How will demand and supplies for critical minerals change in the next decade? What is the right capital stack for companies focused on critical minerals? And what skills should students and early-career engineers develop if they are interested in mining and other industries sourcing critical minerals?
Three experts with three distinct perspectives on critical minerals in the United States and abroad shared their insights into the industries, financing, policies and technologies in the critical minerals ecosystem. The conversation took place during the Catalyze Series Webinar, Future-Proofing Critical Mineral Supplies, and connects to themes of the upcoming CATALYZE Summit in Detroit, Michigan, April 20-21, 2027.
Abigail Hunter, Executive Director of SAFE’s Center for Critical Minerals Strategy, brings policy and market expertise on building critical mineral supply chains. Darian Orozco, Sr. Director of Process and Plant Engineering at Mariana Minerals, discusses robotic mining technology and his company’s autonomous operations. And Cindy Jia, the Managing Director and Head of the Sustainable Solutions Group – Americas at ING, offers a financial sector perspective on scaling these solutions. The discussion is moderated by Jake Wellman, who leads US programs for Constructive, including the ASME Catalyze summit.
These are your questions and our expert panel’s answers about critical minerals industries and technologies, lightly edited for brevity.
Jake Wellman: I wanted to pick up on something you offered to talk more about. What is the right capital stack for companies focused on critical minerals?
Cindy Jia: I spent half my career in banking, the other half at a startup. So, I have a perspective from both ends of the table, and I think there’s similar trajectory for a lot of folks on the startup side.
The U.S. government has been a very strong supporter for critical mineral technologies and projects in their earliest life cycles, right, looking to spend money in early-stage R&D for new process development and new refinery and new methodologies of extracting critical minerals. That’s the early stage where you’re looking at TRLs [technology readiness levels] of maybe one to three or four.
Then as you get through those earlier stages, you might have technology coming out of a lab, whether it’s an organizational lab or a large research institution. You might get some traction, like Mariana has had raising venture capital. To take it to the next step, looking at commercial development and improving out a demonstration pilot case, and those are the cases where it might not be a huge expense. It might be a couple million or a couple tens of millions. But those are what is potentially available from the venture capital side.
As you further commercialize the technology, when you actually look at the implementation of the technology, these companies could get acquired by a very large mining conglomerate. But oftentimes that’s not the available pathway, depending on where the stage of the development of the project is, and also it might not be the most ideal option from a return standpoint.
Where is that missing middle? It’s the capital stack that’s needed to take it to that next level to actually execute on a project.
To the extent that many of these do involve a significant degree of technology risk, where is that missing middle? It’s the capital stack that’s needed to take it to that next level to actually execute on a project. After you’ve executed your first project, you can say, ‘Hey, I demonstrated this. This my technology works. It will produce X amount of output and yield.’ That’s a much better position from a negotiation standpoint, than before you actually had a project executed.
So, what we attempt to do at the Sustainable Solutions Group is to provide that missing middle. There is a lot of work required to undertake a review of the technical feasibility of a commercial proposition. That’s what we seek to provide.
We are different from a venture capital investor in that we primarily focus on debt instruments, specifically project finance. We’re looking to bank against the cash flows of a particular project. We’re specifically looking at the economics expected from a project, and whether the technology is likely to work or not. And whether there are ways we can mitigate risk with specific financing structures and lending structures.
I think we offer a very important role with our product in the market. In that the alternatives to what we offer, right, and and there are different alternatives out there. Whether you’re looking at venture debt, which has higher cost of capital than bank financing, like we would offer, you also have potential private credit lenders who also have higher, significantly higher cost of capital, given that they’re looking more at it from a corporate perspective, right?
I think we can be a very helpful lever to put into the capital stack alongside some of the other options, such as private credit lenders, or investors, which are also another pathway for companies at this stage to lower the overall cost of capital as you scale up your project from a demonstration TRL level of maybe five or six to get to a TRL level of eight or nine that becomes commercially ready to scale further.
Jake Wellman: We’ve seen a lot of change just in the past couple decades that has radically reshaped the need for, and the use cases for, critical minerals. As you look into your crystal ball, what do you expect to change in the next decade that might transform the conversation we’re having today? As we think about the demand for critical minerals and what the supply looks like, both in the U.S. and abroad.
Darian Orozco: I think you know cathode chemistry is probably the most obvious example of where we’ve seen really major market changes. Where high nickel cathode was the the name of the game for a long time, and now we’ve seen lithium iron phosphate or LFP really come to be the replacement and the workhorse for the EV battery.
So, as costs are changing and evolving, companies are going to make replacements in the metals they source. But on the flip side, there’s going to be some core metals and some core elements that are not going to change. Lithium is needed across all battery chemistries, so lithium demand is not going to change, even if the actual core chemistry, the cathode, is changing. Same goes for copper. Copper is needed for anything electronic, including all data centers. Copper demand is here to stay. And nickel and high alloys and a lot and stainless steel and a lot of others.
Companies are going to make replacements in the metals they source. But on the flip side, there’s going to be some core metals and some core elements that are not going to change.
I think you will start to see some substitution discussions, but people have been looking for alternatives [to many rare earth minerals] and they haven’t found them yet. There’s some just core thermodynamics and material science that you can’t quite overcome.
