LEARN / GLOSSARY
Critical mineral
A mineral designated as critical by the Secretary of the Interior under three statutory criteria. The current list carries 60 minerals. A separate federal list of critical materials exists under a different authority, and the two do not contain the same things.
Definition type: statutory · Last verified August 2026 against the final 2025 List of Critical Minerals, 90 FR 50494
Definition
Section 7002 of the Energy Act of 2020 defines a critical mineral as any mineral, element, substance or material designated as critical by the Secretary of the Interior, acting through the Director of the U.S. Geological Survey, using three criteria: that it is essential to the economic or national security of the United States; that its supply chain is vulnerable to disruption, including from foreign political risk, abrupt demand growth, military conflict, unrest and protectionist behavior; and that it serves an essential function in the manufacturing of a product whose absence would have significant consequences.
The statute excludes fuel minerals, along with common varieties of sand, gravel, stone, pumice, cinders and clay.
Measurement noteTwo federal lists run in parallel under the same section of the same act. The Secretary of the Interior designates critical minerals through USGS. The Secretary of Energy separately determines critical materials, defined as non-fuel materials with high supply chain disruption risk that serve an essential function in energy technologies, plus everything already designated a critical mineral. A material can sit on one list and not the other.
Why the difference matters
Uranium is the clearest case, and its treatment has moved three times. It appeared on the 2018 List of Critical Minerals, was removed from the 2022 update on the reasoning that the Energy Act excludes fuel minerals, and was restored to the final 2025 List published on November 6, 2025. The Secretary used the authority in the Energy Act to designate a mineral that another federal agency has determined to be strategic and critical to defense or national security, following a Department of Energy recommendation citing uranium’s importance to electricity generation.
The Department of Energy’s separate Critical Materials List reached the opposite result on the fuel question, declining to designate uranium because Section 7002(a) restricts critical materials to non-fuel substances. The same element therefore sits on one federal list and not the other, decided by a statutory word rather than by any disagreement about its importance.
Why the dictionary version is insufficient
Common usage treats critical as a synonym for scarce or strategically important. The statutory test is narrower and more specific, requiring all three criteria at once, and the resulting designation carries legal consequences for permitting, procurement and federal support that a general sense of importance does not.
Related terms
Industrial base · Surge capacity · Value added
Appears in
Critical Supply-Chain Dependencies
Read next
Critical Supply-Chain Dependencies
Sources
- Energy Act of 2020, Section 7002, Division Z of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021, Pub. L. 116-260. congress.gov
- U.S. Department of Energy, What Are Critical Materials and Critical Minerals? energy.gov
- Critical Minerals Lists, National Science and Technology Council. criticalminerals.gov
- U.S. Geological Survey, Mineral Commodity Summaries. usgs.gov