President Donald Trump says American companies will now have access to Venezuela's vast oil reserves.
But the country's other goods have also attracted the attention of his administration.
Experts say Venezuela has unverified amounts of minerals, metals and potentially rare earth elements.
These raw materials are essential for industries from defense to technology, and the administration has repeatedly emphasized their importance to US national security.
But while Washington may aspire to secure critical elements for Venezuela, experts say this is a difficult task and would not do much to strengthen America's supply chain.
The quantity and economic sustainability of Venezuela's mineral resources are uncertain.
Companies also face great risks in extracting minerals in Venezuela without stable safety guarantees.
Experts say many of these regions have guerrilla soldiers and armed groups engaged in illegal gold mining.
The energy-intensive extraction of rare metals can also harm the environment.
“There is an awareness within the administration that even beyond oil, the country has a broader value of natural resources,” said Reed Blakemore, research director at the Atlantic Council’s Global Energy Center.
"However, if we are talking about the conditions under which we are able to exploit those mineral resources and bring them to market, it is a much more challenging story," he added.
"And even, frankly, more challenging than the oil story," Blakemore continued.
China's role in the supply chain
Even if American companies were to attempt to extract Venezuela's rare metals, extracting them from the ground is only part of the process.
These materials are usually sent to China for refining, writes CNN.
According to the International Energy Agency, China accounted for over 90% of global rare earth metal refining in 2024.
The country holds a virtual monopoly on the processing and refining of materials due to decades of government subsidies, industry expansion, and lax environmental regulations.
Rare metals have become a major sticking point in US-China trade tensions.
Beijing last year implemented some rare earth export controls during the trade spat, raising concerns about the lack of secure supply chains in America for these critical materials.
“China still has a nearly unique capacity to process rare earth metals, and this industrial and geopolitical advantage cannot be overcome overnight,” said Joel Dodge, director of industrial policy and economic security at the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator.
Critical minerals and rare earth elements
The U.S. Geological Survey identifies 60 “critical minerals” vital to economic and national security.
These critical minerals include a mix of commodities, including aluminum, cobalt, copper, lead, and nickel.
The list also includes 15 rare earth elements, such as cerium, dysprosium, neodymium and samarium.
Rare earth elements refer to a category of 17 specific metallic elements.
These goods are essential inputs into everyday technologies, such as phones, batteries, and television screens, as well as military and defense equipment, such as lasers, fighter jets, and missiles.
"Rare minerals" is a misnomer, as the elements are relatively ubiquitous in the Earth's crust, according to Julie Klinger, a geographer and associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
But extracting and refining them is the hard part.
American lawmakers have been concerned in recent years about the country's dependence on imports for these critical elements.
There have been efforts to develop domestic mining and refining of rare metals in the United States, but the timeline for projects can take years, if not decades.
Critical minerals in Venezuela
The U.S. Geological Survey does not include Venezuela on its list of countries with rare earth elements (countries on the list include China, the United States, Brazil, and Greenland, among others).
Two and a half decades of rule by presidents Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela created an information gap about the scale of the country's resources, experts say.
However, experts believe that Venezuela has deposits of several minerals, such as coltan — from which the metals tantalum and niobium are derived — and bauxite, which may contain aluminum and gallium.
Tantalum, niobium, aluminum, and gallium are all considered critical minerals by the USGS.
In 2009, Chavez highly praised the country's natural resources, including "blue gold," a nickname for coltan.
That year, according to Reuters, Chavez said a large coltan reserve had been discovered in the country.
In 2016, Maduro created the Orinoco Mining Arc, a territory of Venezuela designated for mineral exploration and production.
But the region has been affected by illegal mining.
“While the country sits on vast deposits of mineral resources, it is crippled by a combination of weak geological data, low-skilled labor, organized crime, lack of investment and an unstable policy environment,” Sung Choi, metals and mining analyst at BloombergNEF, said in a note.
"Despite its current geological potential, Venezuela is unlikely to play any significant role in the critical minerals sector for at least the next decade," Choi said. /Telegraph/
