The U.S. Army is leasing land on bases across the country to companies that will build and operate critical mineral processing plants, military officials said Thursday, the latest push by the Trump administration to establish a domestic supply chain for materials essential to defense.
Army officials told The Wall Street Journal that it had awarded long-term leases to Titan Mining Corporation, EnergyX, Ioneer and REalloys for processing and refining minerals such as graphite, lithium, boron and rare earth elements. The agreements, which are preliminary, are designed to give the Army direct access to minerals needed in everything from drones to body armor. In lieu of cash payments, the companies will give the Army a percentage of the processed output, officials said.
“The main objective here really is to make the American and allied supply chain for these critical minerals more robust and more resilient,” David Fitzgerald, the deputy undersecretary of the Army, said in an interview.
The military has been seeking ways to make better use of its 15 million acres of property, including opening them to data center construction in exchange for computing power. The mineral processing plants will be located on Army depots that are already heavy industrial sites, officials said.
EnergyX will process lithium at the Red River Army Depot in Texas, where the Army recently announced it would manufacture and test small drones. The company has already acquired more than 50,000 acres of mineral rights for lithium deposits near the depot. EnergyX founder and CEO Teague Egan noted the proximity of the raw material: “It’s a pretty cool situation, because the lithium that can go into those batteries can come from right underneath the ground in which they stand.”
Titan Mining will refine graphite at a base in either Alabama or Arkansas; Ioneer will process boron and REalloys will process rare earth elements, both at a military hub in Utah. Titan currently mines graphite in New York but ships it to Germany for processing before it returns to U.S. customers. Chief Executive Rita Adiani said the new plant, costing the company between $30 million and $50 million, will still require environmental reviews. “There are no shortcuts around that,” she said.
China controls around 90% of global processing for many rare earth elements and graphite, about 70% of lithium-ion battery production and at least 80% of boron compounds, according to the companies involved. Bernard Rowe, a co-founder at Ioneer, said there was little value in mining domestically only to ship the material overseas: “There’s not much point in having a mine and digging up the material and then sending it all offshore.”
“There is a ticking clock here,” said Jeff Waksman, the Army’s principal deputy assistant secretary for installations, energy and the environment. “We recognize that there is always a risk that China can cut us off from these minerals.”
The base leases remove one of the most challenging barriers to new mineral projects: access to industrial sites that can accommodate complex processes and have infrastructure such as energy and wastewater treatment. However, experts noted that the economics of mineral processing remain difficult. Alvin Camba, a researcher at defense-technology company Lyvi, said margins are low and startup costs high: “The reason it works in China is because it is the global industrial superpower.”
John Spear, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the Colorado School of Mines, said mineral processing is difficult near population centers because of water, air, and environmental pollution concerns, as well as workplace safety hazards. Waksman said the Army facilities must adhere to the same environmental laws as private land: “We have to adhere to all of the same laws.”
Army officials said they have so far received between $15 billion and $20 billion in private investment for building out critical infrastructure on bases, and expect to secure up to around $50 billion. The Trump administration is in the midst of a governmentwide effort to spend many billions of dollars to establish a critical minerals supply chain free from China’s control, an undertaking some experts expect will take at least a decade.