This is a two-year project supported by the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) through its Defense Education and Civilian University Research (DECUR) Partnership, a program under DoD’s Minerva Research Initiative (Minerva). The project is managed by the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas at Austin.

The clean energy transition will be minerals and metals intensive. Currently, supply chains are overwhelmingly reliant on imports from China. Given rising geo-strategic tensions between the United States and China, that dependence has potentially troubling implications for U.S. national security. In order to understand whether and how such dependence might create national security risks requires an exploration into the nature and extent of likely future demand for and supplies of raw materials and intermediate inputs as the scope and scale of demand for batteries and other inputs increase. Further, although metals and minerals have different properties from liquid fuels, they potentially can be employed as coercive foreign policy tools. The control of energy supplies was the basis for the 1973 oil crisis and is causing significant global shifts as a result of Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Such an effort with minerals and metals, if it were to be employed by the PRC, could potentially cause significant disruption to Western economies and national security.

The project aims to interrogate more fully foundational social science questions, particularly important since the U.S. has costly plans to diversify its supply chains for these materials. These diversification plans could raise the costs associated with the clean energy transition and will require significant transformations in trade and alliance patterns. The project will use two expert roundtable convenings to collect state-of-the-art social science-informed approaches to modeling and understanding these questions. We will invite experts from academia, security, and policy to two workshops where they will present short memos for comment and discussion. The first workshop was held in fall 2023 at the Colorado School of Mines (memos and videos). The second workshop was held in spring 2024 at the University of Texas at Austin (memos and videos).

The third component will be a table-top exercise (TTX) at the Naval War College in Spring 2025 where participants will role play a major supply disruption to the battery and metals supply chain. The TTX will produce a summary report and brief for a wider policy audience. PME students will be involved in writing the report and brief and administering and participating in the TTX. 

The core contribution to social science will be surfacing best practices in understanding and modeling this dynamic decision space, identifying critical gaps and potential paths forward for overcoming them at the intersection of technology, society, and security. The implications for national security are a more robust analytical basis for decision-making. Given the stakes, including revived geo-strategic competition with China as well as a re-orientation of the U.S. national economy to revive manufacturing, an examination of the foundations for the emergent turn to diversification of supply chains and on-shoring and ally-shoring of supply is important and necessary.

This material is based upon work supported by, or in part by, the Office of Naval Research grant number N000142312722 under the Minerva Initiative DECUR Partnership of the U.S. Department of Defense.