Did You Know That America’s Mineral Strategy Ends at the Border?

As U.S. Seeks Minerals, It Can’t Process Them

By Jane Lalonde

Here’s the reality: the United States is investing billions to secure upstream access to critical minerals—from lithium brines in the Salton Sea to graphite mines in Mozambique. But nearly all those efforts dead-end at the same place: the midstream. The refinery. The crucible. The place where minerals become useful.

This isn’t a trade issue. It’s not about tariffs or market access. It’s about infrastructure—specifically, the industrial systems that take raw mineral ores and refine them into the materials modern life depends on.

The mine may be today's national headline, but refining is the true story.

Take rare earths. The U.S. extracts about 12% of the global supply, but nearly two-thirds of that material is shipped to China for processing, then re-imported as magnets, batteries, and advanced alloys. Even nickel, sourced from America’s sole operating mine in Michigan, is refined overseas.

They key take-away? Ownership of minerals does not equal control over their value. The mine is the headline, but refining is the real story.

A Nation That Used to Refine

This wasn’t always the case. Through the 20th century, the U.S. was home to major refining and metallurgical operations. But by the 1990s, those facilities had largely vanished—offshored by the gravitational pull of global economics, where looser regulations and cheaper labor redefined industrial geography.

We ceded the middle of the supply chain. Today, the U.S. has mineral ambition without mineral sovereignty. We know where the minerals are. We know what we need. But we lack the capability to transform those resources at home.

That’s not a sourcing problem. It’s a design challenge.

“The rare earth gap isn’t just a supply chain problem. It’s a design and blueprint challenge.” — Jane Lalonde, CMO

What 70,000 Years Taught Us—And What the Next 30 Demand

Here’s the scale of the issue: to enable the global energy transition—electric vehicles, wind turbines, grid storage—the world will need to mine more metals in the next 30 years than we’ve pulled from the Earth in the last 70,000.

That level of demand is incompatible with the current industrial model. We cannot meet it with 20th-century tools. We cannot meet it without rethinking what extraction and refinement look like, where they happen, and how we define sustainability—not as a cost, but as a catalyst.

Rethinking Refining: Seaweed, Systems, and the Next Industrial Platform

Innovation is already underway. At the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, researchers are exploring how seaweed—yes, kelp—could play a role in rebuilding domestic mineral capacity.

Orca, The Blue Evolution Initiative is focused on developing biologically inspired methods to extract critical minerals using the natural bioaccumulation properties of seaweeds. These marine macroalgae act as living filters, absorbing elements like cobalt, lithium, and rare earths directly from seawater or brine streams.

This isn’t science fiction. It’s systems thinking. It’s rooted in ecological evolution.

If the U.S. wants to regain mineral relevance, we’ll also need more than new mines. We’ll need an alternative supply chain—that is distributed, clean, and domestic. We’ll also need policy, design, and science pulling in the same direction.

^{Jane Lalonde is a climate activist and brand expert. She serves as the CMO for Blue Evolution and their iniatives across all verticals.}