SAFE Summit 2025

Some of the world's sharpest minds in energy, transportation, and supply chains gather every year in Washington DC for the SAFE Summit 2025. Against a backdrop of power shifts, historic investments, and strategic realignments, the 2025 Summit brought together investors, policymakers, business leaders, and national security experts to chart the future of energy security and economic resilience.

Safe Summit 2025 Credit: Anne Clawson

Critical minerals were a particular focus of the summit, a topic that has been increasing in importance recently. A few takeaways from the April 2025 gathering that continue to reverberate through conversations taking place today:

• America is serious about critical minerals. This is no longer seen as a thought exercise or a theoretical need for a theoretical green future – control of critical minerals supply chains is seen as an imperative today.

• On-shoring supply chains takes time and effort. It took decades for China to build out its critical minerals supply chain and infrastructure. The U.S. can’t replicate it overnight. The U.S. needs to provide “sustained attention to the issue from the top,” as Nazak Nikaktar of Wiley Rein mentioned during a panel.

• …But not everything can be made here. Senator John Hickenlooper (D-CO) said he learned early on that “there were a lot of needs we could not fill based on the minerals we see in the United States.”

• Processing is an overlooked piece of the puzzle. There’s been a lot of focus on mining, but part of the broader supply chain challenge is there’s not a lot of minerals processing in the U.S. – or even processing technology. 

• Permitting reform is a must. There’s bipartisan consensus on the topic, and companies believe it can be done while maintaining important protections. According to Jeff Hanman, Chief Strategy Officer at Teck,  “The industry doesn’t need lower standards. It needs tighter timelines.”

• Price supports are tough. There’s broad agreement that Chinese companies can undercut U.S. prices because their prices don’t reflect the actual costs of production. Panelists seemed to agree that price floors aren’t a good approach, but there’s still less agreement about the best way to support U.S. producers.