Georgia Tech will lead a $7.5 million U.S. Department of Energy effort to map critical minerals hidden in kaolin mining residues and other unconventional deposits across the Southeast. The Critical Minerals in the Atlantic Seaboard Plain project, known as CM-MAP, extends DOE’s Carbon Ore, Rare Earth, and Critical Minerals (CORE-CM) initiative by reading minerals out of material already on the ground. Traditional mining permits in the United States can stretch to 29 years, the second-longest timeline in the world, and CM-MAP is built around a faster premise.
Selected by DOE’s Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation, the award positions the Institute to build a regional innovation ecosystem rather than fund a single mine. Researchers will analyze samples from kaolin operations, heavy mineral sands, legacy mining residues, and coal combustion byproducts. Yuanzhi Tang, a Georgia Power Professor and founding director of Georgia Tech’s Center for Critical Mineral Solutions, is the project’s principal investigator. The work runs alongside a parallel federal push that includes congressional backing for a Georgia Tech demonstration center.
Georgia Tech Lands $7.5 Million to Map a New Kind of Mineral Source
The CM-MAP award is one of several regional consortia DOE has stood up under its critical minerals office. Georgia Tech will lead a team drawn from universities, national laboratories, industry partners, and nonprofit organizations across the Southeast.
The project builds on CORE-CM, an existing DOE initiative focused on carbon ore, rare earth, and critical minerals, and folds Georgia Tech’s research base into a coordinated regional effort. The $7.5 million award is intended to fund both the science and the surrounding infrastructure: data pipelines, regional collaborations, and the workforce pipeline that would turn research findings into operating mines, processing facilities, and recycling plants.
Tim Lieuwen, Georgia Tech’s executive vice president for research, framed the project as a coordinated national response rather than a single grant. “This is a powerful example of how Georgia Tech brings together leading research capabilities and partnerships from industry, government, nonprofits, and national labs to address complex national challenges,” Lieuwen said in the Institute’s announcement. “By identifying and domestically sourcing critical minerals, we are helping secure essential supply chains.”
What CM-MAP Will Examine
CM-MAP focuses on sedimentary deposits that include kaolin, bauxite, heavy mineral sands, and phosphates. It also targets legacy mining residues and coal combustion byproducts, the kind of material that sits in piles and ponds across the region from older industrial operations.
The scope is deliberately broad because the underlying question is not which single deposit to develop. The question is how much critical mineral content is hiding in materials the Southeast already produces, processes, or has discarded. Researchers will sample those materials, characterize them, and feed the results into machine-learning models.
- Kaolin, a white clay mined in Georgia for more than a century, with potential rare earth content in the clay itself and in the tailings left behind
- Bauxite and phosphate deposits, both of which carry trace critical minerals alongside their primary commercial products
- Heavy mineral sands from coastal Georgia operations, which already yield rare earth concentrates
- Legacy mining residues and coal combustion byproducts, materials already extracted and sitting on the surface
Why Conventional Mining Cannot Catch Up
U.S. import dependence is the reason federal agencies are funding unconventional approaches. In 2024 the United States imported 80% of the rare earth elements it used, 100% of its gallium and natural graphite, and between 48% and 76% of its lithium, nickel, and cobalt, according to a Georgia Tech analysis published in May 2025.
Those numbers, drawn from U.S. Geological Survey data, sit on top of a permitting environment that has historically taken decades to clear. Traditional mining can take ten to twenty years from exploration to production and up to 29 years in the United States, the second-longest timeline in the world. The delay is one reason the country has only two domestic rare earth mining locations, both in Georgia and California, and ships much of what it mines abroad for refining.
| Critical mineral (2024) | U.S. import share | Where it shows up |
|---|---|---|
| Rare earth elements | 80% | Magnets, wind turbines, defense systems |
| Gallium | 100% | Telecommunications and semiconductors |
| Natural graphite | 100% | Lithium-ion battery anodes |
| Lithium, nickel, cobalt | 48% to 76% | Batteries for EVs and grid storage |
Waste mining, the recovery of critical minerals from mine tailings, coal ash, and industrial byproducts, sidesteps much of that timeline. The tailings are already extracted, sitting on the surface, with no drilling or blasting required. Bioleaching, ligand-based extraction, and electrochemical separation are now making recovery from those legacy wastes technically viable, and new processing facilities could be built near existing kaolin or heavy mineral sand operations within a few years rather than decades.
