KC gets a mineral refining grant. Could we become a new type of industry town? | Hudnall
A few years ago, Tony Caruso was talking to a St. Louis manufacturer of silicon wafers, the thin discs of semiconductor material that get turned into computer chips.
The company relied on a specialty chemical and a particular kind of tubing, both from a single overseas supplier. If that supplier came up short, the plant would have to shut down.
Around the same time, Caruso kept seeing news stories about finished Ford trucks — built, painted, ready to drive — sitting in storage lots due to a shortage of semiconductor chips.
“The vulnerability of America’s supply chain really started to hit home for me,” said Caruso, a physicist and vice chancellor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. “We have all these risky deficiencies across the board — areas where we have no production capacity for a lot of critical materials. It makes us completely vulnerable to the countries with power and autonomy over those materials.”
He began to research what was being done to mitigate this vulnerability, either by the federal government or private industry. There were a lot of little individual efforts popping up, but they were small in scale.
“In order to have a lasting, durable, resilient, robust, sustainable operation,” Caruso said, “you really need to have an ecosystem.”
Caruso wants Kansas City to be the center of that ecosystem, and he’s spent the last several years trying to make that happen through a UMKC-led coalition he created called the Critical Materials Crossroads.
The initiative got a major boost this week when it was awarded a $15 million grant from the National Science Foundation that, if milestones are met, could eventually be worth as much as $160 million. Attached to the press release announcing the grant were statements of support from across the political aisle (Emanuel Cleaver, Mike Kehoe, Jerry Moran, Laura Kelly) and local business powerhouses (Burns & McDonnell, the KC Chamber of Commerce).
The award doesn’t guarantee Caruso’s vision will become reality. It is the first step in what supporters say will take years of investment and coordination among universities, manufacturers and government agencies.
Still, Caruso believes Kansas City has a chance to build something unprecedented — a whole new industry for the region that would create thousands of jobs and add billions to the GDPs of Missouri and Kansas.
“We’re really the first of a kind in standing up something this big,” he said. “We’re trying to be a blueprint for the rest of the country.”
‘A kind of battery belt’
The obvious question is: Why Kansas City? It’s not a place most people associate with semiconductors or critical minerals.
But Caruso argues this region already has many of the ingredients needed to anchor an entirely new domestic supply chain.
For generations, companies pulled a lead ore called galena out of the ground along the Missouri-Kansas border, using it to make tools, paint, and eventually batteries. Along the way, they left behind a byproduct nobody wanted at the time.
That leftover material, sitting in slag piles across southeast Missouri, southeast Kansas, and northern Oklahoma, happens to contain nickel, cobalt, gallium and germanium — some of the very metals now considered critical to national security.
The mining left behind something else, too: a cluster of battery manufacturers that trace their roots to that same lead-acid lineage and still operate today, from EaglePicher in Joplin to Clarios in St. Joseph to Stryten Energy, with plants in Kansas City. Caruso calls it “a kind of battery belt.”
“I don’t know any other places in the nation that have that high of a concentration of that many battery cell producers,” he said.
Those two things — the leftover slag and the ready-made customer base — are what Caruso's plan is designed to connect. Companies like Doe Run — which still mines lead, copper and zinc in southeast Missouri today — ship their concentrate overseas because there's no domestic capacity to refine it further. Meanwhile, those regional battery manufacturers — including, soon, the massive Panasonic EV battery plant in De Soto — import refined lithium, nickel, cobalt and lead mostly from Asia.
Caruso's plan is to build the piece in the middle that's currently missing: Take that regional concentrate, plus recycled material like spent batteries and industrial scrap, and refine it locally into the alloys and battery-grade materials manufacturers actually use. Instead of raw material leaving the region and refined material arriving from overseas, both steps would happen here.
What this would look like, Caruso said, is a massive, bustling industrial park in the Kansas City area — 200 to 500 acres, with individual plants each producing a specific metal or advanced material.
Rare earth minerals hub
That hub would be powered, in part, by UMKC, which through Critical Materials Crossroads will lead a consortium of about a dozen universities tasked with developing faster, cheaper and cleaner ways to extract and refine these materials. Once those methods are proven in the lab, the plan is to hand them off to private companies to pilot and eventually scale into full production
“So we would start to see smaller manufacturers come in and make components out of those materials,” Caruso said, pointing to things like metal-injection-molded parts, battery cells, super-alloy turbine fins, and industrial catalysts.
In his telling, the Critical Materials Crossroads becomes a kind of gravitational pull, drawing in businesses that need that metal, each one locating a little closer to Kansas City than it otherwise would have.
UMKC Chancellor C. Mauli Agrawal noted that our region’s logistical network offers an additional competitive edge.
“There’s several reasons why Kansas City is ideal for this,” Agrawal said. “We have minerals and materials that are actually available in mines in Missouri and Kansas. But Kansas City is also situated right in the middle of the country, with rail connections going north, south, east, and west, two major interstates, and river transportation.” That combination, he said, is part of what convinced federal reviewers this region could actually pull off large-scale industrial logistics.
As for what happens next: Caruso said UMKC will begin working with industry to identify the technologies and workforce needs that could help attract new advanced manufacturing companies to the region. But he acknowledged the university can only play a supporting role. Ultimately, he said, it will be the region’s business community, developers and investors who determine whether projects move forward — by securing sites, financing deals and breaking ground.
“The sooner we can start moving dirt, and moving companies in, the better,” he said.
Agrawal cited an impact report that projects this initiative could create 10,000 jobs and contribute $40 billion in economic impact across the Kansas City metropolitan area.
Those numbers, which like all projections should be viewed with heavy skepticism, would require a lot of dominoes to fall in the right order. But cities are built by people willing to imagine a future that doesn’t exist yet, and right now, some of Kansas City’s most influential leaders are collaborating to do just that.
It’s nice to see people dreaming big in this town. It’s even nicer that Washington seems to think there’s some merit to that dream.
