The United States is home to a wealth of natural resources, with certain states leading the way in producing some of the most valuable minerals essential for industry, technology and economic growth.
Why It Matters
As well as widely used metals such as iron and copper, some states have minerals critical for certain manufacturing processes, demand for which can provide a significant boost to regional economies.
The U.S. has also been looking to reduce its dependence on foreign sources of critical minerals, with President Donald Trump promising to enhance America’s domestic mining infrastructure, which could result in further economic opportunities for states with abundant resources.
What to Know
According to data from the U.S. Geological Survey, there is significant variation when it comes to how much mineral wealth states possess.
Nevada has the most mineral wealth of any state, producing almost $10 billion worth of nonfuel mineral commodities in 2024, which accounted for 9.4 percent of the country’s annual output.
Mining has long been essential to Nevada’s economy—its precious metal deposits earning it the title of the “Silver State.” According to the Bureau of Land Management, Nevada has the largest mining program in the U.S., with over 180,000 active mining claims. It is also home to the country’s only large-scale mining operation for lithium, a critical mineral for rechargeable batteries and electric vehicles, the importance of which has seen its extraction dubbed the 21st century’s “gold rush.”
Texas sits in second, owing partly to its size and diverse geological formations, and it produced over $9.7 billion worth of minerals in 2024. These were primarily materials used in construction such as gravel and cement, Texas being the largest producer of both materials in the U.S.
Arizona produced just under $9.3 billion worth of minerals in 2024—equivalent to 8.8 percent of the total U.S. output that year—including construction materials as well as molybdenum mineral concentrates, used to produce alloys for steel production, aircraft parts and electronics.
Despite certain states having developed mining and refinement industries, America is far from the global leader in terms of output—accounting for only 4 percent of nonferrous, nonfuel mineral production in 2024, according to the National Mining Association.
Concerns about the country’s reliance on foreign imports have prompted past administrations and the current one to take measures to expedite the development of America’s natural resources, now a more pressing task given the potential imposition of tariffs on many of the country’s most significant mineral suppliers, such as Canada and Mexico.
One of Trump’s first executive orders warned that the country’s critical minerals production capacity was “far too inadequate to meet our Nation’s needs,” with another promising to establish America as a “leading producer and processor of non-fuel minerals, including rare earth minerals.”
According to a mid-2024 study by S&P Global, the U.S. mine development timeline is the second longest in the world, behind only Zambia, with an average of almost 29 years between the discovery of a deposit and first production.
What People Are Saying
Jane Nakano, senior fellow in the Energy Security and Climate Change Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Newsweek that the importance of rare earth minerals, “is hard to overstate.”
“Securing rare earth minerals was a major agenda during the first Trump administration, where we saw the first federal strategy on critical minerals security,” Nakano said. “Given that background, I see the second Trump administration interest in this issue to be a continuation of the effort to secure the supply chains for critical minerals, which has since become a bipartisan area of U.S. priority.”
Trump has requested that access to Ukraine’s reserves of rare earth minerals be used as compensation for past and future military assistance to the country. Speaking to Fox News earlier in February, he said he wants “the equivalent of $500 billion of rare earth” minerals from the country in return for continued aid.
Trump’s January 20 executive order, titled “Unleashing American Energy,” outlined an increased focus on domestic mineral production.
“It is the policy of the United States…to establish our position as the leading producer and processor of non-fuel minerals, including rare earth minerals,” the order read, “which will create jobs and prosperity at home, strengthen supply chains for the United States and its allies, and reduce the global influence of malign and adversarial states.”
What Happens Next
The president has ordered several departments to reduce regulatory hurdles for mineral mining, to “accelerate the ongoing, detailed geologic mapping of the United States,” and to draft proposals for how to reduce America’s reliance on foreign sources.
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