What

This site provides data on the evolving landscape of critical mineral investments and policies driven by the US government. While there has been an enormous amount of excellent reporting and analysis, publicly facing data aggregation has been more limited. This website seeks to fill that gap, at least temporarily, and provide a source of well documented information for various interested parties to use.

The underlying data was hand collected and collated from a variety of primary and secondary sources starting in the fall of 2025. For now the dataset largely reflects 2025 & 2026, but in the future may be expanded retrospectively to contextualize the present day.

The site will likely expand with additional data and analyses as time permits. This is a passion project for for me (who?) so it may be more intermittent. Additionally, while I have endeavored to provide thoroughly researched information, there may be errors. Please email if you have questions or catch any mistakes.

Why

Mineral markets are beset with frictions: Financing constraints, slow supply responsiveness, highly localized and visible negative externalities, high barriers to entry and high transaction costs, monopolies and oligopolies, technological demand side uncertainty, geopolitics and trade barriers (e.g.,export controls, tariffs, quotas), etc.

They’re frequently characterized by opacity, volatility, and fragility.

One way to reduce frictions – and increase resiliency and stability – is through transparency, i.e., information. Accurate data, and access to it, helps reveal and map the actual topography of markets, in theory, increasing efficiency.

This canonical insight¹ feels particularly important for the minerals industry. Investors, firms (incumbents and entrants), governments and various other market participants rely heavily on the minerals information ecosystem to accurately characterize markets and make decisions (investments, regulations, procurement, entrance, etc). Junior miners present demand forecasts to signal their value proposition; lenders underwrite based on detailed market analyses, price forecasts, and benchmarking competitors; regulators weigh supply / demand forecasts and domestic capabilities in trade disputes.

While there are private sources like BNEF, CRU, S&P, Benchmark, and many others; public sources from governmental organizations, like the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), play an enormous role. This stems not only from the credibility of their publications and statistics (which go back to 1900!), but their maps and resource assessments (see a good summary by NASEM here). Public data has played a key role in all of the examples that I provided above, and in the private resources too (many a private report includes a USGS mineral commodity citation).

As a USGS alum, I love a good dataset; as a former federal employee and nerd, I love thinking about the role public information plays in markets.² This website/project seeks to reduce search costs and lower the barrier to entry for organizations with fewer resources or access to expertise.

If you’ve read this far and are interested in the value of public information (and metals), this paper by Abhishek Nagaraj is a really fun starting point.

Finally a note: this website and its content are licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

Footnotes

1. See the 2001 Nobel prize recipients (Akerlof, Spence, Stiglitz); or enjoy this 2020 book chapter of the field by Stiglitz himself.

2. This includes not only data, but also government signaling power (i.e., when firms receive financial support); and the reverse, the role private information in the public ecosystem. I also am especially interested in the impact of public finance in markets, technology, and firm outcomes.