“The tailings are already mined and sitting on the surface,” Tang and a co-author wrote in a 2025 essay for The Conversation republished by Georgia Tech. “There is no need to drill or blast. That means existing infrastructure, faster timelines and lower costs than new mining operations.”
The Lead Researcher and Her Mandate
Tang wears three hats on the project. She is the Georgia Power Professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, with a courtesy appointment in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. She is also the founding director of the Center for Critical Mineral Solutions and the executive director of the Strategic Energy Institute.
Her Center for Critical Mineral Solutions, founded in 2024, sits at the center of the institute’s interdisciplinary work on supply chains. The CM-MAP award gives her team a federal mandate to knit that research base into a working regional system.
Through this award, we are working to build secure and resilient critical materials supply chains, from resource discovery and characterization to processing, recovery, recycling, and advanced manufacturing, while also developing the skilled workforce needed to support these emerging industries.
Tang’s stated vision is a regional innovation ecosystem built around both unconventional resources and circular economy approaches, one that turns the Southeast’s existing mining waste into the input for a domestic supply chain.
How AI Will Read the Tailings
The research plan calls for combining physical sampling with artificial intelligence and machine learning applied to the resulting datasets.
The model is to feed characterization data from natural deposits and industrial sites into models that can predict where additional resources sit, optimize extraction pathways, and inform future recovery and recycling strategies. Large datasets generated across the Southeast give the AI layer enough material to work with, and the same infrastructure can later be used to guide where new processing facilities should be sited.
That step matters because the bottleneck for unconventional sources is not geology, it is knowing which piles and which deposits are worth processing. AI-driven resource mapping is what converts a regional sampling program into something that resembles an operating supply chain. The same tools, applied to coal ash and industrial residues, could help prioritize which waste streams to recover first.
A Southeast Network Built on Federal Money
CM-MAP is the federal layer of a broader regional network Georgia Tech has been building since 2024. Through the Georgia Partnership for Essential Materials, Georgia Tech works with the University of Georgia, Georgia State University, and the Georgia Mining Association to convene industry, nonprofits, regional economic development agencies, national labs, universities, and technical colleges.
The network extends internationally through a U.K.-U.S. working group that links southwestern UK and southeastern U.S. researchers, industry leaders, and government agencies focused on supply chain resilience. The U.S. side of that partnership runs through Tang’s Strategic Energy Institute.
On the federal side, Rep. Earl L. “Buddy” Carter (R-GA) secured $500,000 in the House-passed 2026 appropriations act, announced January 8, 2026, to establish the Georgia Critical Mineral Supply Chain Manufacturing Demonstration Center. That funding builds on President Trump’s March 20, 2025 executive order to boost U.S. production of critical minerals and rare earth elements, according to Carter’s January 8, 2026 release. The Demonstration Center is intended to connect resource development, materials processing, recycling, and advanced manufacturing in one regional pipeline.
- $7.5 million: DOE award to Georgia Tech to lead CM-MAP
- $500,000: House-passed 2026 appropriation for the Georgia Critical Mineral Supply Chain Manufacturing Demonstration Center
- 8 million tons: Georgia’s annual kaolin production, the largest of any U.S. state
- 29 years: The U.S. mining exploration-to-production timeline, the second-longest in the world
- 2024: Year Georgia Tech’s Center for Critical Mineral Solutions was founded
CM-MAP is positioned to feed the Demonstration Center. Characterization data from kaolin operations and mining residues across the region will inform where processing facilities get built, and the workforce trained through CM-MAP is meant to staff them. Tang expects the project to give the Southeast a working example of how unconventional resources and circular economy practices can be combined into a domestic critical minerals supply chain, with the broader federal effort, including the Trump administration’s March 2025 executive order, providing the policy backdrop. For readers tracking how the U.S. is responding to China’s grip on rare earths, the parallel Modi push against mineral weaponization at the BRICS summit sketches the diplomatic frame around the same problem.
