Critical Minerals Standards Coordination

Enabled through partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy, the ANSI Critical Minerals Standards Coordination initiative is carrying out the following activities:

• Standards Landscape: Mapping existing standards and developing a comprehensive Critical Mineral Standards Landscape and online standards database
• Webinars & Workshop: Hosting standards webinars and workshops for stakeholders; including the September workshop
• Standards Strategy: Developing a U.S. Standards Strategy for Critical Minerals to advance and coordinate positions, strengthen U.S. leadership in international standard setting and global adoption, foster interoperability across U.S. industry-adopted standards, and identify existing gaps where the U.S. could take the lead in standardization
• Strategy Implementation: Facilitating U.S. Strategy Implementation and Maintenance
• International Roundtable: Promoting U.S. Standards Strategy recommendations and the commitments made in the G7 Roadmap to Promote Standards-based Markets for Critical Minerals with allied national standards bodies and stakeholders
• Administration of U.S. Technical Advisory Groups for relevant International Organization for Standardization (ISO) Committees
• Monitoring ISO developments through the U.S. ISO Critical Minerals Standards Coordination Group

From January to June 2027, the CMSC members will develop a U.S. Standards Strategy for Critical Minerals which will:

• Identify coordination needs for standards development and implementation, taking into account upstream and downstream challenges and opportunities
• Discuss the role of standards in export and trade
• Propose how to align existing best practices and secure global adoption
• Consider various U.S. technologies and encourage market competition
• Consider regulatory frameworks for downstream stakeholders
• Identify key standardization gaps within the critical minerals supply chain and support implementation of the Strategy. Gaps should identify how they relate to ‘a’ through ‘e’ where possible.

A call for working groups members will be announced in late 2026.

On September 23-24, 2026, stakeholders from across the critical minerals value chain will convene at a hybrid workshop to inform the scope, priorities, and recommendations of the Strategy. Attendees will contribute to deep-dive discussions on:

• Traceability, circular economy, data handling, and labeling
• Processing and refining of minerals and materials
• Mining and extraction
• Downstream component and product manufacturing with a focus on:
  • Battery & energy storage technologies
  • Magnets & electromagnetics
  • Semiconductors & electronIc components
  • Structural & advanced materials

Discussions will examine how standards can support secure and resilient supply chains, strengthen domestic manufacturing competitiveness, and meet growing downstream demands for conformity assessment, safety, performance, traceability, and trusted supply chain information.

ANSI invites organizations to sponsor the September workshop and support the advancement of U.S. critical minerals standardization.

In June 2026, ANSI hosted two webinars where attendees learned about standardization activities related to the full lifecycle of critical minerals, including upstream, midstream, and downstream. Attendees heard briefings from various standards and codes developers, highlighting their current activities and providing opportunities for dialogue with participants. The materials from both sessions are included below.

ANSI is developing a standards landscape to increase awareness about published and in-development standards, codes, guidance, and related conformity assessment materials. The landscape will include various metadata about the document status and associated technical pillars. The landscape will be developed through direct contributions from ANSI’s Request for Information and ongoing technical events.