We can build mines. We can build factories. But without validated process intelligence, small businesses cannot convert domestic feedstocks into qualified materials, and that gap is costing us competitiveness.
When the U.S. Small Business Administration issued its Request for Information on strengthening domestic supply chains, OLI Systems submitted a formal response. Our argument was simple: you cannot close a supply chain gap by building infrastructure at the endpoints alone. The real bottleneck is in the middle, and it is largely invisible to policymakers focused on mines, factories, and capital.
The problem is not what most people think
The United States has promising domestic sources of lithium, rare earth elements, nickel, cobalt, manganese, and other strategic materials. What is often missing is the midstream capability to convert those sources into consistent, qualified products. For rare earth elements and battery metals, that conversion typically requires solvent extraction, a technically demanding separation process where phase chemistry, acidity, impurity load, and feed variability all interact. A circuit that performs well at bench scale can become unpredictable at pilot scale. This is not a materials availability problem. It is a process chemistry problem.
A small supplier without a validated flowsheet, an impurity management strategy, and a credible scale-up plan is not truly ready to serve strategic domestic markets, even if its bench chemistry is promising.
Most small businesses in this space can demonstrate that their chemistry works in the lab. What they struggle to show is that it works reliably at scale, that mass balance closes, impurities are managed, and production costs are defensible. Without that evidence, they cannot raise capital, win offtake agreements, or pass customer qualification. Promising technology stalls not because the science is wrong, but because the process has not been validated.
What OLI recommended
Our core recommendation to the SBA: validated process modeling, solvent extraction simulation, and chemistry-based digital flowsheets should be recognized as critical infrastructure for domestic supply chain scaling. These are enabling capabilities that determine whether small businesses can compete, not optional engineering support.
RECOMMENDED PROGRAM DESIGN PRIORITIES
- Critical Materials Modeling and Simulation Vouchers — funded access to thermodynamic modeling, digital process flowsheets, and process-readiness review
- A Solvent Extraction Scale-Up Initiative — targeted support for the most significant separations bottleneck in rare earth and battery material supply chains
- 90-Day Supplier Scale-Up Sprints — milestone-driven engagements connecting suppliers with modeling expertise and pilot facilities
- Regional Critical Materials Innovation Networks — linking small businesses with national laboratories, universities, customers, and investors
- A National Process Readiness Scorecard — measuring whether suppliers can reliably meet specifications, not just whether they exist in a database
We also argued that process modeling providers should be eligible for SBA support as shared infrastructure across an entire class of suppliers, not only as vendors to individual projects.
Why this is a national competitiveness issue
OLI has spent more than fifty years building first-principles thermodynamic models for electrolyte systems. Those capabilities, including speciation modeling, solvent extraction simulation, corrosion and scaling prediction, and process flow modeling, were developed for oil and gas, chemicals, and mining. They apply directly to the midstream processing challenges that critical materials supply chains face today.
Countries with stronger process modeling capabilities will move promising feedstocks to qualified products faster, at lower risk, and with greater investor confidence. That speed is what separates domestic suppliers who become durable parts of strategic supply chains from those who remain indefinitely at bench scale.
What comes next
This RFI response is part of a broader effort to ensure process modeling is recognized in national policy conversations as foundational, not an afterthought. We are building OLI’s presence across the critical materials research and innovation ecosystem through collaborative programs with national laboratories, universities, and industry partners. If you are working on critical materials processing, brine chemistry, battery recycling, or geothermal resource extraction and see potential alignment with OLI’s capabilities, we would be glad to connect.