The Golden Nexus
The Golden Nexus brings together Colorado School of Mines, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and the National Laboratory of the Rockies, a national laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation, to strengthen domestic critical mineral supply chains, accelerate energy innovation and build the workforce of the future.
Together, these institutions concentrate mineral and energy expertise, capabilities, and facilities within a few square miles in Golden, Colorado—delivering impact for industry and the nation that no single institution could deliver on its own.
Uniting expertise, accelerating impact.
Building on decades of partnerships amongst these three institutions, the Golden Nexus combines complementary capabilities across energy and critical minerals, from resource assessment to extraction to processing, advanced materials, recycling and commercialization.
Areas of collaboration include:
- Waste to value: Combining resource assessment and technology development to recover critical minerals from waste streams and identify alternative domestic sources.
- Assessment and characterization: Pairing USGS data and assessments with Mines’ predictive modeling and NLR’s advanced materials characterization to identify and validate domestic resources faster.
- Emerging energy resources: Bringing together expertise, research and technology development to advance next-generation geothermal, geologic hydrogen and other emerging opportunities.
From research to real-world solutions
The Golden Nexus connects major research facilities for each of the three partner institutions:
National Laboratory of the Rockies’ Energy Materials and Processing at Scale (EMAPS) facility
Together, these facilities enable synergistic research and development spanning resource intelligence, AI-guided analysis and modeling, technology development, process integration, scale-up and commercialization.
A direct connection for industry
The Golden Nexus gives industry partners a gateway to expertise, facilities, researchers and emerging talent across all three institutions. Through focused collaboration, the partners will tackle industry challenges, accelerate technology development and move promising solutions to market.
The Golden Nexus collaboration includes:
- Industry engagement
- Collaborative research
- Capability and expertise exchanges
Building the workforce the U.S. needs
The Golden Nexus connects education, research and industry to build the technical workforce needed to advance critical minerals and energy innovation. Hands-on research, internships, postdoctoral opportunities and industry engagement will prepare talent while strengthening U.S. competitiveness.