NIOCORP MINE- Project Vault: How the US Plans to Secure 60, Rare earths get bulk of Trump’s ‘uneven’ $18.6B funding despite small role & a bit more with coffee...
May 12th, 2026~Project Vault: How the US Plans to Secure 60
Project Vault: How the US Plans to Secure 60 | Skillings
The United States just announced a mineral stockpile larger than anything attempted since the Cold War. Not as a military exercise. As an industrial insurance policy.
Project Vault, unveiled February 2, 2026, commits $12 billion to warehousing all 60 commodities on the U.S. Geological Survey’s critical minerals list. The objective isn’t subtle: eliminate the leverage that China and other suppliers hold over American manufacturing. And it’s structured as something Washington rarely attempts: a public-private partnership that actually asks companies to put money where their supply chain anxieties live.
This isn’t a stockpile for decoration. It’s a hedge against the kind of disruption that already shut down Ford Explorer production in 2025 when rare earths dried up. That wasn’t a defense project. That was a civilian SUV line going dark because one input disappeared.
Welcome to the new playbook for commodity security.
How Project Vault Actually Works
The mechanics matter more than the headline number. This isn’t the government hoarding minerals in a bunker and hoping someone eventually needs them.
Manufacturers submit requests specifying exactly which minerals they need and in what quantities. Project Vault acquires those materials and stores them in secure facilities across the country. Companies then commit to two binding requirements: purchase those minerals at a fixed price set when they enrolled, and cover upfront storage costs plus loan interest.
The structure shifts long-term price risk away from individual balance sheets and onto a centralized, government-backed mechanism. A mid-sized manufacturer can’t afford to warehouse two years of gallium or germanium on spec. But pooled through Project Vault, that becomes feasible.
The $12 billion comes from two sources: $10 billion in Export-Import Bank financing: EXIM’s largest commitment in its 92-year history: and nearly $2 billion in private capital. Three commodity trading houses handle procurement and supply: Mercuria Energy Group, Hartree Partners, and Traxys North America. They’re not consultants. They’re buying and moving the physical material.
Major manufacturers have already signaled participation. GE Vernova, Clarios, and Boeing aren’t just expressing support. They’re preparing to lock in tonnage. When an aerospace giant and a battery manufacturer both show up, you know the exposure is real.
Why 2026 Is the Inflection Point
Ford’s 2025 shutdown wasn’t an anomaly. It was a preview.
The Explorer halt exposed what happens when a single rare earth element becomes unavailable. Production stopped. Not slowed: stopped. The supply chain didn’t have redundancy because there wasn’t economic justification to build it. One supplier controlled the input. When that supplier tightened allocation, the line went dark.
That’s the civilian case. Defense procurement faces identical vulnerabilities, but with fewer alternative suppliers and longer qualification timelines. When President Trump compared Project Vault to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, the parallel was deliberate. Oil shocks threatened economic stability in the 1970s. Mineral shocks threaten it now.
The 60 commodities on the USGS critical minerals list aren’t exotic curiosities. They’re inputs for batteries, semiconductors, permanent magnets, defense systems, renewable energy infrastructure, and telecommunications hardware. Lithium, cobalt, rare earths, graphite, manganese, nickel: these aren’t substitutable at scale. You can’t engineer around a shortage when the chemistry requires a specific element.
China controls processing capacity for most of these materials, even when ore originates elsewhere. Approximately 80% of rare earth refining happens in China. Nearly 70% of cobalt processing. Over 60% of lithium refining. Those aren’t market positions. Those are chokepoints.
The Direct Impact on North American Miners
Project Vault changes the calculus for domestic and allied producers immediately.
Lundin Mining, with significant copper and zinc operations in the Americas, now faces a buyer with committed offtake and fixed pricing. That de-risks expansion projects and makes marginal deposits economically viable. When a government-backed stockpile offers to purchase at a locked price, project finance becomes substantially easier. Banks like certainty. Project Vault sells certainty.
Hecla Mining, one of the largest U.S. silver producers with growing base and critical metals exposure, benefits from similar dynamics. The company’s Lucky Friday Mine in Idaho and its polymetallic operations produce several commodities that fall under Project Vault’s mandate. Guaranteed offtake at known pricing eliminates the single biggest barrier to mine development: demand uncertainty.
But there’s a more significant strategic shift. Project Vault doesn’t just create a buyer. It validates a new pricing framework. When manufacturers commit to fixed prices through the stockpile, they’re establishing a floor. That floor becomes the baseline for negotiating with other suppliers. Producers outside the U.S. who want to maintain market share suddenly face competition from a non-commercial buyer willing to hold inventory indefinitely.
The timing intersects with a broader investment cycle. North American mining projects have struggled to attract capital despite rising commodity prices because investors fear demand destruction or substitution. Project Vault eliminates that variable for 60 specific materials. The U.S. government just became the demand backstop.
The China Calculation Nobody Wants to Discuss
Project Vault will initially source materials from China. It has to.
When alternative processing capacity doesn’t exist at commercial scale, there’s no other option. The stockpile can’t wait for new refineries to come online. It needs to start accumulating immediately because the supply vulnerabilities exist right now.
