The US will spend $162 million to turn mine waste into critical minerals

The US Department of Energy selected nine projects that recover scandium, copper, antimony and rare earths from mine tailings, existing mines and industrial waste — without opening a single new mine.

The DOE, through its Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation, selected nine projects to share up to $162 million, aimed at recovering critical minerals and strategic materials from existing industrial sources — operating mines, tailings piles and processing waste — rather than funding the search for new deposits. Four companies (Anactisis, Still Bright, Nusano and SiTration) will advance technologies from bench scale to prototype demonstration; another five (Thompson Creek Metals, Felix Gold's Treasure Creek project in Alaska, DISA Technologies, Alcoa and Trigg Minerals) will take already-piloted technologies to the pre-commercial stage. The announcement, made on August 18, 2026, follows a nearly $1 billion package the DOE had already announced in August 2025 for critical mineral mining, processing and manufacturing, under the US executive order focused on supply chain security.

The detail that sets this package apart from a simple subsidy announcement is the technical criterion behind the split: the funding follows the Technology Readiness Level (TRL) scale, which measures how close a technology is to operating at full scale. The four bench-scale projects move from level 4-5 (lab validation) to level 7 (demonstration in an operational environment); the five pilot-stage projects move from level 6-7 to 7-8, the edge of commercial use. That split isn't bureaucracy — it's a recognition that money alone doesn't move a mining technology from paper to plant; what moves it is reducing technical risk in measurable steps, one at a time. And the target of all nine projects is the same: reprocess something the industry has already extracted and discarded, not open a new mine. That changes the question critical minerals policymakers should ask — not just 'how many new mines were permitted,' but 'how much value is still buried in what's already been dug up.'

Opening a new critical minerals mine in the US takes, on average, more than a decade between discovery and production — time that industrial policy simply doesn't have, given the urgency of reducing dependence on China for refining. Recovering minerals from existing tailings and industrial waste is a parallel, faster route, because part of the infrastructure and the material are already in place. For those working in mineral processing or the circular economy, this package is a concrete sign that part of the future supply of critical minerals won't come from underground — it will come from piles that have already existed for decades.