American Battery Technology won its appeal with the U.S. Department of Energy on June 2, securing the full reinstatement of a $115 million grant to build the first commercial-scale lithium refinery in Nevada after the Trump administration spent approximately eight months reviewing whether to honor the award, from the grant's termination on October 9, 2025 through the reinstatement modification agreement signed on June 2, 2026. The grant, originally issued under Biden's Manufacturing Energy Supply Chain office, came back intact, no funds cut, no milestones rescheduled beyond the review delay itself, no technical requirements lowered. Ryan Melsert, ABAT's CEO, called it a validation that the project 'has achieved all of its contracted technical and commercial milestones to date.' That language matters. It is not a political mercy decision. It is a technical sign-off from a different administration that the engineering works.
The decision arrives at a moment when processing, not mining, has become the actual bottleneck in the critical minerals race. As of 2024, the U.S. was approximately 80% net import reliant on rare earth elements. China refines approximately 35% of nickel, 50–70% of lithium and cobalt, and nearly 90% of both graphite and rare earth elements that the grid and EV supply chains depend on, according to the International Energy Agency. A mine in Nevada or Montana is strategically worthless if the ore has to ship to China for processing, you have simply outsourced the leverage. ABAT's Tonopah Flats project in Nevada targets exactly this vulnerability: a commercial-scale refinery that processes lithium from unconventional lithium-bearing claystone deposits and converts it into battery-grade lithium compounds domestically. The Trump administration's January executive order on processed critical minerals made this explicit: the US is fully import-dependent on 12 critical minerals and imports more than half its consumption of 29 more. No administration, regardless of party, can afford to leave that gap unfilled.
The mechanics of the grant reinstatement are straightforward but significant. ABAT demonstrated the lithium refinery technology at integrated demonstration scale, proved it worked, hit the contracted milestones. The Biden DOE awarded the grant accordingly. When the Trump administration took office in January, the grant faced the standard review question: does this project still serve national interest, or is it legacy spending we should walk away from? The answer, after four months of due diligence, was yes, it still serves national interest. The only schedule adjustment was the time lost in the review itself; everything else remained unchanged. That is a strong signal that the Trump team is not ideologically hostile to critical minerals infrastructure they did not design, they are evaluating it on merit.
What makes this durability unusual is how rare bipartisan consensus is in industrial policy right now. The CHIPS Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, buy-American rules, tariff policy, these are deeply contested along party lines. But critical minerals processing has become almost orthogonal to that axis of conflict. China's control of refining is a vulnerability every administration sees the same way. ABAT also has export bank cover: the Export-Import Bank of the United States advanced a $900 million Letter of Interest for the full Tonopah Flats project, providing a financing backstop if the refinery reaches construction. That is not a small number. It suggests EXIM is confident in the project's long-term viability.
But the grant reinstatement is not a done deal on economics. July 13, 2026 is the deadline for Commerce and USTR to report on the status of trade negotiations under the Trump administration's critical minerals trade negotiations order, with any Section 232 tariff imposition contingent on the President determining that negotiations are insufficient. If tariffs are imposed on imported lithium compounds or other processed minerals, it reshapes the math for every domestic refiner. A tariff could make ABAT's refinery more competitive against imported material. It could also raise the cost of downstream battery makers who need cheap, reliable lithium feedstock, creating a different kind of supply-chain friction. The real test of whether this grant actually builds capacity is not the DOE's confidence in ABAT's engineering. It is whether the tariff decision makes domestic refining economically viable at scale, and whether ABAT can move from the grant stage to actual construction before that window closes or shifts.