“There needs to be an analogous amount of focus and attention put on minerals processing over the next 5 to 10 years so that in 20 years down the road, we’re not facing a Strait of Hormuz based on lithium or manganese or something else.”
That’s Dr. Nathan Johnson, Director of the Laboratory for Energy and Power Solutions (LEAPS) and Co-Director of the Metis Center for Infrastructure and Resilience at Arizona State University, on the latest episode of Grid Chats. Energy security used to mean secure access to fossil fuels. Building today’s grid requires something different: a reliable supply of the minerals and materials that go into it, from lithium and nickel to rare earth magnets and advanced conductors. Nathan joined host Michael Wu to talk through that shift, and what it will take for the U.S. to get ahead of it.
What’s Happening. Building the grid now means securing everything from raw material extraction through midstream processing to the finished components in generators, transformers, and transmission lines. That supply chain isn’t moving at the pace the grid needs. Arizona alone is on track to double its capacity in the next 10 years, the same growth it took a century to build the first time, and the bottleneck isn’t willingness or demand. It’s whether the minerals and materials to build it can be sourced fast enough.
Why It Matters. China does not hold the largest reserves of most critical minerals, but it does hold the most processing infrastructure. Two decades of state-backed investment gave China near-monopoly control over the midstream step, refining raw ore into the battery-grade, magnet-grade, and semiconductor-grade materials the grid actually runs on. That concentration turns a technical bottleneck into strategic leverage. Recent export controls on rare earth magnets, Zimbabwe’s lithium export ban, and disruptions tied to the Strait of Hormuz all showed how quickly the effects ripple through supply chains with limited ability to substitute or reroute.
What’s Next. The U.S. has the capital markets, the allied relationships, and the institutional architecture to lead. The open question is whether policy will meet this strategic moment. Five moves are within reach, as outlined in “Securing Energy Abundance: From Fuels to Critical Materials,” including financing allied refining capacity in frontier markets, establishing government-backed price floors, aligning technical standards with allied partners, building circularity into mineral recovery, and investing in alternative technologies that reduce dependence on constrained materials altogether.