A senior US official told Asia Times that American refiners would rely on their own innovation to make the country self-sufficient in critical minerals, and that she was confident they would succeed. Industry experts, however, said some US projects would still have to pay high costs to learn China’s traditional extraction method, which Chinese firms have spent more than two decades perfecting.
“Over the last 20 years, we’ve developed a lot of innovation, but we didn’t develop the manufacturing know-how,” Audrey Robertson, assistant secretary of energy at the Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation of the US Department of Energy (DOE), told Asia Times at the Financial Times Metals & Mining Summit in London on October 15.