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Graphite and manganese mining in the U.S.: Proposed projects and federal battery mineral policies

2025· article· en· W4412967494 on OpenAlex
Elizabeth Holley, Lukas Fahle, Nicole Smith, Raphael Deberdt, Jordan L. Calderon, G. V. Gibbs, Morgan Bazilian

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

fundA Canadian funder is recorded on the work.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueResources Policy · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEngineering
TopicExtraction and Separation Processes
Canadian institutionsnot available
FundersNational Research Council CanadaNational Science Foundation
KeywordsManganeseMineralBattery (electricity)Natural resource economicsBusinessEnvironmental scienceMaterials scienceMetallurgyEconomicsPhysics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Demand is increasing for the minerals used in energy transmission and storage, such as graphite and manganese in batteries. These two commodities are produced in relatively few locations around the world, and major consumers such as the European Union (EU) and the United States (US) are highly reliant on imports, especially for refined products from China. In the US, graphite and manganese are not currently mined. In efforts to avoid geopolitical supply chain disruptions, the U.S. federal government has implemented new policies promoting domestic mining and processing of critical minerals. This contribution reviews the geological resources and development status of graphite and manganese projects in the U.S. and examines the impacts of policies on U.S. mining and processing of these two commodities. Measured, indicated, and inferred resources of 20.9 Mt are known for graphite, including 3.7 Mt of reserves. Resources of 50.5 Mt are known for manganese, with no established reserves. Graphite exploration is in advanced stages in Alaska and Alabama and in early stages in Montana and New York. There is one operating processing plant for natural graphite in Louisiana and one is under construction in Alabama. Synthetic graphite is produced in one plant in New York, and synthetic graphite plants are under construction in Georgia and Tennessee. One manganese mine is in permitting review in Arizona, and manganese exploration is underway in Minnesota and Arizona. Historic manganese mines in Arkansas, Maine, Colorado, Nevada, and Montana are unlikely to reopen in the near term, and exploration for manganese on the seafloor is in very early stages. The potential for known resources to meet demand is modeled based on three energy transition scenarios and a range of battery share assumptions, showing that known graphite resources are likely sufficient to meet future U.S. demand for hundreds of years, whereas manganese resources are sufficient to meet only decades of projected U.S. demand. Supply bottlenecks will arise if these projects do not progress into development. Policies intended to spur domestic production include the Biden administration's Bipartisan Infrastructure Law of 2021, the 2022 authorization of the Defense Production Act, the 2022 CHIPS in Science Act, the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, as well as the second Trump administration's 2025 executive orders on Unleashing American Energy and Unleashing America's Offshore Minerals and Resources. Potential shortfalls include overemphasis on processing compared to mining, insufficient incentives, and a contentious regulatory framework for both terrestrial and deep sea mining. • Graphite and manganese are geologically available in the United States. • New policies are aimed at increasing domestic production. • Federal investment and research are needed to enable responsible development.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: Observational
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.361
Threshold uncertainty score0.302

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.010
GPT teacher head0.262
Teacher spread0.251 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it