The U.S. is pouring billions into a push to end the country's dependence on China for critical minerals. Now, a parade of mining companies hoping to ride the boom are trying to grab attention by wrapping themselves in red, white and blue.
The result is a jumble of similar corporate names that try to sound important and patriotic.
In recent years, companies have emerged with names like U.S. Critical Materials, U.S. Critical Metals, and U.S. Critical Minerals. Entrants since President Trump's re-election include American Critical Minerals, US1 Critical Minerals and a company called Absolutely Critical Resources.
US1 Critical Minerals is based in Australia, and a major asset is the right to look for uranium in southern Tanzania. But the company says it hopes to focus on the U.S. Its red-white-and-blue website shows the Statue of Liberty and a person wearing a cowboy hat striding with a partner through amber waves of grain.
Australia's Trigg Minerals, which is focused on tungsten and antimony in the Western U.S., recently decided to rename itself to align with "U.S. national security interests and U.S. federal government procurement objectives."
There were already companies called United States Tungsten, American Tungsten, United States Antimony and American Antimony. Trigg now calls itself American Tungsten and Antimony.
"How are you supposed to know which is which?" said Tomasz Nadrowski, a portfolio manager for the Amvest Terraden Critical Minerals Fund. While he has never accidentally bought the wrong company's shares, he said he had to constantly clarify his subject when speaking to others in the industry: "Oh, this one? You mean that one?"
Part of the problem, Nadrowski said, is that mining companies are run by geologists. "Where do you think they keep their head most of the time? Underground, like ostriches," he said. "They are not poets."
Until 2024, Donald Swartz was the chief executive of American Rare Earths, which plans to mine the critical minerals in Wyoming. Today, he is the CEO of Rare Earths Americas based in Manchester, Ga., a different company that listed its shares in the U.S. in May. "I can say that I didn't name either one of them," Swartz said. A third company, USA Rare Earth, has been offered $1.6 billion in government support.
Mining executive Tony Sage faced an unusual problem on a call with investors: One investor accused Sage of not knowing where his company's deposit of rare minerals was located. It is in Greenland, but the investor was sure the deposit was somewhere else.
The cause of the mix-up: Sage leads New York City-based Critical Metals Corp., while the investor thought the call was with Critical Metals PLC, which has a copper and cobalt project in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
"When you're trying to describe your company in a couple of words, there's not much you can do in the rare-earth space other than using the name rare earth, critical minerals, critical metals," said Sage.
His project in Greenland has received a formal letter of interest from a U.S. funding agency. It is called Tanbreez, a neologism that refers to tantalum, niobium, rare-earth elements and zirconium. "We could have called the company Tanbreez," said Sage, "but no one knew what the hell Tanbreez was."
Some companies such as American Tungsten say they aren't following marketing trends and their names simply describe what their companies do. At U.S. Critical Minerals, CEO Jesse Edmondson says his company adopted the name during Trump's first term and was the "first mover with our naming convention."
Alex Grant, a chemical engineer from Toronto, started a magnesium-smelting company in 2022 and named it Magrathea after a planet in Douglas Adams's "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" whose inhabitants build other planets. Grant said it was an apt name because his company aimed to rebuild a metals supply chain for America with a smelter planned for Arkansas.
He acknowledged that some people in the industry struggled to spell and pronounce Magrathea and have even called it Margherita.
He said it was possible that five or 10 years down the road it will be time to change the name. If so, he already has a name picked out: Magnesium Company of America.