critical minerals

U.S. and Australia sign $3B critical minerals deal

President Donald Trump and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese inked an agreement on Monday that will pump billions of dollars into critical minerals projects. The U.S. and Australia will together contribute $3 billion to the projects over the next six months. The total project pipeline is worth $8.5 billion, the governments said. As part of

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Trump administration may sell deep-sea mining leases at startup’s urging

The U.S. Department of the Interior said Tuesday it’s beginning the process of selling deep sea mining leases after a request from startup Impossible Metals. The agency said the process would “evaluate a potential mineral lease sale in the waters offshore American Samoa.” The administrative procedure requires a publication in the federal register and the

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GM’s new ‘manganese rich’ battery promises cheaper EVs in 2028

General Motors revealed Tuesday a new battery chemistry called lithium-manganese-rich (LMR), which it says should slash costs while delivering driving range that’s just shy of the most advanced batteries on the market.  “With LMR, we can deliver over 400-mile range in our in our trucks while significantly reducing our battery costs,” Kurt Kelty, GM’s vice

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Durin digs up $3.4M to automate drills for critical minerals exploration

Finding new sources of critical minerals is a costly business. Worldwide, companies spent $12 to $13 billion on exploration in 2023. The upshot: mining is the definition of a hit-or-miss business. Companies today use advanced models of the Earth’s crust to pinpoint the best prospects, but even then only about three out of 1,000 attempts

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Trump to endorse coal for data center power in the face of grim market realities

President Donald Trump is set to sign an executive order on Tuesday aimed at boosting coal’s flagging fortunes, reports Bloomberg. The order will direct the federal government to list coal as a critical mineral and force some coal-fired power plants that had faced closure to keep generating electricity. The Trump Administration is expected to couch

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Earth AI’s algorithms found critical minerals in places everyone else ignored

Last summer, mining startup KoBold made a splash when it said it had discovered in Zambia one of the world’s largest copper deposits in more than a decade. Now, another startup, Earth AI, exclusively told TechCrunch about its own discovery: promising deposits of critical minerals in parts of Australia that other mining outfits had ignored

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Trump administration might give a boost to deep-sea mining for critical minerals

Critical minerals are the new oil: everyone needs them, but not every country has them. That’s led some to search for them in some pretty wild places. And few places are as outlandish as the ocean deep. But deep-sea mining appears poised to get a boost from the incoming Trump administration, according to The Wall

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Alta Resource breaks down e-waste for rare earth metals that electronics need

Rare earth metals are largely unknown to the general public, but are used in a huge variety of products. The elements, including neodymium, and praesodymium, and cerium, themselves aren’t rare. But they’re concentrated in certain parts of the globe and are very challenging to refine into anything useful. Their unique electric and magnetic properties make

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