DESC0024047

The sheer size, complexity, and resource requirements within critical mineral supply chains leave them vulnerable to disruption or exploitation, affecting critical national infrastructure and economic security. Various unpredictable political, environmental, infrastructural, or climactic stressors can have systemic and cascading disruption upon everything from basic commodities to critical minerals. Without adequate redundancies or adaptive capacities in place, nations and companies can easily find themselves subject to critical slowdowns in manufacturing and operating capacity due to restrictions in mineral access. As such, there is an urgent need to evaluate the resilience of national and industry supply chain capabilities. We propose building a platform for high fidelity mapping of the supply chains for critical mineral facilities. The goal is to map critical facilities and supporting infrastructure, visualize risks (supply chain threats, vulnerabilities, and consequences) and resilience (i.e., ability of supply chain to recover) with follow-up stress testing. In turn, these advancements will visualize and quantify the failure points of interconnected supply chain networks, capacity for recovery, and various adaptation strategies to limit or eliminate disruption or cascading loss. Resilience Analytics (RA) proposes to develop a two-fold framework for this Fast-Track SBIR. First, we will build from identified facilities for critical minerals with supply chains by NREL and others, providing geospatial and econometric analyses of supply chains for each critical mineral of interest. Second, we propose a resilience stress test on mapped supply chain networks through minerals production life cycle, illustrating which critical nodes are most sensitive to disruption. This approach, known as ‘Resilience Stress Testing’ (RST), is a tiered tool authored by RA for visualizing and quantifying an institution's single-points-of-failure and capacity for recovery in the event of a disruption. The market opportunity for a resilience-based approach to mapping critical minerals supply chains is extensive due to the limitations of more conventional analysis for tracking prospecting, processing, and production. Mapping of the supply chain with RST provides businesses and affected stakeholders with an identification of where gaps in the critical mineral supply chain exist, how much these gaps are affecting various econometrics, and how sensitive the supply chain is. The addressable market for proposed tool includes enhancing supply chain in critical mineral production and understanding life cycles. The use of RST can be beneficial for large organizations that depend on critical minerals, as well as government agencies responsible for maintaining and operating critical infrastructure that rely on critical minerals.