Program Manager, Critical Minerals & Energy Innovation Grants

Funding Opportunities
WASHINGTON—
The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation today announced $45.7 million for 19 projects that will unleash American energy innovation by addressing and filling domestic critical minerals and materials supply chain gaps. This funding supports the development of novel technologies that will be used in the production of critical materials by developing pilot-scale facilities for processing magnesium and rare earth elements.
“Reshoring minerals production and processing will strengthen our domestic rare earth supply chains from end to end,” said
Assistant Secretary of Energy (EERE) Audrey Robertson
. “By ensuring the minerals that are mined in America can be processed in America and manufactured into American technologies, these investments will bolster America’s national security and energy independence.”
According to the U.S. Geological Survey (link is external) , more than 95% of the U.S. supply for rare earth elements comes from foreign sources, over 50% of most critical minerals come from foreign sources, and at least 14 critical minerals come exclusively from foreign sources.
Critical Material Innovation, Efficiency, and Alternatives
DOE’s Critical Material Innovation, Efficiency, and Alternatives funding opportunity provides federal funding to build a secure domestic supply of critical minerals from sources across the United States, including ore deposits, mine and industrial waste, and recycled materials.
These projects build on an unprecedented surge in federal support for domestic critical minerals supply chains under the Trump Administration. In August 2025, DOE announced a series of funding opportunities totaling nearly $1 billion to advance and scale mining, processing, and manufacturing technologies across key stages of the critical minerals and materials supply chains.
The following two projects have been selected for pilot-scale processing from a continuous bench-scale to kick-start pre-commercial/commercial production.
USA Rare Earth
(Stillwater, Oklahoma) will build, demonstrate, and operate a pilot-scale continuous ion exchange rare earth element production plant with the objective of building a first-of-its-kind bench-scale continuous ion exchange separations process into a viable pre-commercial unit that demonstrates a solvent extraction technology. Successfully demonstrating this process will pave the way for the operation of the nation’s first mine-to-magnet supply chain.
Big Blue Technologies
(Cheyenne, Wyoming) will scale a magnesium metal production process from pilot to commercial, using a modular smelter. This project will use ore and aluminum scrap as primary feed stocks to produce magnesium metal and calcium aluminate slag and will demonstrate 2,000 hours of continuous unmanned operation of a single 2-MW modular smelter. Following a recent closure, the U.S. currently produces only small quantities of primary magnesium metal.

This project will kick off plant expansion to restart commercial production of American magnesium, a necessary material for advanced mobility and defense applications.
The following 17 projects will develop innovative technologies and practices to diversify commercially viable and sustainable domestic sources of critical materials. These technologies focus on optimizing affordability, environmental emissions, and resource usage or intensity within extraction, production, separation, processing, refining, alloying, manufacturing, or recycling technologies.

• Southwest Research Institute (San Antonio, TX) will develop a sustainable domestic supply of graphite by converting waste or captured carbon dioxide into graphite and oxygen gas. The project will also develop a novel plasma reactor system to convert carbon dioxide into graphite.
• Princeton University (Princeton, NJ) will develop a prototype of the novel string crystallization technology to produce lithium concentrates from a variety of saline water sources.
• Battelle Memorial Institute (Columbus, OH) will pursue the development of a novel disruptive technology to dissociate small, saturated hydrocarbons found in natural gas to…