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EXCLUSIVE: Industry experts warn the United States is “one crisis away” from losing access to the rare earth elements that power everything from fighter jets to electric vehicles — a vulnerability President Donald Trump’s new $12 billion “Project Vault” aims to address.
The initiative, backed by $1.67 billion in private seed money and a $10 billion loan from the Export-Import Bank, would create a federally supported stockpile of rare earth elements and other critical minerals. The U.S. currently imports much of those materials from China.
Executives from Graphite One, one of the country’s largest critical mineral developers, told Fox News Digital the effort could mark a turning point in the battle over China’s dominance of global supply chains.
“The Chinese are willing to weaponize access to … semiconductor materials like gallium and uranium,” Graphite One advisor Dan McGroarty said. “Then they turn off the tap and sort things out, give us a one-year reprieve, you know, it’s a leash, and they can yank that leash anytime they want.”
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CEO Anthony Huston compared the concept to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, established after the 1970s oil crisis to safeguard U.S. energy security, arguing that critical minerals now play a similarly vital role in powering modern defense systems, advanced electronics and electric vehicles.
“For years, American businesses have risked running out of critical minerals during market disruptions… Project Vault [will] ensure that American businesses and workers are never harmed by any shortage,” Trump said in his announcement last month.
Graphite One recently made news with its “truly generational” Graphite Creek site in Alaska, which is the U.S.’ largest asset of that particular critical mineral, in Huston’s words.
As of 2024, the U.S. was at least 93% import-dependent on rare earth elements and graphite, according to the International Energy Agency, and remains heavily reliant on foreign suppliers for dozens of other critical minerals.
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“The United States really relies on China and Africa for graphite. China, as we understand, is our adversary,” Huston said.
A buried lede in the Project Vault news, he added, is a little-reported counter-terror aspect.
Huston said some African mineral deposits, including in parts of Mozambique, are located in areas where ISIS-linked groups have operated. By onshoring development of critical minerals, the U.S. will not only work to unseat Chinese dominance but also deal a blow to operations in areas run by people who want to kill us, he argued.
McGroarty added that Project Vault reminds him of the idea of “dual-use technologies” during the Cold War, where computers of the time had technology that could not be exported – but could be used for both manufacturing and nuclear weapons design, for instance.
“On another level, we’re going to have to balance it across 20, 30, 40 different metals, minerals, compounds, and composites, not just oil,” he said.
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McGroarty said the U.S. is “one crisis away” from having REEs “cut-off” by adversaries like China.
Huston also spoke of why Project Vault fits the 2020s more than any other time.
In the prior century, there were no cell phones, no EVs and graphite and the like were being used in analog tools like pencils and primitive computers.
The Graphite Creek site supplied materials for World War II-era steel production, a far cry from its potential role in today’s high-tech economy. Huston reiterated that the U.S. needs its own “strategic petroleum reserve” of critical minerals rather than relying on adversarial nations.
“As they say when you’re flying, put the oxygen mask on yourself first before turning to help those around,” he said.
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Asked about any nexus between Project Vault, the Senate’s renewed focus on Arctic national security amid foreign incursions and Trump’s overtures toward Greenland, McGroarty suggested there may be one — but it’s not yet clear.
He quipped that sometimes it’s better to look at the globe from the top rather than the side, which places North America in the center of everything.
“See what nations have a presence in the Arctic, you’ll see the importance of Greenland; you’ll also see that the U.S. is an Arctic nation only because of Alaska,” he said.
Of the 60 critical minerals on the U.S. government’s official list, Alaska has known resources of at least 58, he added.
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“It’s the same sort of thing with Greenland. In the case of Greenland, I think there’s a phrase that I use from time to time: resource denial — That is to say, you might try not to be interested in Greenland’s resource potential in critical minerals. If you wake up one day, and the Chinese and the Russians are engaging in economic relationships in Greenland and directing those metals and minerals into their supply chains, you will have to be concerned about what goes on.”
China-based experts, on the other hand, were dismissive of Project Vault, with rare-earths analyst Wu Chenhui telling the state-owned Global Times that while Trump’s move is novel, it “functions more as a short-term buffer than a fundamental solution,” and other officials in the Communist nation were similarly bearish on the news.
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