Strengthening and Benchmarking Critical Mineral Supply Chains With BLEECAM (Text Version)

This is the text version of the video Strengthening and Benchmarking Critical Mineral Supply Chains With BLEECAM.

This video outlines how the BLEECAM™ tool helps decision makers see risks, trade-offs, and opportunities across the full critical materials life cycle.

[Narrator speaks]

The technologies powering our modern society depend on critical minerals and materials sourced through complex global supply chains.

But what happens when one link breaks?

Shortages, trade disruptions, processing bottlenecks, and shipping demand can affect everything from energy infrastructure to manufacturing.

Making informed decisions requires seeing the entire system. That’s why researchers at the National Laboratory of the Rockies developed the Benchmarking Life Cycle Environmental, Economic, and Social Metrics for Critical and Advanced Minerals Materials tool or BLEECAM.

BLEECAM is an open-source, integrated, decision-support platform for evaluating the impacts, risks, and trade-offs across U.S. and global critical minerals and advanced materials supply chains.

BLEECAM connects the full life cycle from mining to processing and refining, to manufacturing, to use and deployment, to recycling and recovery. The Department of Energy has built more than a dozen specialized tools across its national labs—each solving one piece of the critical minerals puzzle. BLEECAM brings them into a single framework so for the first time, their results speak the same language.

Users can evaluate dynamic factors such as impact trade-offs, technology maturity, geography, and time based on economic, environmental, social, and supply disruption impacts.

Current use cases include rare earth elements and gallium for the energy sector, data centers and artificial intelligence, and power electronics systems.

Not every solution is ready today. BLEECAM accounts for the maturity of each technology across the supply chain, distinguishing what can be deployed now from what emerging materials and technologies could unlock as they scale, so decisions reflect the readiness, not just theoretical potential.

By integrating multiple modeling approaches into a unified analytical framework, BLEECAM turns complex data into decision-ready insights, comparing optimal, local sourcing strategies across material flows, regional dependency risks, and investment opportunities.

Built on the National Laboratory of the Rockies expertise in supply chain analysis and optimization, life cycle assessment, techno-economic and life cycle costing analysis, and system-wide modeling, BLEECAM enables different stakeholders such as government, industry, and academic researchers to evaluate the consequences of their decisions and inform targeted efforts to secure supply chains.

BLEECAM outputs can help governments prioritize portfolio investments, enable industry to make sourcing and siting decisions based on real world risks, and provide researchers with an open platform and standardized methods for advancing supply chain modeling and analysis.

Explore BLEECAM and partner with the National Laboratory of the Rockies to solve critical materials supply chain challenges.

[Text on screen: To learn more, visit nlr.gov/critical-minerals/bleecam]

[Narration ends, music stops.]