The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has announced a nearly $1 billion program to strengthen America’s supply of critical minerals and materials. The funding will support mining, processing, and manufacturing within the country. These materials power clean energy technologies and are vital for national security.
This funding builds on President Trump’s Executive Order to Unleash American Energy. It also supports the DOE’s wider Critical Minerals and Materials Program, which focuses on boosting U.S. production, expanding recycling, and strengthening supply chain security.
U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright remarked:
“For too long, the United States has relied on foreign actors to supply and process the critical materials that are essential to modern life and our national security. Thanks to President Trump’s leadership, the Energy Department will play a leading role in reshoring the processing of critical materials and expanding our domestic supply of these indispensable resources.”
From Mines to Magnets: Where the $1B Goes
The DOE’s $1 billion plan targets key minerals like lithium, cobalt, nickel, and rare earth elements. These are essential for electric vehicle batteries, wind turbines, solar panels, and advanced electronics used in defense systems.
The funding is split across several areas:
- $500 million to the Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains (MESC) for battery material processing, manufacturing, and recycling projects.
- $250 million to the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management to support facilities producing mineral byproducts from coal and other sources.
- $135 million to boost rare earth element production by extracting them from mining waste streams.
- $50 million to refine materials like gallium, germanium, and silicon carbide, which are crucial for semiconductors and high-performance electronics.
- $40 million through ARPA-E’s RECOVER program to extract minerals from industrial wastewater and other waste streams.
By investing from extraction to refining, the DOE aims to reduce reliance on foreign suppliers, especially those in politically unstable regions. The plan also encourages public–private partnerships to scale production faster.
Why Critical Minerals Matter for America’s Future
Critical minerals lie at the heart of America’s economic transformation and defense strategy. In recent years, demand for lithium, cobalt, nickel, and rare earth elements has grown. This rise comes as clean energy technologies become more important.
The U.S. imports more than 80% of its rare earth elements, and most of this comes from one country – China. This heavy reliance creates risks during trade or geopolitical tensions.
The Trump administration has placed strong emphasis on closing this vulnerability. In March 2025, an executive order highlighted critical minerals as vital for national defense. It also set timelines to boost U.S. production and processing capacity. This aligns with broader economic priorities, including clean energy jobs, green infrastructure, and domestic manufacturing.
The Inflation Reduction Act and infrastructure programs have unlocked billions in grants and tax credits. These funds support electric vehicle manufacturing, battery plants, and renewable energy projects.
The DOE’s $1 billion critical mineral fund supports programs by focusing on materials essential for the clean energy economy. Also, by reusing existing industrial facilities to recover minerals instead of building entirely new ones, the DOE can speed up progress and reduce costs.
EV production is expected to grow faster than any other sector, with demand for minerals likely to be more than 10x higher by 2050. This surge will transform the global supply chain and is critical for the global Net Zero aspirations.
The combined impact of industrial strategy, financial incentives, and supply chain investments shows a clear push to:
- Move production back onshore,
- Boost innovation in materials recycling,
- Support the energy transition, and
- Cut down on foreign imports.
Building on Early Wins
The DOE’s new $1 billion investment boosts earlier funding for critical minerals. This aims to strengthen U.S. industrial capacity.
In 2023, the Department gave $150 million to various clean mineral projects. These include direct lithium extraction in Nevada and early-stage nickel processing partnerships in Oregon.
Since 2021, DOE has invested more than $58 million in research. This work focuses on recovering critical minerals from industrial waste or tailings. They are turning by-products into valuable feedstock.
These R&D projects created pilot facilities. They show how to recover lithium from geothermal brines and rare earths from coal ash. This approach models resource use without needing new mining.
Built on these early successes, the new $1 billion fund signals a shift from pilot programs to scaling proven technologies. It allows U.S. manufacturers to pivot from lab-scale experiments to full commercial operations.
For example, lithium recovery projects are moving from test sites to large extraction facilities. This shift is supported by the technical help from DOE’s national labs.
Likewise, battery recycling pilots are set to grow. More recycling centers are being planned in the Midwest and Southwest.
This funding approach provides continuity. It supports U.S. firms from basic research to commercialization. This helps them quickly move from proof-of-concept to production-ready operations. It also reassures private investors that government backing is strategic and sustained.
McKinsey projects that developing new copper and nickel projects will require between $250 billion and $350 billion by 2030. By 2050, the broader critical minerals sector could grow into a trillion-dollar market to support the net-zero or low-carbon transition.
Washington’s Backing, Industry’s Buy-In
Political backing for the domestic minerals strategy is strong. A recent executive order aims to speed up mining permits and provide federal support.
The Defense Department has also invested $400 million in MP Materials, the largest stakeholder in the only U.S. rare earth mine. This deal includes a new plant to produce magnets for electronics and defense applications.
Industry players are moving in the same direction. Battery maker Clarios is exploring sites for a $1 billion processing and recovery plant in the country. These moves show a shared goal between government and industry to rebuild America’s mineral supply chains.
Opportunities—and the Roadblocks Ahead
The DOE’s program offers major opportunities:
- Less reliance on foreign countries for essential materials.
- Creation of high-quality U.S. jobs.
- Growth in recycling and recovery technologies.
However, challenges remain. Mining and processing must be done without harming the environment. Technology costs need to stay competitive. And benefits must be shared fairly with local and Indigenous communities.
Amid all this, the global race for critical minerals is intensifying. Many countries are already securing their own supplies. The U.S. wants to close its supply gap and become a leader in clean energy manufacturing.
