360 times the legal limit.

Valero did not respond to a request for comment. Phillips 66 spokesperson Al Ortiz told Grist, “Our focus right now is on safely idling our facilities. We are proud of the work we have done and continue to do with the state to ensure we will be able to meet future market demand.”

Between the two closures, California is slated to lose 17% of its refining capacity, which could cause gas prices to surge past the already nation-leading price of US$4.50 per gallon. It’s unclear what the closures might mean for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, as the state will likely import gasoline to cover a portion of the shortfall and people tend not to drastically decrease consumption even when prices go up.

Lawmakers don’t appear to have planned for this scenario. “The state is largely without a system-wide transition plan,” Cottie Petrie-Norris, a Democrat who represents portions of Orange County in the state assembly, said at a recent hearing. Creating such a road map, she noted, “is one of the most complicated, and I believe important, challenges that policymakers will need to face in the decade ahead.”

Without a plan in place, environmental advocates worry that the state will shove aside its progress combating climate change to keep gasoline flowing. California has for years led the nation in adopting stringent fuel-economy standards, setting aggressive greenhouse-gas-reduction targets and enforcing strict environmental regulations. But, in their attempts to keep the refineries online, even Democrats are proposing measures such as fast-tracking drilling permits and pausing a profit cap on refineries, a step the state took in 2023 to control gas prices and combat price gouging.

“What we’re seeing right now from lawmakers in California is an attempt to appease Big Oil,” says Faraz Rizvi, policy and campaign manager at the Asian Pacific Environmental Network, an environmental justice organization. “The crisis of affordability in California and the results of the last election have really shaken California Democrats, and they are really embracing a drill-baby-drill approach.”

Rizvi points out that while oil companies have done a good job pinning blame for the closures on California regulations, market forces were already pushing in that direction. The consultancy Wood Mackenzie estimates that nearly a quarter of all oil refineries worldwide are set to go dormant by 2035. One recently began shutting down in Texas, which is among the most favourable business environments for fossil fuel companies. In California, survey data shows that demand for gasoline has dropped by roughly 15% since 2017. Ortiz nods toward those trends when he tells Grist in an email, “Phillips 66 announced the idling of its Los Angeles-area refinery as part of its focus on the long-term value of its asset portfolio.”

Rizvi is much more direct. “This is all about their profit margin. Their bottom line,” he says of oil companies, which have seen record profits in recent years. “They had the opportunity to hold California consumers hostage and they took it.”

Proponents of a fuel-agnostic free market disagree, saying that policymakers’ attempts to pressure oil and gas companies amounted to the state putting its thumb on the scale and contributed to the current crunch. “All of these politically creative costs make it more and more difficult to operate,” says Wayne Winegarden, who oversees environmental work at the libertarian Pacific Research Institute. “We as Californians have gone a little bit too far by not accounting for the costs we’re imposing by accelerating a transition that it is clear we’re not ready for,” he says. “We put ourselves in this very difficult situation.”

Despite a split on why the refineries decided to shut down, all sides generally agree that the state wasn’t ready for the moves. Rizvi says that this “middle” phase of an energy transition can be especially difficult to navigate as older technologies sunset and newer ones come on line. “California should have recognized that we are in a perilous moment,” he says.

While California leads the country in electric vehicle adoption, such cars still account for less than a quarter of all vehicles sold statewide. Federal EV tax credits are set to end this fall, and President Donald Trump’s administration has tried to freeze funding for charging station infrastructure (though recently reopened it). “You’re trying to force people into using technology that isn’t ready to take on that burden,” Winegarden says.

Exactly how California gets out of this conundrum is up for debate. Winegarden says that it’s important to be open to the role that all fuels, including oil, can play in the state’s energy future. Rizvi sees this as an opportunity to bolster investments in alternatives to fossil fuels and commit to a green transition.

Regardless, they say, lawmakers need to chart a course – and quickly. “A piecemeal approach to the transition is not the answer,” Petrie-Norris said at the hearing. “We need a real plan.”

This article originally appeared in Grist. It has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style. Grist is a non-profit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. 

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