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It may not make headlines as much as some of its U.S. Government Critical Minerals List peers, especially the battery criticals lithium, cobalt, graphite, nickel and manganese, and as such you may not have heard much about it — but antimony has entered the spotlight and has garnered the attention of Pentagon planners.

After receiving two grants from the U.S. Department of Defense Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) to the tune of $200,000 to study the domestic production of military-grade antimony trisulfide in the context of its Stibnite Gold Project in Idaho in September 2022, mining company Perpetua Resources Corp. was awarded $24.8 million to complete environmental and engineering studies to obtain a Final Economic Impact Statement, a Final Record of Decision, and other ancillary permits on December 19, 2022.

The $24.8 award was made through the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Industrial Base Policy’s Defense Production Act (DPA) Investments program and the Air Force Executive Agent.

Acknowledging the growing national security implications of rising critical minerals demand, the Department of Defense in recent months has stepped up its efforts to secure its supply chains, and the DPA Investments Program award to Perpetua Resources Inc. is the first critical minerals award using Ukraine Supplemental Appropriations.

Why would, as InvestorIntel’s Dean Bristol phrased it, the Department of Defense start the “Invest in Critical Minerals Strategy with the letter ‘A’”?

There is good reason.

Writes Bristol:

“Antimony trisulfide is essential to national defense as a key component for munitions and primers used in every branch of the armed services. Additionally, every military uniform is coated with antimony to provide fire protection and minimize infrared detection. It is also a useful material for the energy transition as a glass clarifier in solar panels or as a metal strengthener to wind turbine components.

More recently, antimony is gaining recognition as a battery metal for its role in liquid metal battery technology. Yet, the U.S. has no domestic antimony production at present. Even more challenging, roughly 90% of global antimony production is controlled by China, Russia, and Tajikistan. Not exactly, the names you want at the top of your list of a ‘must have’ commodity.”

Halimah Najieb-Locke, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Industrial Base Resilience put it in broader terms in the official DoD award announcement, stating that “[t]he Department’s DPA Investments Program is delivering on its core mission to restore domestic industrial capabilities essential to the national defense by enabling the warfighter,”and adding that “[t]his action reinforces the Administration’s goals to increase the resilience of our critical mineral supply chains while deterring adversarial aggression.”

As the Pentagon points out, Perpetua’s “Stibnite Gold Project” produced antimony trisulfide for the defense industrial base during World War II and the Korean War. Operations were abandoned in the mid 1950s. Recognized as the “sole domestic geologic reserve of antimony that can meet Department of Defense (DoD) requirements,” the Stibnite Gold Project, according to Bristol, “ is designed to apply a modern, responsible mining approach to restore an abandoned mine site and produce both gold and the only mined source of antimony in the United States.”

In keeping with the mining industry’s current efforts to sustainably green our future, the Project will “be powered by the lowest carbon emissions grid in the nation” and will supply a portion of the antimony produced at the site to U.S.-based Ambri, a company which has developed an antimony-based, low-cost liquid metal battery for the energy storage market.

In light of the increasingly volatile geopolitical global landscape, it is reasonable to expect a stronger focus on the national security implications of mineral resource security on the part of U.S. stakeholders in the coming months.  ARPN will be keeping tabs on U.S. government awards to strengthen critical mineral supply chains for our national defense sector, as well as the ones underpinning our economic wellbeing and green energy future as they are announced.

Happy New Year!

For most of us, the first week of January means it’s time to go back to the grind after an extended period of family time, food coma, rest and – hypothetically, at least — reflection.  It also means trying shake the brain fog and mental rust that has settled in order to dive back into the swing of things.

Today, it’s time to meet 2023 head-on.

If you could use a refresher to get you up to speed on where we are in the critical minerals space, take a look at our “Year in Review” post, especially if you missed it amidst the pre-holiday craziness in December.

In it, we argued that in some ways, 2022 was the year in which strengthening supply chains moved from “rhetoric to reality” as much progress was made, including important groundwork to build out a secure North American critical minerals supply chain.  However, we also cautioned that much more remains to be done, and to overcome the many challenges, new alliances will need to be forged.

As Shane Lasley argues in Critical Minerals Alliances 2022, a magazine covering 29 metals and minerals (when counting rare earths as 14)  deemed critical to North American supply chains as well as related policy issues:

 “The optimum solution to laying the foundation for the next epoch of human progress will only be discovered through the forging of unlikely alliances between the woke and old school, environmental conservationists and natural resource developers, liberals and conservatives, national laboratories and private sector entrepreneurs, local stakeholders and global mining companies, venture capitalists and innovators, and everyone else with visions of a cleaner, greener, and high-tech future.”

Now the question is, what lies ahead?

As we look at overall trend lines in the critical minerals space, we see the following themes emerge:

• A focus on the Super Criticals (see our Year in Review post for more info);
• the growing importance of geopolitics, with China taking center stage and alliances and partnerships continuing to be forged to reduce reliance on Beijing;
• the acceleration of the green energy transition which will require vast amounts of critical minerals;
• as well as industry’s efforts to sustainably green our future by harnessing the materials science revolution.

All of these themes are intertwined, and more may emerge in the coming months, but rest assured that ARPN will be covering these issues extensively as we go forward.

Of course, we are not the only ones to have paused and reflected on what’s to come in 2023.  In a new piece for InvestorIntel.com, editor in chief, critical minerals, Jack Lifton stipulates that “2023 is a breaking point if there is to be an EV revolution/transformation.”

Arguing that “[i]t is not at all certain that high-tech, critical minerals producers and processors, will be ready or even existent by the time the minerals can be delivered to their end-user manufacturers,” Lifton says that “[i]t’s time that car makers performed a due diligence on the critical minerals’ supply space.”

In his view, car makers must — specifically for minerals, metals and manufactured components dependent upon lithium, cobalt, nickel, graphite, manganese and the rare earths —

• “[a]scertain whether or not the supply of finished components necessary for the assembly of motor vehicles (…) can meet current and all future demand;
• and predict and mandate price maximums for critical minerals that they can afford if their products are to be sellable.”

Benchmark Mineral Intelligence’s Simon Moores says that “2023 will be the end of the start up phase for electric vehicles and battery supply chains” as we are “entering scale up.” He adds: “This may seem like demand (which industry could not fulfill) is falling when it’s high and volatile. A sky high but bumpy ride ahead.”

In the waning days of December the stage was set for 2023 with decisions to come standing to determine national fortunes and human progress in decades ahead.

As 2023 rolls down the runway, it’s time to buckle up.

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In recent months, and in particular in the wake of the recently-passed congressional Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), we have seen a long overdue uptick in efforts to build out a secure North American critical minerals supply chain. Not surprisingly, many of these efforts are focused on what ARPN has dubbed the “super-criticals” – the five battery materials, plus (…) more