The Ambassador Alfred Hoffman, Jr. Center for Critical Minerals Strategy
SAFE’s Center for Critical Minerals Strategy is dedicated to building secure, sustainable, and ethical supply chains for electric vehicle batteries in North America.
The dynamic landscape for critical minerals is shaped by policy developments across various countries, institutions, and agencies, globally. A comprehensive approach to effectively implement and harmonize existing policies across minerals-consuming countries, like Europe, North America, Australia, Japan, and Korea—while strengthening efforts to work in partnership with like-minded and resource-rich countries—is needed. Together this two-pronged strategy will level the playing field, ensure high standards are met, and secure critical mineral supply chains.
Accelerating our mineral security objectives while staying true to its mission of facilitating “A Global Race to the Top,” the Minerals Center focuses on the following pivotal areas:
- Ensuring supply chain transparency, from extraction to processing to recycling.
- Bolstering midstream processing and recycling to incentive domestic and allied production of batteries, permanent magnets, and more necessary for the 21st century economy.
- Aligning domestic policies with multilateral commercial diplomacy efforts and trade policy.
- Infusing critical mineral policies with private sector and investor perspectives.
- Advancing capacity building in lower-income resource-rich countries.
- Strengthening the Transatlantic Alliance and supporting NATO’s ‘Energy Transition by Design’ workstream.
- Taking stock of existing policies on critical minerals and their substitutes with applications in energy and defense sectors, their strengths and weaknesses, to inform what is needed next.
The Minerals Center operates internationally, analyzing critical minerals and accompanying electrification policies in resource-rich and like-minded consuming countries. Minerals Center policy recommendations are currently geared towards a United States audience. The Minerals Center works with SAFE’s European Initiative for Energy Security (EIES) on European policy recommendations and is growing its global footprint through ties to the MSP.
The U.S. Department of State selected the Minerals Center as its sole NGO partner to engage the private sector around the MSP and advise on policy. This work is driven through the Minerals Investment Network for Vital Energy Security and Transition (MINVEST).
SAFE Reports
