(The Center Square) — As more federal money goes out to deal with the critical mineral supply chain, Pennsylvania gets another grant.
The latest, almost $1 million to Penn State University, will focus on researching whether boron nitride can replace gallium in semiconductors. Gallium currently has no domestic source, and is one of dozens of minerals where China dominates the refining and processing of them.
For others, like aluminum, cobalt, and tellurium, foreign sources dominate. Their use in the defense and advanced tech industries have made them national security concerns.
“More than 95% of the U.S. demand for rare earth elements comes from foreign sources, more than 50% of most critical minerals come from foreign sources, and at least 12 critical minerals come exclusively from foreign sources,” the Department of Energy noted when announcing the grant.
The goal is to drive down those numbers as much as possible.
“That’s what this call for proposals is about: how do we find alternative materials to replace the ones that we have a hard time getting a hold of,” said Grant Bromhal, DOE’s senior science advisor for the Office of Resource Sustainability.
The Penn State award, part of a $10 million award pool to four projects, follows a $10 million award last month with a two-year timeline to see whether swapping out gallium is worth pursuing.
Other efforts have focused on recovering scandium for alloys and fuel cells (which supporters say could bring tens of billions of dollars into Pennsylvania and nearby states) and pulling lithium out of fracking wastewater. Others see a potential in filtering out a range of critical minerals from coal refuse pits as they make synthetic jet fuel, but they’ve been wary of government subsidies beyond grants from the Department of Energy.
This research activity and experimentation is a revival of sorts of an industry that used to be alive in America.
“The critical minerals industry is one, as a general rule, that we exported a few decades ago — it was seen as dirty and the thought was we can use the value, but we can export those things to other places,” Bromhal said. “Now we see that we need to create some of that value and jobs, and we can do it cleaner than anyone else can.”
Recent years have seen an influx of cash to the industry and researchers from the federal government.
Since 2021, DOE’s Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management doled out $161 million for projects related to critical minerals, from finding them in America to figuring out how to produce and process them in traditional mining and fossil fuel-producing places, FECM Spokeswoman Christalyn Solomon noted.
“This is the type of industry that is new and there’s a real opportunity in Pennsylvania and places like it to grow this,” Bromhal said.
The next step for the industry, though, could be bumpy: developing the talent to drive innovation. Penn State’s work on boron nitride has an eye on the problem; the research grant includes an internship program for graduates and undergraduates to glean some knowledge.
“We’re working to make that path better,” Bromhal said. “By virtue of investing more and more into these efforts … we’re in the position to be set up so that things are much better when we’re really gonna need them in five years. But it’s not a smooth, clear path.”
DOE has four pillars directing the agency’s research, he noted: diversifying the supply of critical minerals, developing alternatives, improving efficiencies, and creating a circular economy through recyclables.
As the Department sees it, the Appalachian region has a lot of potential for this critical mineral work.
“If we look at Pennsylvania and Appalachia in general, there’s a lot of effort that’s going on there,” Bromhal said. “There’s a real opportunity to engage with the communities in the region. There are a lot of impacts by the energy transition with jobs changing, so we’re looking to find ways to find a synergy between a need for these materials — a way to find the greatest value and to minimize the waste — and where we can clean up some of the air and water and land in those regions and find opportunities to put people back to work.”