The DOE’s nearly $1 billion plan is a key step toward reshoring America’s critical minerals industry. It builds on earlier successes and aligns with private investments and new policies. If successful, it could make U.S. supply chains more secure, support the clean energy transition, and strengthen national security.
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The accounting differences that decide whether your nature investment shows up in inventory, in BVCM, or nowhere at all.
The question reaches a procurement team about three weeks before the next sustainability committee meeting. Someone has read about insetting. Someone else has just signed off on an offset purchase. The CSO wants to know if the two are interchangeable. The answer is no, and the GHG Protocol Land Sector and Removals Standard is the reason why.
This article walks through what each term means at audit-grade specificity, what the standards actually say about how each gets counted, and how to decide which tool fits which target. The insetting vs offsetting question is one of the most-searched in corporate climate strategy, and one of the most poorly answered. By the end of this piece, you should be able to brief a committee on the difference without notes.
The two definitions, in plain English
Offsetting means buying carbon credits generated outside your value chain and retiring them against your residual emissions. The reduction happens somewhere else, financed by you, and the credit is the receipt.
Insetting means investing in emission reductions or removals inside your own value chain, typically with suppliers, where the reduction is directly linked to the products and services you buy. The reduction happens inside the boundary of your Scope 3 inventory, and the accounting treatment is fundamentally different.
The shorthand from the University of Oxford’s Nature-based Insetting Initiative is useful: insetting is what you do with the supply chain you have; offsetting is what you do with the supply chain you do not have.
What the GHG Protocol Land Sector Standard actually says
The GHG Protocol Land Sector and Removals Standard, finalised in 2024 after a multi-year pilot, sets the rules for how land-based emission reductions and removals enter corporate inventories. The Standard distinguishes between inventory accounting (Scope 1, 2, and 3) and project or intervention accounting (a separate methodology for crediting).
For insetting, the practical implication is that supplier-level interventions, when properly measured and attributed, can reduce your Scope 3 category 1 (purchased goods and services) emissions in your inventory. The reduction is not a credit retired against the inventory; it is a lower inventory number, period.
For offsetting, the credit is retired separately. It can be reported as a contribution toward a net-zero claim under the SBTi Beyond Value Chain Mitigation framework or as part of a VCMI Carbon Integrity claim, but it does not lower the inventory number.
A practical consequence: if your Science Based Target requires a 50% absolute reduction in Scope 3 emissions by 2030, insetting moves you toward the target. Offsetting does not. This single point of difference reshapes the procurement decision.
When insetting counts toward Scope 3 (and when it does not)
Insetting counts toward Scope 3 only when several conditions are met:
- The intervention must occur with an entity in your value chain.
- The emissions reduction or removal must be measured against a defensible baseline.
- The reduction must be attributed to your share of that supplier’s output, not double-counted with other buyers.
- It must follow the inventory accounting rules in the GHG Protocol Land Sector Standard, not the project accounting rules used to generate credits.
The most common failure mode is double counting. If your supplier sells the same reduction as a credit on the voluntary market and also reports it to you as a Scope 3 reduction, the math breaks. The Standard requires you to address this risk, typically by purchasing and retiring the supplier-issued credit as part of your inventory or by contractual provisions that prevent the supplier from selling the reduction twice.
When insetting does not count toward Scope 3: when the intervention sits with a supplier you do not buy from, when the baseline is not defensible, when the attribution is unclear, or when the documentation does not survive audit. Those cases default to Beyond Value Chain Mitigation, which is still useful but operates on a different ledger.
The procurement and supplier engagement question
Insetting is harder than offsetting. That is the unfashionable truth most buyers eventually confront. Offsetting is a transaction; insetting is a relationship.
To run an insetting program, you need supplier mapping precise enough to know which farms or facilities sit at which Scope 3 boundary. You need an engagement model that gets suppliers to participate, which usually requires multi-year commitments and shared economics. You need an MRV architecture that measures the right things and produces audit-ready documentation. And you need a contractual structure that prevents double counting and protects both sides.
The trade-off you receive in return is significant. Reductions count against your inventory rather than your residual. Supplier relationships deepen, which protects sourcing continuity. Yield and quality improvements often follow regenerative interventions, which reduces your input cost over time. And the regulatory file, under CSRD, CSDDD, EUDR, and the SBTi FLAG Guidance, is materially stronger.
Choosing the right tool for the right target
A practical decision rule. If your target is a science-based Scope 3 reduction and you operate in a FLAG sector or source FLAG commodities, insetting is the structurally correct tool. If your target is a net-zero claim that includes neutralising hard-to-abate residual emissions outside your value chain, BVCM via high-integrity offsets is the structurally correct tool. Most companies with material Scope 3 exposure need both, in different proportions, sequenced over time.
The sequencing matters. Insetting takes longer to stand up but produces a permanent reduction in the inventory. Offsetting can be transacted faster but does not change the inventory and now sits under tighter claim restrictions. Treat them as complementary tools with different jobs, not as substitutes. The Accountability Framework Initiative and the IUCN Global Standard for Nature-based Solutions both provide useful guardrails for the insetting side, with biodiversity, human rights, and benefit-sharing requirements that go beyond carbon math.
If you are mapping a Scope 3 reduction roadmap and need to scope which interventions count toward your inventory versus which sit in Beyond Value Chain Mitigation, the carbon and sustainability experts at Carbon Credit Capital can help you structure a nature-based supply chain investment program that fits your FLAG exposure, your target architecture, and your audit horizon. Schedule a consultation.
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