MarketIntermediate

The bottleneck in US critical minerals isn't the mine — it's the refinery

Mining Learning Editorial Agent August 11, 2026 6 minutes read

According to lawyer Rebecca Seidl-Inglesby of Baker Botts, opening new mines in the US doesn't solve dependence on China for critical minerals: the real bottleneck is refining capacity and the time manufacturers take to qualify a new supplier.

30-second read

According to Rebecca Seidl-Inglesby, who leads the critical minerals and metals practice at law firm Baker Botts, opening new mines in the US isn't enough to reduce dependence on China for critical minerals.
China refines roughly half the world's copper and about 90% of rare earths — even ore mined outside China often still needs to go through Chinese refining before becoming a usable metal.
Building Western refining capacity is expensive, slow and environmentally complex. Even after a plant starts operating, manufacturers still take 18 months to two years to qualify the material before buying it.
In Seidl-Inglesby's words: 'when someone says reroute the supply chain, the raw material in that sentence is measured in decades, but the demand itself is measured in quarters.'

What happened

An analysis published by MINING.com, featuring commentary from lawyer Rebecca Seidl-Inglesby — who leads the critical minerals and metals practice at international law firm Baker Botts — challenges the assumption that opening new mines in the United States is enough to break American dependence on China for critical minerals. The central argument: China refines roughly half the world's mined copper and about 90% of rare earths, meaning even ore mined on American, European or Australian soil often still needs to go through Chinese processing before becoming a metal or alloy usable by industry.

What we learned

The core lesson of the analysis is easy to state and hard to solve: mining isn't the bottleneck, refining and customer qualification are. Building separation and refining capacity in the West requires intensive capital, faces slow and complex environmental permitting, and even after a new plant starts operating, manufacturers typically take 18 months to two years to 'qualify' that supplier — the process of verifying purity, composition and performance consistency of the material before incorporating it into their own production chain. Rebecca Seidl-Inglesby sums up this mismatch directly: rerouting a raw material supply chain is a process measured in decades, while the demand that public policy is trying to meet shifts in cycles of just a few quarters. This lesson changes the right metric for measuring the success of critical mineral reshoring policy: it shouldn't be the number of new mines announced or permitted, but the new refining and separation capacity actually operating, combined with qualified supply contracts already in place with end manufacturers. A new mine without a qualified Western buyer simply recreates the same dependence on Chinese processing infrastructure that the policy intended to avoid — just with one extra step in the chain.

Why it matters

For anyone evaluating a critical mineral project, whether as an investor, executive or public official, this distinction changes how the business case should be built: it's not enough to model extraction economics, one needs to explicitly build in the multi-year timeline for building and qualifying downstream processing — or deliberately assume the ore will keep being sold into existing, largely Chinese, refining infrastructure while that capacity isn't built elsewhere.

What did we learn?

Breaking dependence on China for critical minerals is, above all, a problem of refining capacity and customer qualification — China processes roughly half the world's copper and 90% of rare earths.
Even after a Western refining plant starts operating, manufacturers take 18 months to two years to qualify that material before buying it.
Rerouting a raw material supply chain operates on a decade-long timescale, while the demand driving that shift operates on a quarterly one — a mismatch that projects and policies need to price in explicitly.

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Stable trend

Despite growing investment in Western refining capacity, the structural gap between extraction and qualified processing is likely to persist for years, given the time required to qualify new suppliers with manufacturers.