In recent years, the United States has moved to reduce its reliance on foreign supply chains and the risks that come with them. Critical minerals have emerged as a priority with overseas supply and production posing a serious national risk.
Consider boron, which is vital for industrial and defence purposes. It has been decades since the US has had any homegrown capability, and global supply is effectively owned by two companies. Supply is already struggling to keep pace with demand.
In late 2025 boron joined the federal list of critical minerals. The White House’s recent announcement of more than $2 billion in new domestic mining investments, alongside the Export-Import Bank’s $8 million commitment to 5E Advanced Materials‘ Fort Cady project, now the nation’s leading candidate to become the first new US boron producer in decades, is another positive step towards rebuilding America’s critical mineral supply chain. Policymakers are clearly focused on building critical minerals projects and bringing them into production.
However, recognition and funding are just the beginning. Just as important is turning these critical designations into actual supply, and that requires exploration, feasibility studies, permitting, engineering, customer qualification and financing to align. Every credible project has to complete that process, regardless of how strategically important its resource is.
Fort Cady, in Southern California, is that path in practice. Fully permitted, Fort Cady represents the largest reported borate resource in the United States, supporting decades of future production of up to 90,000 tonnes per year. But resource urgently doesn’t make financing for domestic supply any easier to obtain. The Export-Import Bank’s investment in Fort Cady is a welcome development, but it precedes a larger opportunity – our application for a $285 million project-level debt facility, for which we already hold a letter of intent. Government capital does not need to fund construction outright, but it can de-risk a project enough that private capital follows.
Access to secure financing solves one part of the problem. The other is what we’re actually financing. Domestic mining alone cannot guarantee supply chain security. If we extract critical minerals only to ship them overseas for processing, we’ve traded one dependency for another.
Our real goal should be to create complete domestic value chains, from extraction through advanced materials. That means building not only the capacity to mine critical minerals, but also to refine them and convert them into the materials domestic industries actually use. Fort Cady has been designed around this model. We are advancing production of refined borates today while developing higher-value boron materials for use in defense, semiconductors, advanced manufacturing, energy infrastructure and agriculture.
Even that can only be effective if it connects to domestic demand and reaches U.S. customers. At Fort Cady, four commercial agreements across industrial, construction and chemical sectors are an indication that the demand is there. Government and industry must work together and build a supply chain to meet it.
The United States has correctly identified its dependence on foreign critical minerals as a strategic vulnerability. Recent momentum shows that recognition is now widely shared across government and industry. The next step is turning that recognition into permitted, financed and operating projects.
Success will not only be measured by funded projects, but by how many secure domestic supply chains we actually build.
Paul Weibel is Chief Executive Officer of 5E Advanced Materials (Nasdaq: FEAM), which is developing one of the world’s largest new conventional boron deposits through a vertically integrated platform in Southern California.
