EXCLUSIVE — The Department of Energy announced Tuesday that it awarded $162 million to nine selected projects across the country aimed at recovering critical minerals and materials from industrial feedstocks as part of the Trump administration’s effort to diversify the U.S. supply chain. 

“The focus of this particular funding opportunity was to use government dollars to enable the private sector to extract those critical minerals in new and innovative ways,” Assistant Energy Secretary Audrey Robertson told the Washington Examiner.