President Donald Trump celebrates Diwali at the White House.

WASHINGTON (TNND) — The Trump administration took another step in its bid to find new sources of critical minerals and rare earth metals to reduce the country’s dependence on China for the resources that are key ingredients in a wide range of industrial goods.

President Donald Trump and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese agreed to a deal that they said will generate projects worth up to $8.5 billion in the coming years. The U.S. and Australia invest $3 billion in the next six months to start creating a pipeline of critical mineral projects in both countries, including a Pentagon investment for an advanced gallium refinery in Australia.

The U.S. is trying to make deals with allies and its own investments to build out a bigger supply chain for rare earth minerals to break free of the global reliance on China, which mines some 70% of them and handles around 90% of the refining process. The resources are critical for many modern manufacturing processes, renewable energy and military equipment.

Despite the importance to manufacturing and national security, it is still highly difficult to make mining and refining projects profitable, which has limited the scale of the industry outside of China. New projects are highly capital intensive and require lengthy permitting processes, expensive specialized equipment and a high-skill workforce.

In Australia, the U.S. is trying to add cooperation with a country that already has a robust mining sector that can ramp up production of other materials. Australia is estimated to have around 5% of the world’s reserves of rare earths and accounts for some 8% of global production with an already robust mining sector.

Trump and Albanese hailed the deal as a landmark step in breaking through some of China’s dominance on the rare earth and critical minerals supply chains, though there are questions about how quick and impactful it will be.

“In about a year from now we’ll have so much critical mineral and rare earth that you won’t know what to do with them," Trump said during their meeting at the White House. "They’ll be worth $2.”

But mining the deposits is just the start of a long and complicated process. Permitting for a new mine can take several years, building and expanding capacity in refineries to process the materials is also time-consuming, and it will also take time to build out the supply of skilled workers and specific equipment for projects.

“What I worry about is we’re going from zero to infinite,” said Ian Lange, associate professor of economics and business at the Colorado School of Mines. “Is all the equipment there? Are all the people there? Can everybody ramp up at once? Our evidence from the electricity sector with gas turbines is no.”