Supply Chain and Market Analysis

Secure critical mineral supply chains are essential for deploying and sustaining energy technologies. Disruptions in the availability of key minerals can slow innovation, increase costs, and create vulnerabilities in energy systems. NLR is developing a risk-informed framework for critical mineral supply chain assessments through case studies, domestic fieldwork, and stakeholder roundtable dialogues. This framework will use newly designed metrics to quantify supply chain risks and impacts at multiple spatial and temporal scales, providing insights for local, regional, and long-term scenarios. Furthermore, it will improve understanding of how externalities, stakeholder impacts, and mitigation actions collectively influence supply chain security, stability, and economics over time.

Contact: Alberta Carpenter

Designing secure and competitive critical mineral supply chains requires understanding how mining, processing, manufacturing, and recycling systems evolve together over time and geography under economic, technological, and policy constraints. Life cycle assessment and systems modeling are essential tools for understanding the technical, environmental, economic, and social implications of materials, processes, and technologies — from resource extraction through production, use, and end-of-life management.

NLR's Benchmarking Life Cycle Environmental, Economic, and Social Metrics for Critical and Advanced Materials (BLEECAM) platform advances this capability by integrating dynamic supply chain optimization with cradle-to-cradle material flow modeling and impact assessments.

BLEECAM is a systems-level modeling framework that:

• Simulates global and U.S. critical material supply chains from mining through manufacturing, use, recycling, and recovery
• Optimizes supply chain configurations under technology, market, and policy constraints and shocks
• Integrates life cycle assessment, techno-economic analysis, life cycle costing, and social life cycle assessment within a unified modeling environment
• Tracks environmental, economic, and social indicators across time and geography
• Captures system dynamics such as demand growth, technology learning, infrastructure buildout, market, trade, and policy shocks for target sectors, including energy generation systems and data center infrastructure.

By linking optimization to multi-dimensional life-cycle metrics, BLEECAM enables decision-makers to evaluate trade-offs among cost, regulatory constraints, resource use, stability, and social outcomes under evolving market conditions and potential global supply disruptions. The framework is designed to inform:

• Strategic investment decisions
• Domestic manufacturing and recycling strategies
• Infrastructure siting and deployment decisions
• Supply chain planning
• Policy design for critical mineral and advanced material systems.

Rather than evaluating individual processes in isolation, BLEECAM models whole-of-system transitions, allowing stakeholders to assess how emerging technologies and policy interventions reshape critical mineral supply chains over time.

BLEECAM is software funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation Office's Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Office.

NLR is pursuing authorization to assert trademark rights in the BLEECAM name and copyright in the source code for an open-source software release.

Contact: Sherif Khalifa

NLR models and evaluates integrated demand for materials and manufactured components across full supply chains for existing and advanced energy technologies and markets over time. By running targeted what-if scenarios, NLR can identify potential bottlenecks and pinpoint where future demand may exceed the capacity of existing mining, processing, and manufacturing infrastructure. This gap analysis informs strategies to prevent supply chain constraints through policy incentives, technology innovation, trade, and increased recovery of materials from end-of-life technologies.

In addition, NLR's assessments account for factors such as workforce readiness, policy changes, economic market forces, and cybersecurity risks that can significantly influence the stability of critical mineral supply chains over time. These capabilities reveal how to strengthen domestic production capacity, diversify supply sources, and address non-technical vulnerabilities that could threaten supply chain stability.

Contacts: Sarah Inskeep and Maggie Mann

The RING Model is a global, cross-sectoral supply chain simulation. RING leverages scenario analysis to examine how supply and demand for raw materials, refined materials, technology components, and finished technologies may evolve over time. Based on these supply and demand trajectories, RING assesses supply gaps at each stage of the supply chain and translates those gaps into potential economic impacts and investment needs. Using this framework, RING also simulates the potential economic and energy system impacts of changes in trade relationships or export restrictions, providing insights that can lead to more secure supply chain planning.

Contact: Julien Walzberg

SCORPIO is a multi-scale, multi-indicator that combines detailed supply chain analysis with macroeconomic models (based on hybrid input-output [HIO] tables) to assess material recovery pathways at the supply chain and economy-wide scales. SCORPIO provides comparative indicators of costs, economic activity, earnings, regional gross domestic product, workforce, and other effects throughout a given reverse supply chain and the broader U.S. economy for both prospective and retrospective analysis.

SCORPIO reveals potential outcomes and trade-offs of different technology, component, or material recovery solutions in a holistic manner. The U.S. Department of Energy has used SCORPIO to evaluate flat glass recycling and reuse, and this is currently being expanded to include electrical steel (e-steel) and transformer applications.

SCORPIO can be leveraged to see potentially critical components and interdependencies of an entire supply chain network for any commodity or industry, such that the analysis could be used to anticipate change before it becomes an emergency or missed opportunity. The framework can be used to study both reverse and forward supply chains. For instance, the model's network-building and optimization algorithms can be leveraged to study industrial plants operating under different manufacturing onshoring scenarios. Moreover, the discrete event simulation module accounts for onshoring dynamics (e.g., delays, backlogs) through a detailed representation of component and material manufacturing queues. The HIO then uses the supply chain modeling outputs to quantify the direct and indirect economic and resource-use impacts of onshoring and material recovery scenarios.

Contact: Julien Walzberg

NLR has developed and demonstrated a multimodal transport model to assess transport costs and times associated with routing across road, rail, and water networks and explore logistical tradeoffs relevant to other industries. The transportation network includes domestic rail, road, and waterway routes, as well as relevant international waterway routes, and represents intermodal transfer nodes (ports and railways).

The model can calculate the least-cost route between any (and all) points in the United States. It can also calculate least-cost cargo-specific costs, transport mode-specific costs, and loading, unloading, last-mile, and intermodal connection costs. The model can be used to understand how different modes of transportation, constraints on transportation routes, and new domestic production facilities might influence the time and cost required to transport different raw materials and manufactured products.

Critical mineral recovery, processing, transport, application, and resource recovery can be energy-intensive, motivating a better understanding of location-specific energy opportunities and challenges. NLR uses advanced models to conduct energy sector analysis, including grid planning and operations. These tools evaluate how energy demand within critical mineral supply chains could interact with other energy demands and with energy generation, transmission, storage, and transport.

Together, these tools help identify opportunities to source the energy needed in critical mineral supply chains, including options to reduce costs while meeting energy reliability expectations. They also highlight bottlenecks, infrastructure gaps, and resource limits that may affect long-term material supply and security.

CELAVI: Circular Economy Lifecycle Assessment and Visualization (GitHub)
Addresses material flow and other impacts considering changes to the energy system over time

FINITO: Fuels and Industry Integrated Optimization
Incorporates natural gas and fuel infrastructure and markets to identify the least cost option to meet all energy and commodity needs

HIPSTER: Harmonized Impacts of Products, Scenarios, and Technologies across Environmental and Resource Metrics (GitHub)
Combines and standardizes results from different NLR models so various impacts can be compared fairly using the same assessment assumptions and boundaries

ReEDS: Regional Energy Deployment System
Estimates the electricity system buildout over time to optimally meet loads and reliability requirements

REopt
Helps guide sites' investment decisions in distributed energy technologies

reV Model
Identifies opportunities for energy sources to meet needs at key points in the supply chain

TEMPO: Transportation Energy & Mobility Pathway Options Model
Estimates the evolution of energy demand for transportation, which can impact availability and costs at points along the critical mineral supply chain

Contact: Dan Bilello