The irony is unavoidable. The program designed to reduce dependence on Chinese supply chains will, in its first phase, send billions to Chinese processors. But the strategic logic holds: having a six-month or twelve-month buffer of Chinese-sourced material provides runway to develop alternatives. Without that buffer, any disruption creates immediate shortages.
Project Vault operates alongside complementary initiatives designed to accelerate that transition. The Forum on Resource Geostrategic Engagement (FORGE) aims to create preferential trading relationships with allies. Bilateral pricing agreements with Canada, Australia, and select South American nations use price floors rather than tariffs to incentivize domestic refining investment.
The three-commodity firms managing procurement: Mercuria, Hartree, Traxys: specialize in navigating exactly this kind of geographically fragmented supply chain. They don’t have political constraints. They source wherever the material exists at the required purity and price. Over time, as North American and allied capacity grows, sourcing shifts. But that’s a five-year process, not a six-month one.
China understands the threat. Export controls on gallium and germanium implemented in 2023 and tightened through 2025 were direct responses to Western efforts to build independent supply chains. Those controls created the regional price spreads that now define critical minerals markets: a topic we’ve covered extensively regarding their impact on mining finance teams.
What This Means for Resource Nationalism
Project Vault accelerates a trend already reshaping global mining: governments treating commodity access as a national security issue rather than a trade question.
Every major economy is implementing some version of strategic reserves, export licensing, or forced localization. Canada’s Critical Minerals Strategy. The EU’s Critical Raw Materials Act. Japan’s stockpiling programs. Australia’s supply chain resilience initiatives. These aren’t coordinated policies. They’re parallel responses to the same vulnerability.
For mining companies, this creates both opportunity and complication. Opportunity because governments are now willing to underwrite projects that private capital wouldn’t touch. Complication because navigating resource nationalism now requires political risk assessment at every stage.
Project Vault’s public-private structure offers a template that other nations will study. The U.S. isn’t nationalizing mines. It’s not imposing export bans. It’s creating a mechanism where private manufacturers share costs and government provides scale. That’s politically palatable in a way that direct state ownership isn’t.
The $12 billion price tag sounds enormous until you contextualize it. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve holds roughly 400 million barrels valued at approximately $30 billion at current prices. Critical minerals don’t require that volume because their value-per-ton is substantially higher. Sixty commodities stored at commercially relevant quantities costs less than crude oil precisely because you need less physical material to achieve strategic impact.
The 180-Day Timeline and What Comes Next
Project Vault’s announcement included a 180-day enrollment window for manufacturers. That’s not arbitrary. It’s designed to force decisions before companies can wait to see how markets develop.
The first tranche of purchases will reveal which commodities face the deepest supply anxiety. If lithium and rare earth requests dominate, that signals where manufacturers see the greatest risk. If the requests spread evenly across all 60 materials, it suggests broader systemic concern rather than commodity-specific shortages.
Commodity traders are watching enrollment closely. Fixed-price commitments from major manufacturers will influence spot markets immediately. If Boeing locks in ten years of titanium at a set price, spot titanium suddenly has a floor. Producers know there’s a buyer of last resort.
The three firms managing procurement: Mercuria, Hartree, Traxys: will begin acquiring material in Q2 2026. They’re not waiting for policy clarity or international coordination. They’re executing now, which means prices for several critical commodities will face upward pressure from a large, non-commercial buyer entering the market.
For mining operators and investors, Project Vault represents the clearest signal yet that commodity security has moved from theoretical concern to funded priority. When the U.S. government commits $12 billion with EXIM’s full backing, that’s not a pilot program. That’s infrastructure.
The stockpile won’t eliminate supply chain vulnerabilities overnight. Refining capacity takes years to build. Mining projects require a decade from discovery to production. But it creates the breathing room needed to make those investments without gambling on sustained high prices or uninterrupted access to existing suppliers.
That’s the real strategic value. Not the material sitting in warehouses. The optionality it provides to build alternatives without immediate economic pressure. You can’t disrupt geology or metallurgy. But you can buy time. Project Vault just purchased approximately 18 to 24 months of it.
The question isn’t whether other nations will follow this model. Several already are. The question is whether the model proves effective before the next supply shock tests it. Ford’s Explorer line going dark was expensive but manageable. The next disruption might not be.
May 11th, 2026~Rare earths get bulk of Trump’s ‘uneven’ $18.6B funding despite small role
Rare earths get bulk of Trump's 'uneven' $18.6B funding despite small role - MINING.COM
Despite the Trump administration investing around $18.6 billion into critical mineral projects, the investment push is lopsided, with the rare earth supply chain receiving far more funding than other metals, BMO Global Commodities Research says in a new report.
The Trump government’s roughly $18.6 billion in committed and uncommitted funding breaks down into about $15.9 billion in loans, $2.1 billion in equity investments and $615 million in grants across 60 instances of project financing, BMO analysts George Heppel and Max Yerrill said in a note on Monday about their report.
This funding has come through new legislative avenues such as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and existing sources like the US Export Import Bank (EXIM), the United States’ International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) and the CHIPS Act.
