Antimony entering a “perfect storm of production”, Larvotto Resources MD says

Larvotto Resources (ASX: LRV) this week determined the viability of tungsten as a byproduct at its past-producing 100%-owned Hillgrove antimony and gold project in New South Wales, which it aims to bring into commercial production in Q2 2026.The company reported 90% tungsten recovery with a 16X increase in feed grade delivered in recent metallurgical testwork, which it said also indicates a simple and cost-effective processing circuit would produce a saleable tungsten concentrate. Tungsten is the material of choice for a key defense application – what the military calls penetrators – high-density, armour-piercing projectiles. As with other critical minerals key to defense applications, its production and refining are heavily dominated by China. The discovery adds more momentum to the project’s Mineral Resource Estimate (MRE) for its current DFS Ore Reserve study of 8,766 kt @ 4.0 g/t gold and 1.1% antimony and 7.2g/t AuEq.After China’s exports limits on antimony, the Hillgrove project “has become a strategic asset being one of the world’s top 10 antimony deposits with material near-term production potential in a Western jurisdiction”, analysts at Blue Ocean equities said in a note in September.Infographic: China’s grip on global antimony refiningAntimony is a lesser-known metal with multiple applications. Its largest end-use is as a flame retardant, but it is also found in solar panels and  lead-acid batteries.The US Department of the Interior has designated it a critical mineral because it is also essential for armour-piercing ammunition, infrared sensors and precision optics. China, Russia, and Tajikistan control a significant portion of global antimony production, with China being the largest producer and refiner. Hillgrove ahead of the gameLast year, Larvotto signed a binding offtake agreement with trading house Wogen Resources for sales of its first seven years of antimony output at Hillgrove.Larvotto Resources only acquired the Hillgrove project in late 2023 and has since released initial resources, reserves, prefeasibility and definitive feasibility studies.“We started the financing project in January this year. It was quite a unique thing that we did, but that shows you the strength of it,” managing director Ron Heeks told MINING.COM in an interview. “Eight weeks after the DFS we funded the project, we did 100 US bonds and a $60 million capital raise on top of that, and we’ve effectively been in build since that time, and we will be in first production Q2 next year,” Heeks said. The Australian company aims to produce 5,400 metric tons of antimony annually at Hillgrove, representing 7% of global production. Larvotto’s ASX-listed stock is up 123% over the last year. Last month, it rejected a non-binding indicative offer from United States Antimony Corporation (NYSE-A: UAMY), which valued the miner at about A$722.9 million ($469 million).Historical production The Hillgrove mine produced antimony intermittently since its discovery in 1857, with significant modern-era production from 1969 until a temporary closure in 2014 due to low antimony prices.“The perpetual story  is that antimony has been mined here from World War I, World War II, Vietnam, Korea,” Heeks said. Heeks said while the antimony price is always affected by ammunition demand, what is driving antimony at the price at the moment is that 30% to 40% of antimony now is going into solar panel use.“And then you’ve got the military uses of it, so every bullet and anything with military lead in it has somewhere between 2.5% and 6.5% antimony in it, which is why the US military is getting desperate,” he said. “Then you’ve got the unique thing that around the world, most of these ore bodies are very similar, that at the top of the system [are] higher mercury grades. Luckily, that bit for us is long gone, withered away. But then you get high antimony for about 200 or 300 metres. Then you get antimony gold, which is where most of our resources sit,” Heels said. There’s been zero interest in antimony for 20, 30 years. So, there’s nothing ready to go.  So, you’ve got this perfect storm of production decreasing by 60%, demand going up by 60%. The whole Western world, including us, has shut down all their refineries – China – they’re the only ones with the refineries.” Destination markets unclear The company will sell 100% of its concentrate to Wogan at Rotterdam pricing.The traders will sell to whoever gives them the best price, and Heeks won’t know the destination when the trucks pick up product and leave the site, but he doesn’t believe the antimony would enter China. “At the moment, that would never be China because China has created an artificial internal market, as they do occasionally. They tried this on Australia a few years ago on iron ore, and all they did was more than double the price that they ended up paying for it.”They’ve created an artificial market, so essentially, nobody is selling to China at the moment, which is causing China a spectacular amount of grief because they can’t produce enough to get their solar panels. And internally, it’s not like they can say, ‘let’s go do more with these old projects and restart them’, because it’s gone.” But Heeks points out that even as miners in the Western world are starting to dig again for the minerals they left in the ground for decades, the grip China has on the refining market can’t be loosened any time soon. “If we sold it to the US, they’d have to send it to China to refine it. We can’t refine it here. The only facility you’ve got in the United States is the US Antimony Corps smelter, which has got to be 70 years old and at full capacity can only do about 2,000 tons per annum,” Heeks said.USAC operates the only significant antimony smelter in the United States and it is in a “sold out” condition, according to the company’s website.  “Wogan will sell to smelters in Asia, non-China, or Europe. India is probably the biggest smelting market at the moment outside China,” he said. “Nobody in the US can treat this. Nobody in North America can treat an antimony concentrate,” Heeks said. “We’ve been awarded the underground mining contract. We have 15 kilometres of underground development in place and about 12 months of ore ready to go,” he said.“We’re the only project, in all honesty, that is going to be producing significant amounts of antimony in the next four years, arguably more.”Weiter zum vollständigen Artikel bei Mining.com Weiter zum vollständigen Artikel bei Mining.com