The US Department of Energy (DOE) is awarding $17 million across projects that will accelerate critical materials innovation while promoting safe, sustainable, economic, and efficient solutions to meet current and future supply chain needs. The projects, which span 11 states, are strengthening and streamlining manufacturing for high-impact components and technologies such as hydrogen fuel cells, magnets for high-efficiency motors, high-performance lithium-ion batteries, and high-yield low-defect power electronics.

These projects are coordinated through DOE’s Critical Materials Collaborative, which is designed to catalyze a robust critical materials innovation ecosystem by connecting DOE’s critical minerals and materials portfolio with industry and beyond, supporting real-world innovation through each stage of the research, development, and demonstration (RD&D) pipeline.

The supported small-scale demonstrations for critical materials including lithium, nickel, cobalt, rare earth elements, platinum group metals, silicon carbide, copper, and graphite will help de-risk critical materials innovations and accelerate commercial readiness and adoption for critical materials including the aforementioned.

The selected projects:

Use magnets with reduced critical materials content:

• University of Texas at Arlington (Arlington, Texas): $1,000,000

• Ames National Laboratory (Ames, Iowa): $1,000,000

• ABB, Inc. (Cary, North Carolina): $1,520,000

• Niron Magnetics, Inc. (Minneapolis, Minnesota): $2,700,000

Improve unit operations of processing and manufacturing of critical materials:

• Free Form Fibers (Saratoga Springs, NY): $926,000

• Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Blacksburg, Virginia): $1,000,000

• University of North Dakota (Grand Forks, North Dakota): $1,000,000

• Ames National Laboratory (Ames, Iowa): $1,000,000

• Oak Ridge National Laboratory (Oak Ridge, Tennessee): $1,000,000

• Summit Nanotech USA Corporation (Lafayette, Colorado): $1,000,000

Recover critical material from scrap and post-consumer products:

• Texas Agricultural and Mechanical University (College Station, Texas): $1,280,000

• Infinite Elements (El Paso, Texas): $1,500,000

Reduce critical material demand for clean energy technologies:

• Celadyne Technologies (Chicago, Illinois): $1,000,000

• COnovate (Wauwatosa, Wisconsin): $1,000,000

This opportunity was funded by EERE’s Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Technologies Office (AMMTO).