US Department of War invests $29.9M DPA Title III funds in ElementUSA to create domestic gallium and scandium supply

Mechanism

Another narrowly-targeted DPA Title III award in the recurring cadence of Department of War micro-investments patching single-point-of-failure critical-materials supply gaps, alongside the Lattice Materials germanium/silicon optics award (2025-12-22) and the REDAR/Systima SRM awards (2025-12-23) already in the register. Unlike those, this award funds an entirely new domestic source rather than expanding an existing one: ElementUSA's process extracts gallium and scandium — both of which the US currently imports almost entirely, with gallium historically dominated by Chinese refining capacity subject to Beijing's 2023 export licensing regime (2023-07-03-china-mofcom-gallium-germanium-export-controls) — from bauxite residue ("red mud"), an alumina-refining waste stream with no current domestic recovery industry. The Gramercy, Louisiana site sits near existing US alumina refining capacity, giving the company a large, low-cost feedstock base (30+ million tons cited) without new mining. Severity is set low (2/5), consistent with sibling Title III micro-awards: the dollar amount is small and the facility is explicitly a demonstration plant, not full commercial-scale production. The award continues to trace to Executive Order 14241 (20 March 2025) on increasing American critical-mineral production and to the same national-security rationale (gallium and scandium feed missile-defense, sensor, F-35/F-22 and hypersonic applications) invoked in the sibling awards.

Downstream implications

• Establishes a novel, non-mining domestic pathway for both gallium and

scandium recovery (bauxite-residue extraction) that, if scaled beyond demonstration stage, would reduce direct exposure to Chinese gallium export licensing — the first register entry addressing gallium supply from the demand (build-a-domestic-source) rather than the export restriction side.

• Extends the recurring pattern of small DPA Title III tranches

(Lattice Materials, REDAR/Systima, now ElementUSA) that the register should expect to continue as a steady drip rather than one-off events.

• Scandium recovery specifically is notable: US scandium supply is

essentially nonexistent domestically today, so even a demonstration-scale facility is a meaningful first data point for that material specifically.

Open questions

• What throughput (kg/year of gallium and scandium) the demonstration

facility is designed to reach, and the timeline to any follow-on commercial-scale Title III or Office of Strategic Capital award.

• Whether the bauxite-residue extraction process has been validated at

pilot scale elsewhere, or whether this DPA award is funding first-of-kind process risk.