Audrey Robertson
Assistant Secretary of Energy; Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation
“Copper in this country. We have plentiful resources of actual, you know, raw rock that can become copper. But we only have three copper smelters in this country in the last decade. China's built 42, I believe. It doesn't matter if we have copper in the ground here if we can't turn it into a usable resource.”
“In the recycling space. We send all our black mass back to China because they have the facilities to process and refine in a way that we don't yet. But we are working very hard to fix that.”
“In the case of gallium, we don't produce gallium in this country at all. And after this funding opportunity, we're going to have five different companies that have figured out how to extract gallium from existing assets right here in America.”
“In so many of these critical mineral markets over the last 20 years, there has been an intentional economic warfare around making them uneconomic at any cost, which is why all of those industries have shut down. When I'm talking about copper, graphite, aluminum, we could go through all of the critical mineral...”
Audrey Robertson
One-line summary: DOE Assistant Secretary overseeing critical minerals, recycling/urban mining, and energy innovation. Operator background (Franklin Mountain Energy / Copper Trail). Tracked for first-party processing-gap claims (copper smelters, gallium from existing assets, black-mass exports to China).
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Speaker-attributed claims extracted from diarized sources. Each bullet mirrors one entry in quotes: frontmatter — keep them in sync.
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On copper-supercycle-ai-data-centers, us-critical-mineral-independence:
"Copper in this country. We have plentiful resources of actual, you know, raw rock that can become copper. But we only have three copper smelters in this country in the last decade. China's built 42, I believe. It doesn't matter if we have copper in the ground here if we can't turn it into a usable resource." — 2026-09-01-podcast-columbia-energy-exchange-doe-s-audrey-robertson-on-growing-us-critical (2026-09-01)
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On us-critical-mineral-independence:
"In the recycling space. We send all our black mass back to China because they have the facilities to process and refine in a way that we don't yet. But we are working very hard to fix that." — 2026-09-01-podcast-columbia-energy-exchange-doe-s-audrey-robertson-on-growing-us-critical (2026-09-01)
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On us-critical-mineral-independence:
"In the case of gallium, we don't produce gallium in this country at all. And after this funding opportunity, we're going to have five different companies that have figured out how to extract gallium from existing assets right here in America." — 2026-09-01-podcast-columbia-energy-exchange-doe-s-audrey-robertson-on-growing-us-critical (2026-09-01)
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On us-critical-mineral-independence:
"In so many of these critical mineral markets over the last 20 years, there has been an intentional economic warfare around making them uneconomic at any cost, which is why all of those industries have shut down. When I'm talking about copper, graphite, aluminum, we could go through all of the critical mineral..." — 2026-09-01-podcast-columbia-energy-exchange-doe-s-audrey-robertson-on-growing-us-critical (2026-09-01)
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