2022 Final List of Critical Minerals

The first critical-minerals list made under section 7002 of the Energy Act of 2020 (Pub. L. 116-260) rather than under Executive Order 13817 alone, and expressly a revision of the 2018 list at 83 FR 23295. It designates 50 minerals and — the structural change from 2018 — breaks the rare earths out as individual elements, naming cerium, dysprosium, erbium, europium, gadolinium, holmium, lanthanum, lutetium, neodymium, praseodymium, samarium, terbium, thulium, ytterbium and yttrium separately, alongside antimony, gallium, germanium, graphite, tungsten and the platinum-group metals. Helium, potash and uranium had been on the 2018 final list but were not carried onto the 2022 draft; USGS records that comments requesting their inclusion "did not identify any inaccuracies in the data used to conduct the quantitative evaluation".

The moment US designation acquired element-level resolution on rare earths — which is what later allows a US list to be compared directly against Chinese control announcements that name individual elements, such as the seven medium and heavy rare earths in MOFCOM Announcement No. 18 of 2025. It also moves the list onto a statutory footing with a three-year review cycle, which is the mechanism that produced the 2025 list.