‘Great financial pivot’
“The great US finance machine has pivoted into critical minerals,” the analysts said. “Never before in the USA’s history have we seen a mobilization of capital and policy in support of critical mineral supply at the scale of what has been achieved in the past two years. But [it] has only been partially distributed so far.”
The US government’s work to develop critical mineral – and especially rare earths – supply chains outside China’s control reflects efforts to catch up with Beijing’s significant lead. The country’s state-led investment into rare earths dates back to 1964 and by the 1980s, Chinese chemists had developed methods to affordably separate rare earths into their individual elements, an expensive and complex process that most Western companies are still trying to master.
Despite rare earths’ strategic significance for defence applications, they continue to attract outsized government funding even though their market value is relatively small. The total volume of the elements bought worldwide in 2024 was just $3.5 billion, compared with more than $300 billion for copper, $20 to $35 billion for lithium and $10 to $15 billion for uranium, according to figures from Reuters and the US Geological Survey.
Vast sums for rare earths
US rare earth developers and explorers have significantly benefitted from government investment, a standout example being private Brazilian miner Serra Verde which the DFC backed with a $565 million funding package in February. USA Rare Earth’s (Nasdaq: USAR) $2.8 billion acquisition of Serra Verde is expected to close in the third quarter. Last summer, the Department of Defense (DoD) invested $400 million in MP Materials (NYSE: MP), the sole rare earths miner in North America, making the DoD the largest shareholder in the company.
The BMO analysts note that graphite projects have also been tapped for sizeable investments, such as Graphite One (TSXV: GPH), which might receive about $2.1 billion from EXIM. Most of the loan would go towards a planned graphite anode plant in Ohio and the rest for its Graphite Creek project in Alaska.
Unbalanced funding
The authors estimate that the potential funding available to the Trump administration amounts to hundreds of billions of dollars, yet they note other critical metal projects such as for tungsten, antimony, nickel, cobalt and others are underinvested.
The world’s supply of tungsten is mostly controlled by China. The hard, dense metal is used mainly for cemented carbides for cutting and drilling tools, as well as in alloys for aerospace, electronics and military applications like armour-piercing ammunition.
Tungsten projects have received funding, though it pales in comparison to the sums advanced for rare earths projects. Fireweed Metals’ (TSXV: FWZ) Mactung project in Yukon – said to be one of the world’s largest undeveloped tungsten deposits – has received about $15.8 million from the US Department of Defense. That department also backed Northcliff Resources’ (TSX: NCF) Sisson tungsten-molybdenum project in New Brunswick with $15 million.
Considering its value, government investment in tungsten is “concentrated and underweight” and antimony, nickel, cobalt, tantalum, and tin have received “very little funding relative to their importance,” the BMO analysts say.
March 2026~The US’s Critical Mineral Offensive Strategy How Can Europe Step Up?
The US’s Critical Mineral Offensive Strategy: How Can Europe Step Up?
FORM YOUR OWN OPINIONS & CONCLUSIONS ABOVE:
Opinion: Project Vault is beginning to reveal just how strategically important Elk Creek could become. The U.S. is now committing $12 BILLION toward securing all 60 critical minerals through a government-backed stockpile system supported by EXIM financing, major manufacturers like Boeing, and commodity powerhouses including Traxys itself. That matters because Traxys is already embedded directly into the emerging U.S. critical minerals supply chain architecture — and NioCorp’s pending deal with Traxys suddenly looks even more significant in that context.
At the same time, NioCorp continues advancing Elk Creek with ongoing underground portal construction, a pending DFS expected now through June, and a potential EXIM FID pathway still targeted around mid-2026. The bigger picture is becoming harder to ignore: America is openly scrambling to secure domestic supply for niobium, scandium, titanium, magnetic rare earths, advanced alloys, and defense-critical materials as China tightens control over global processing and supply chains.
If the Traxys agreement closes alongside a strong DFS, Elk Creek may check nearly every remaining box lenders and government agencies want to see: secure products, commercial distribution, advanced engineering, scalable separation flowsheets, strategic relevance, and long-life domestic supply. At ~$6/share, the disconnect between NioCorp’s current valuation and the growing national urgency surrounding critical minerals continues to look increasingly difficult to justify.
As Trump heads into talks with Xi this week, one issue will sit at the center of the table whether publicly stated or not: critical minerals and America’s dangerous dependence on foreign supply chains. That’s exactly why Elk Creek stands out.
NioCorp isn’t just talking about mining ore — the company is advancing a fully integrated U.S.-based strategy spanning mining, processing, oxides, alloys, ScAl applications, rare earth pathways, and future magnet recycling potential, all while portal ramp construction continues toward completion around September 2026. Add in the pending Traxys deal, imminent DFS, potential EXIM pathway, and growing national urgency around defense materials, and it becomes harder to view Elk Creek as simply another junior mining project.
At roughly a ~$6 share price, the market still appears to be valuing NioCorp like a speculative developer while the geopolitical landscape increasingly points to Elk Creek becoming exactly what Mark Smith has long suggested: a true National Strategic Asset hiding in plain sight.
Staying tuned with many.... waiting for more material news as it becomes available....
"All aboard!..."
Chico
