Competition for critical minerals used in the energy, manufacturing, and tech sectors is heating up to be a major geopolitical flashpoint around the world. The supply chains for essential ingredients for clean energy manufacturing like lithium, cobalt, magnesium, and nickel, are dominated by China, creating a precarious concentration of global supplies. But the United States is hoping to even the playing field by sourcing certain critical minerals from seawater through the use of cutting-edge technology.Today, China supplies about 85-95 percent of the world’s refined rare earth minerals, and is home to a whopping 85-90 percent of the world’s rare earth mine-to-metal refining. Chinese refineries produce 68 percent of the world’s cobalt, 65 percent of nickel, and 60 percent of EV-battery-grade lithium. This extreme concentration creates a dangerous precarity in global energy security. “If producers of these substances decide to restrict access to their customers as a political lever, if prices shoot up, or if more industries develop an appetite for them and eat into the supply,” Vox reports, “companies could go bankrupt and efforts to limit climate change could slow down.”But for Beijing, control over global critical mineral supplies provides a huge leg up both economically and geopolitically, especially as global demand for these materials continues to balloon in size. The International Energy Agency projects that global demand for critical minerals by the clean energy industry will at least double, and possibly even quadruple, by 2040. That range depends on the world’s rate of clean energy adoption, but the higher end is looking likely as global clean energy growth has been kicked into overdrive by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Critical mineral demand growth will largely come from electric vehicles and battery storage, with lithium seeing the fastest rate of growth.Set OilPrice.com as a preferred source in Google here.“A world powered by renewables is a world hungry for critical minerals,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said at a Panel on Critical Energy Transition Minerals in 2024. “For developing countries, critical minerals are a critical opportunity — to create jobs, diversify economies, and dramatically boost revenues. But only if they are managed properly.”The United States has fallen far behind in the race to shore up critical mineral supply chains, but a team in California may have just developed a game-changing technology that could allow the country to start to level the playing field. The new co-flow reactor, developed by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), is designed to extract high-purity magnesium hydroxide from seawater for use in U.S. industries. Going forward, the technology could be used to extract other critical minerals as well, including nickel.Seawater contains an abundance of critical minerals in varying concentrations. “Just 0.1 percent of seawater contains enough critical minerals like magnesium and lithium, if we can fully extract them, to meet humanity’s needs for the next 50,000 years or more,” Jessica Cross, a chemical oceanographer at PNNL, said in a recent press release.The new co-flow reactor being developed at PNNL cycles seawater and sodium hydroxide together, which create magnesium hydroxide when they meet. Magnesium hydroxide is already widely used across the country and is currently imported in large volumes. The team behind the new model thinks that this model could be combined with desalination plants with groundbreaking results. PNNL analysis of found that installing the technology at California’s Carlsbad desalination facility could produce up to 1.16 million pounds (524,000 kilograms) of magnesium hydroxide each day. That’s more than triple the United States’ daily use in one plant alone. Moreover, the technology has immense potential for scalability, possibly opening up opportunities for export in the future.“The biggest advantage of seawater is that on average it has reasonably standard chemical composition all around the world,” explained Chinmayee Subban, PhD, a chemist at PNNL. “That means that we can develop a technology for one location and rapidly scale it to be deployed in many different places.”By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.comMore Top Reads From Oilprice.comAI Boom Sends U.S. Electricity Demand to New HighWorld-First Floating Wind Technology to Help Power Oil RigsOil and Gas Employment Hits a 2026 Low Even as Production Sets Records