Jake Wellman: Darian’s focused on substitution, maybe down the road in terms of chemistries and makeup. Abigail, Cindy, anything top of your mind for the future?
Cindy Jia: I think maybe I’ll jump in here. Policy is certainly something that we keep a very close eye on to the extent that we are looking at these assets that potentially have 10-plus year lifespans, and we’re banking on overall cash flows and returns over a much longer period of time.
That policy uncertainty is going to be a huge piece of how we evaluate the market value of whatever output it is that we’re looking at. If you look at many of these critical mineral projects in the U.S. you’re banking on the fact that there will be this continued competition with China and preference for domestically produced, sourced and refined critical minerals. That can extract a premium from the domestic market, but will that premium continue to stay, or will there possibly be policy changes going forward?
I think a big part of the puzzle is on the refining side. Refining capacity in the U.S. is at a much lesser degree of maturity compared to China, and not just in terms of having facilities capable of refining, but also the equipment needed for refining facilities are produced in China. There’s no major Western manufacturer that could compare from a cost or efficiency standpoint. Companies may have to build assets and facilities here that rely on Chinese supply chains for their components, and that’s going to be a potential point of controversy as we look at the viability of projects.
Abigail Hunter: I’ll just marry both of those answers together. Fifteen years ago, we had heightened geopolitical tensions where China cut off rare earth exports to Japan, and that kind of cascaded through the industrial sector and prompted executives from the automakers at that time to look into no heavy permanent magnets, just with light rare earth elements in their permanent magnets.
You have something similar happening today where people are looking into magnets that are made without rare earths altogether, like iron nitride products that are being produced in in Minnesota in the United States today. We didn’t see a high degree of deployment of those technologies 15 years ago because, as Cindy rightfully pointed out, you had cheap at-scale at-spec material released onto the marketplace, and then the costs won out and manufacturers sourced that cheaper material and built their supply chains around that node.
I do think we are seeing a lot of companies ride the tailwinds of geopolitical tension right now, and whether or not they’re bankable if we have an oversupply of materials again on the market is yet to be seen.
So, I think it’s incumbent upon the manufacturers to also realize that we can’t continue to have a hear-no-evil, see-no-evil way of sourcing materials. It can’t just be policy that is driving attention to these alternative companies. And you do see, without government intervention, some partnerships emerging just out of the business case. But I do think we are seeing a lot of companies ride the tailwinds of the geopolitical tension right now, and whether or not they’re bankable if we have an oversupply of the materials again on the market is yet to be seen.
Jake Wellman: We have a question from the audience that builds on what you just said. The defense sector may be able to de-risk or lower the cost of technologies that require critical minerals in other sectors, whether it’s transportation or energy or electronics, do you see that trend playing out?
Abigail Hunter: Defense is typically a single digit demand source for many of these critical minerals. Tungsten is really the outlier here, where I think defense is like 25 percent of tungsten demand. But for the most part, you’re not going to see defense offtake purchasing move markets and shift critical minerals. That said, this administration and previous administrations have tried to use their procurement power to help defense primes and their subcontractors prioritize a secure supply of critical minerals. And there was a very impressive executive order last week that was released to essentially say no waivers unless you have more of these investments or partnerships, like I talked about with Korea Zinc and Lockheed, to prove that you’re trying to diversify supply.
The one area where we do see some interesting developments incubated in the defense space is the Defense Innovation Unit, which may have been rebranded under this administration, so you’ll forgive me if it doesn’t carry that title anymore. But it has given funding to alternative battery chemistries like Lyten’s graphene battery technology, which is very lightweight. The technology has a good use case in drones. It makes sense for them to take that risk because the application is quite relevant for defense, and that helps de-risk it in the short term. Then, as Cindy alluded to, with the proof of concept of the technology scaled for this one market, you could see it going into last mile for a delivery system or passenger vehicles one day once it’s able to have that continued proof of concept.
Jake Wellman: Darian, you mentioned that mining was not a was not a major in in college when you were studying for your degree. Can you reflect on that now? What are some of the skills that students or engineers currently in the field who are interested in working in this space should be developing as they think about how to enter critical minerals?
Darian Orozco: We’ve been growing the company and rehoming folks from adjacent industries, and there’s a ton of skill overlap with just general capital project execution and infrastructure and oil and gas and petrochem and others. We found a lot of overlap in the skill sets there. So, obviously going into engineering is step number one.
Two general trends in where the world is moving today: one is automation. You know, advanced manufacturing is penetrating most major industries, and trying to think about how you can bring a manufacturing mindset to any heavy industry, even construction. I think there’s going to be a ton of growth there, and having an understanding of how general automation works is going to be critical skills development in the future.
And then the second one is software. We’re software first. We started the company two years ago now with this mindset of software first, and even in two years the advancements in LLMs, programming capabilities, and the ability for engineers to develop and deploy their own software is accelerating at an insane pace. Even six months ago, what you could do with Claude or ChatGPT versus what you can do today is a step change.
Make sure you understand those tool sets and those skills, and be able to go develop your own software to really automate your own workflows and those of your teams. I think that is going to be critical for folks. I’m really excited, honestly, to see what those new grads look like now as the first AI native folks coming out of college. I’m really curious to see what the skills look like there.
