About CritMintel
An open-source intelligence platform tracking geopolitical risk, supply chain vulnerabilities, and strategic dependencies across the critical minerals that underpin modern defense, energy, and technology systems.
Platform Goal
Critical minerals — lithium, cobalt, rare earths, tungsten, and dozens of others — are the foundation of advanced weapons systems, energy storage, semiconductor manufacturing, and modern infrastructure. Control over their supply chains has become a primary axis of geopolitical competition, and disruption to those chains represents a genuine national security risk.
CritMintel was built to make that risk visible. The platform aggregates open-source intelligence on production geography, country-level instability, export dependency, and market concentration to produce structured risk assessments for each mineral. Every brief is built to intelligence production standards — not financial analysis — with an explicit focus on decision-relevant findings for policy, defense, and industrial stakeholders.
The goal is simple: give analysts, policymakers, and operators a clear, current picture of where supply chain exposure exists and why it matters.
How It Was Built
Each mineral brief is researched and written using structured OSINT tradecraft — the same methodology applied in government and defense intelligence environments. Source material spans USGS reports, UN Comtrade trade data, World Bank governance indicators, open congressional testimony, and open-source geopolitical analysis.
Risk scores are derived from a multi-factor framework covering production concentration, political stability, export controls, allied-nation dependency, and strategic criticality to U.S. defense and energy systems. All assessments are analyst-produced; no automated scoring replaces human judgment on the underlying intelligence.
Spectra Intel Group
CritMintel is a project of Spectra Intel Group, a Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned crisis intelligence and threat analysis firm based in Dallas–Fort Worth.
Spectra Intel Group produces structured intelligence for national security, humanitarian, and corporate risk environments — specializing in OSINT operations, entity network analysis, financial flow mapping, and non-combatant evacuation planning.
About the Author
Austin Higgins is the Founder of Spectra Intel Group and Co-Founder and Threat Finance Lead at the Global Counterterrorism and Threat Intelligence Research Institute (GCTIRI) at the University of Texas at Dallas, where he served as a lecturer. A service-disabled U.S. Air Force veteran with a linguistics background and Defense Language Institute training, he has applied intelligence tradecraft across some of the most complex humanitarian and national security environments of the past decade.
Austin conducted real-time OSINT operations supporting civilian evacuations from Gaza and Lebanon, coordinating directly with the U.S. State Department, COGAT, and the Egyptian government to secure country exit approvals, and supporting the reunification of 500+ American citizens with family members trapped in conflict zones. He provided analytical support to hostage release negotiations and co-developed a non-combatant evacuation operation CONOP to SOF planning standards for the Levant region.
His investigative work spans transnational criminal organizations and terrorism, including financial network analysis of TCO operations, identification of money laundering activity, and domestic threat investigations. He has briefed more than 20 congressional offices on conflict intelligence, border crossing status, and constituent evacuation support.
Austin previously led Risk Analytics at Dun & Bradstreet, overseeing a $500M+ global risk intelligence platform focused on holistic financial and supply chain risk. He serves as CFO of the Special Operations Association of America.