Energy Funding Matrix

Up to $134 million will be available for 1-2 awards to enhance domestic supply chains for rare earth elements (REEs) by demonstrating the commercial viability of methods for domestically refining and recovering REEs from mine tailings, deleterious material, and waste streams. The deadline for a letter of interest is December 10, 2025.

This is a prize, not a grant. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Technologies Office (AMMTO) is launching the American-Made Electronics Scrap Recycling Advancement Prize (ESCRAP) $3.95 million in prizes, this three-phase prize is designed to stimulate innovative approaches that reduce the costs and environmental impact of critical material recovery from electronics scrap (e-scrap). Competitors will optimize, validate, and integrate new and improved approaches along the entire recycling value chain to increase the production and use of recovered critical materials. Competitors can win up to $800,000 in cash and $150,000 in national laboratory analysis support. This prize focuses on innovative approaches, processes, or technologies in service of optimizing and implementing critical material separation and recovery from e-scrap.  The deadline for submission for Phase 2 has passed, but Phase 3 will open up on November 12, 2025.
 

This is a prize, not a grant. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Technologies Office (AMMTO) is launching the American-Made Electronics Scrap Recycling Advancement Prize (ESCRAP) $3.95 million in prizes, this three-phase prize is designed to stimulate innovative approaches that reduce the costs and environmental impact of critical material recovery from electronics scrap (e-scrap). Competitors will optimize, validate, and integrate new and improved approaches along the entire recycling value chain to increase the production and use of recovered critical materials. Competitors can win up to $800,000 in cash and $150,000 in national laboratory analysis support. This prize focuses on innovative approaches, processes, or technologies in service of optimizing and implementing critical material separation and recovery from e-scrap.  The deadline for submission for Phase 2 has passed, but Phase 3 will open up on November 12, 2025.
 

MESC expects to make up to $500 million of federal funding available for new awards under this funding opportunity. MESC may issue one, multiple, or no awards. Individual awards may vary between $50,000,000 and $200,000,000. The estimated period of performance for each award will be approximately 24-48 months. The funding opportunity is anticipated to support demonstration and/or commercial facilities processing, recycling, or utilizing for manufacturing critical materials which may include traditional battery minerals such as lithium, graphite, nickel, copper, aluminum, as well as other minerals that are contained within commercially available batteries, such as rare earth elements. Applicants should consider and identify potential downstream domestic customers of their material or product.

Up to $50 million to invest in industry-led parterships to prototype and pilot innovative critical materials processing technologies. This includes processes in the rare earth magnet supply chain, refining alloy gallium, gallium nitride, germanium, and silicon carbide for use in semiconductors. This opportunity aims to support industry-led partnerships to prototype and pilot innovative processing technologies that are currently only proven at the bench scale so to address CMM challenges in high impact areas. The CMM Accelerator program will advance these mid-stage innovations through validation, benchmarking, access to national lab test beds, testing in industry relevant environments, technoeconomic analysis, and life-cycle assessment. The program establishes a pipeline to support technology maturation to ultimately unlock private capital investments.

This Notice of Intent supports DOE’s current vision to secure diverse, resilient, domestic CMM supply chains by expanding the Critical Minerals and Materials Program to fund additional processing research and development (R&D) for the recovery and refining of CMM, as required for critical supply chain use. The intended FOA has four Areas of Interest planned. Area of Interest 1: Coproduction of CMM and Carbon Manufacturing Precursor Materials from Unconventional Coal and Other Carbon-based Feedstocks. Area of Interest 2: Recovery of Heavy Rare Earth Elements (HREE) from Secondary and Unconventional Resources. Area of Interest 3: Critical Mineral Recovery from Produced Water. Area of Interest 4: Process Diversification: Production of Rare Earth Elements from Secondary/Unconventional Resources and Recycled Materials. The FOA is anticipated to be issued in the third quarter of calendar year 2024, but has not yet been issued.