How mining innovation is shaping America’s tech future

Of all the industries linked to technology, mining might feel the farthest — literally.

Of the 180,000 people in the American mining industry (which excludes oil and gas), about 1 in 12 work underground. They operate machines and tools to identify and extract minerals vital to the global economy. Rather than coal, the most coveted are vital to electronics and the energy transition.

“Whether the digital economy or the green energy transition, it will not happen without minerals,” said Kwame Awuah-Offei, who has “explosives engineering” in his title at Missouri S&T, the state’s science and technology college. His office is 100 miles west of St. Louis. 

“Mining contributes to society,” Awauh-Offei said, “by providing the raw materials for everything we do.”

The fading digital transformation projected a sanitized view of economic change. Whether recognized or not, software startup founders and data scientists have always relied on copper, nickel and other material being ripped from the earth. Like restaurateurs and chefs discovering the source of the ingredients in their kitchen, tech and innovation boosters are now awakening to the full breadth of their supply chain.

The federal government agrees. In recent weeks, as Technical.ly reported, the Economic Development Administration (EDA) announced the final Biden administration investments into its Tech Hubs program, and mining was on the menu. As Missouri S&T mining department chair, Awuah-Offei is leading the Critical Minerals and Materials for Advanced Energy Tech Hub, which was awarded $28.5 million (including $3.2 million from the university and state funding). 

A contract with the US government long seemed as sure a thing as any. Domestic supply chains and homegrown technology and entrepreneurship are bipartisan. Yet the Trump administration funding freeze spooked everyone. One leader from a different, previously funded Tech Hubs coalition told me last week he worries a “sledgehammer” could disrupt even well-liked programs. Most programs with federal funding like Tech Hubs operate on reimbursement — spending money and then requesting replacement funds. Payment delays are demons that live inside cash flow projections.

That’s true for a small school like Missouri S&T that intends to build big expensive infrastructure. 

Among the Missouri S&T project goals is the development of an 18,000-sq.-ft. “test-bed facility.” That’s a building with the space, tools and atmosphere to replicate mining conditions, so new methodologies can be developed. In short, Awuah-Offei’s charge is to make getting minerals out of the ground more efficient, with less environmental impact.  

Lessons abound for local economic and ecosystem leaders. Here are four: the role of national security, bipartisanship, ecosystem building and storytelling. 

Want a federal grant? Make a national security pitch

The “CM2AE” — and yes, I’m told this is the preferred shorthand for Missouri’s tech hub — further fills in the narrative of American federal industrial policy, and economic development. 

After well-regarded Baltimore and Philadelphia Tech Hubs proposals were again overlooked for this massive federal infusion in tech investment, a former city government exec texted me: Why didn’t we make the cut? My bet: Because there was no national security urgency in those proposals.

Back in 1980, polarizing Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, an influential Reagan adviser, wrote with his wife Rose Friedman their free-market philosophy in “Free to Choose.” It includes a lengthy section warning that industries attract government subsidy by claiming “national security,” creating inefficiencies and disruptions to global cooperation. Today, the Biden administration’s Tech Hubs program seems relatively safe within the Trump administration exactly because so much of the $500 million was spread geographically and focused on nat sec purposes: defense-focused photonics in Montana; quantum computing in Colorado and New Mexico; semiconductors in New York state; ag tech in Oklahoma and Indiana. 

Courting bipartisanship is a second lesson. With seasawing national politics, local leaders ought to be intentional about whether they intend to build together, or separately. Entrepreneurship is one of the most bipartisan issues in American life. Blue cities rich with innovation and red counties rich with resources can make a compelling economic case for governors of every political stripe. 

Third, consider why entrepreneurship is so bipartisan. Americans seem to love a fair fight and prefer talk over action.

The revival of entrepreneurship-led economic development, maintained as a discipline thanks to funding leaders like the Kauffman Foundation and community coalescing around the term “ecosystem building”, is predicated on this. Investments in inclusive entrepreneurship developed an economic rationale over a social justice one, and this movement’s leaders look and sound like a fairly centrist, fairly bipartisan bunch. 

Generally speaking, commercializing new ideas spans the political spectrum. Trump-backing, Silicon Valley-famous venture capitalist Marc Andresson champions “little tech,” and Harris-supporting billionaires last fall included startup boosters LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and celebrity investor Mark Cuban. It’s also damn hard to ignore the economic realities: commercialized breakthrough research transforms lives. More prosaically, even before the pandemic boom, entrepreneurship accounted for practically all net new jobs.

‘From underground up to the clouds’

Awuah-Offei’s Missouri S&T tech hub’s fourth lesson is in ecosystem building. 

In the early 1990s, economists popularized the concept of the “resource curse” — countries with plentiful natural resources tended to be led by corrupt and profligate governments. In the United States, the richest American states are mostly without valuable rocks in the ground. Awuah-Offei grew up in Ghana, a fairly well-governed West African country not so much bigger than Missouri that risked falling into that resource curse and has struggled in recent years. It’s personal.

Awuah-Offei argues his tech hubs bid is part of an effort to do it differently in Missouri, which has the 10th highest concentration of mining jobs among US states with at least 2,500 employees. More importantly, while Texas has lots of oil and natural gas jobs, and Pennsylvania and Indiana still have a fair number of coal workers, Missouri’s mining industry is more concentrated on extracting these minerals of the future. Missouri doesn’t yet have many software developers, but its mining industry is growing, as it is in Arizona and Utah. 

“If we can take it out of the ground,” Awuah-Offei said. “We should be able to do something with it once it’s up here.”

To make that anything other than an empty platitude, his coalition will need vendors and a far-reaching supply chain. Trained workers will rip rock, then bring some of it to a university lab, where researchers will attempt to improve upon its capture. Other bits will go into batteries and other electronics. Some of these will enter laptops and servers and electric vehicles — all of which will serve as platform for websites, applications and other software, and eventually be recycled. 

Awuah-Offei envisions a future where residents of his 14-county, economically-depressed region can reasonably participate in each of those steps. 

“If you go to a mine, it’s messy and dirty — despite the amazing science,” Awuah-Offei said. “We need to understand what happens from underground up to the clouds.”