A century-old mine and mill in rural St. Lawrence County will be producing concentrates for U.S. manufacturers—now totally reliant on imports—by year’s end.
FOWLER, N.Y.—A fierce wind is slinging sleet and forcing 30-foot hemlocks to genuflect in its gusts this gray, cold November morning, but Joel Rheault is enjoying a warm and fuzzy moment atop a dynamited blast bowl.
Below, a bulldozer is churning through newly dredged soil and shoving boulders aside in an open pit burrowed into the sandy, finely ground waste tailings from the nearby zinc mine.
“Drilling and blast rocking,” Rheault, vice president of operations for Titan Mining Corporation, said. “It’s a beautiful thing.”
The “beautiful thing” taking shape is Titan Mining Corporation’s $360 million Kilbourne Graphite Project within Empire State Mines’ century-old zinc mine and mill, a nationally vital venture in the United States’ drive to develop a domestic manufacturing supply chain free of China’s mineral market manipulation that could revitalize New York’s rural St. Lawrence County, where small towns with proud mining heritages have languished for decades.
Graphite is among 54 commodities deemed “essential to economic or national security” by the Department of the Interior’s Geological Survey. In 2022, the United States was 100 percent import-reliant for graphite, along with 11 other critical minerals. China-based processors control at least 75 percent of the global market for at least 30 of these commodities.
“As a critical mineral, graphite has not been produced in the United States for more than 70 years,” Rheault told The Epoch Times. “We aim to be first in the market to do that.”
Graphite’s high temperature tolerance and electrical conductivity make it ideal for lithium-ion batteries, industrial lubricants, and fire-resistant, lightweight machines and parts across multiple industries.
As of 2024, no natural graphite was produced in the United States, according to the 2025 U.S. Geological Survey. Domestic manufacturers rely on foreign sources and imported more than 60,000 tons that year. Between 2020 and 2023, 43 percent of U.S. graphite imports came from China, which produced 78 percent of graphite consumed worldwide last year.
Increasing reliance on imported critical minerals largely caused by a lack of “mid-stream” capacity—mills, smelters, refineries—in markets dominated by China has been a concern for decades. Since President Donald Trump’s November 2024 reelection, securing domestic supply chains has garnered “a lot more attention,” Rheault said.
Titan’s planned 40,000-ton-a-year operation is one of at least five graphite projects being developed in the United States under Trump administration inducements, according to a report from the Colorado School of Mines.
By John Haughey
