Don’t just secure critical minerals supply. Look for substitutes.
Don’t just secure critical minerals supply. Look for substitutes.
Building complete industrial chains for critical minerals is only one way to escape reliance on concentrated foreign supply. A faster way is to find substitute materials and get several of them ready for use.
Substitution has two stages. The first is finding a candidate material that can be used instead of a critical mineral. This can sometimes involve swapping one element out for another, but much more commonly it requires precisely engineering compounds of multiple (non-critical) elements in exact ratios to recreate the original mineral’s exact behaviour. This has traditionally been very difficult because the vast combination of possibilities quickly becomes impossible to calculate, even for the best supercomputers. But a newer way to model and navigate this enormous search space is now possible due to algorithmic advances.
The second stage is qualification: the testing and certification that lets a material be used in a final product. This has not become faster. Much of the process simply cannot be compressed, and it must be repeated for every application.
Even so, qualifying a substitute material takes less time than building mines and processing plants. Finding and qualifying substitutes should become a formal third pillar of Australia’s critical minerals strategy, alongside the promotion of extraction and processing of the original materials.
Australia has deep research expertise in materials substitution and can help its allies with it. However, what Australia lacks is a fast domestic pathway to qualify those alternative materials for defence use. The urgency is a matter of timing: mines and processing plants take roughly a decade to build, but a foreign power can impose export controls on its critical minerals in weeks.
Also, from 1 January 2027 new US defence procurement rules will bar certain covered materials, including rare earth magnets and tantalum, sourced from adversary supply chains, and many contractors cannot yet trace where their own materials came from. Demand for qualified alternatives will arrive years before new mines can meet it.
John Coyne’s 20 July article on the critical mineral antimony approaches the problem from another direction. His Critical Minerals Sovereignty Test asks five questions of any chokepoint mineral: who mines it, who processes it, who buys it, who stockpiles it and who can deny it? A sixth question belongs on that list, and for several minerals now under scrutiny it changes the answer to all five: what can replace it?
Substitution works because a different material can sometimes do the same job without involving the original supply chain. Iron nitride is an example. The magnetic properties of this material, made from abundant iron and nitrogen, were reported in 1972, but producing it in a stable, usable form took until around 2010, and iron nitride magnets, which contain no rare earths, are only now reaching commercial production. Making the material was the first bottleneck; qualifying it was the next.
What has changed recently is the computational capability to search the whole space of candidate materials at once, rather than testing one promising compound at a time, which makes what happens after discovery the binding constraint.
Moving a new material from discovery to deployment has historically taken 10 to 20 years. In 2011 the United States launched the Materials Genome Initiative, a federal program intended to halve that timeline by pairing computation with experiment. Advances in computation have since compressed the discovery stage sharply, sometimes to months.
While qualification is much slower, the United States revealed in July an expectation that it could be sped up: an executive order gave the Department of War 90 days to produce a strategy for accelerating the testing and qualification of new material sources. That strategy will include use of new software and testing procedures and removal of regulations that slow the process.
Australia should establish the equivalent: a fast qualification and certification pathway that runs through an existing body, such as the Defence Science and Technology Group, with results recognised by AUKUS partners, and allied qualification results recognised in return, rather than each ally qualifying the same material through its own process, as Australian suppliers to the AUKUS submarine program must do today. A country that cannot qualify its own materials cannot build its own products that use them, whatever it produces.
John Coyne highlights the importance of Hillgrove, a project in New South Wales that could eventually fulfil about 7 percent of global demand for antimony, but only once it reaches full production with processing and stockpiling built around it – a decade-long undertaking in itself.
Looking for a substitute for antimony could produce faster results, though there’s no guarantee that one can be found. And none of this argues against Hillgrove, or against building processing and stockpiling capacity; Australia should pursue both. But a sovereignty test applied properly should send policymakers looking for a substitute before they commit a decade and real capital to controlling the mine, the refinery and the stockpile of the original material. Where a substitute exists, it is the fastest and most robust pillar of self-reliance Australia can build.
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