West can't process critical metal; gap widens to 2030

Issued on behalf of NevGold Corp.

NEW YORK, Aug. 18, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Energy Metal News News Commentary - Here is a number that should worry anyone tracking critical-mineral supply chains: by 2030, antimony smelters outside China are projected to meet only about 73% of demand outside China, and that assumes every announced project actually gets built. Even in that optimistic case, industry analysis points to a processing shortfall of roughly a quarter of demand. Antimony is the metal that hardens ammunition, ignites primers, and goes into flame retardants, night-vision gear, and solar glass, and the United States imported an estimated 91% of its supply in 2025 while producing essentially none domestically. The country that controls the metal is the same one that has already shown it will restrict exports as leverage. That is the setup, and one Nevada project has just defined one of the largest strategic domestic resources of the metal on American soil. Companies mentioned in today's commentary include: NevGold Corp. (TSXV: NAU) (OTCQX: NAUFF) (Frankfurt: 5E50), RTX Corporation (NYSE: RTX), GE Aerospace (NYSE: GE), Honeywell International Inc. (Nasdaq: HON), and Axon Enterprise, Inc. (Nasdaq: AXON).

The antimony story is really two problems stacked on top of each other, and both favor new Western supply. The first is a shortage of mines outside China and Russia. The second, and the one that gets less attention, is a shortage of processing capacity, the smelting and refining that turns ore into usable metal. Even where the West can dig antimony out of the ground, it largely cannot process it at scale, and China and Russia together control an estimated four-fifths of both global mine supply and processing capacity. When a supply chain is that concentrated in the hands of strategic rivals, every credible domestic source, from mine through metal, becomes strategically valuable.

The company at the center of today's commentary is NevGold Corp. (TSXV: NAU) (OTCQX: NAUFF) (Frankfurt: 5E50), a Vancouver-based explorer and developer whose Limousine Butte project in Nevada carries both gold and antimony. Over the past year the story around NevGold has shifted, from a gold-focused explorer into a company defining a strategically significant domestic antimony resource at precisely the moment the United States is scrambling to build one. This is a look at the antimony supply crisis in hard numbers, why it is proving so difficult to solve, and the defense and industrial giants whose demand for the metal underpins the entire story.

The Metal Almost No One Watches, Until It Vanishes

Antimony is a silver-grey metalloid, produced mainly from the mineral stibnite and sold as concentrate, metal, trioxide, and specialty compounds. Its uses read like a cross-section of the modern economy: flame retardants that make plastics, textiles, and electronics fire-resistant; lead-acid batteries; clarifying agents in solar and specialty glass; hardening alloys; semiconductors and infrared detectors; and a long list of military applications from ammunition primers and hardened projectiles to night-vision equipment and infrared sensors. It is designated a critical mineral by the United States, the European Union, Japan, and Australia alike. Global demand is not what makes antimony a crisis. Consumption is expected to rise only modestly, from roughly 179,000 tonnes in 2025 to about 186,000 tonnes by 2030, growth of only around 3%. The problem is entirely on the supply side, and specifically in who controls it. The largest producer by far is China, and even as Chinese output has fallen sharply over the past two decades, from around 100,000 tonnes in 2000 to roughly 40,000 tonnes in 2024, the rest of the world has not stepped up to fill the gap. Supply elsewhere has not substituted for the decline, which has left the market tight and the West exposed.

How a Sleepy Metal Became a Weapon

The turning point came in 2024. In August of that year China introduced export controls on antimony products, citing national security, and by December it had prohibited exports of controlled antimony items to the United States outright. The price response was violent: the antimony reference price in Northwest Europe rose from roughly $23 per kilogram in August 2024 to around $63 per kilogram by mid-2025, according to industry data. A metal most investors had never thought about had suddenly become a demonstration of how a concentrated supply chain can be turned into a geopolitical weapon. China temporarily suspended the US-specific prohibition in November 2025, which helped pull prices back toward the mid-$20s per kilogram through 2026, but the reprieve is neither complete nor guaranteed. The suspension is set to expire on November 27, 2026, the underlying export-licensing system remains firmly in place, and the prohibition on exports to US military users or for military end use was never lifted. In other words, the single most important consumer of antimony for national-security purposes, the US defense complex, still cannot rely on the dominant global supplier. Even at today's calmer prices, the metal trades well above the roughly $11 to $13 per kilogram range that analysts estimate is needed to sustain most non-Chinese smelting capacity, which should, in theory, be more than enough incentive to build new supply.

Why the Gap Is So Hard to Close

Incentive, though, is not the same as operating capacity, and this is where the crisis becomes structural. Industry analysis identifies only three proposed antimony smelters outside China and Russia, one in Oman and two in the United States. Even if all three are completed, total capacity outside China and Russia would reach only around 68,000 tonnes by 2030, against projected demand outside China of roughly 93,000 tonnes. That leaves a processing deficit on the order of 25,000 tonnes, about 27% of demand, and again, that is the optimistic scenario in which every announced project is actually built on schedule. The demand mix is also shifting in ways that make the gap harder to paper over. Lead-acid batteries, historically the single largest use at roughly 31% of demand, are expected to decline as electric vehicles displace internal-combustion engines and producers engineer antimony out of each unit. But flame retardants at around 26%, solar and specialty glass at around 23%, and defense are all expected to grow enough to more than offset that decline, and crucially, those applications often require different products, purity levels, and processing routes. New supply cannot simply be any antimony; it increasingly has to be the right antimony, in the right form, produced through the right process, which raises the bar for new projects even further.

The Buyer of Last Resort Wears a Uniform

Ammunition accounts for only about 2% of measured antimony demand, but that figure dramatically understates its strategic weight. Antimony hardens the lead alloys in projectiles, its compounds are combustion-supporting ingredients in primers and detonators, and it runs through night-vision equipment, infrared sensors, and military electronics. In many of these uses, specifications simply do not allow substitution, and the cost of the antimony is negligible against the value of the finished weapon. That combination, mandatory and price-insensitive, gives a small military market outsized influence over which mines and smelters ultimately get financed. And that military demand is rising sharply. US production of 155mm artillery rounds climbed from roughly 14,000 a month in 2022 to about 36,000 a month by early 2026, NATO has reported that Europe's artillery-ammunition capacity increased several-fold in two years, and global military expenditure reached a record of around $2.9 trillion in 2025. Washington is already treating antimony as a defense-industrial bottleneck: in March 2026 the US Department of War awarded $27 million in Defense Production Act funding to expand domestic antimony mining and processing, and the Defense Logistics Agency has separately awarded a contract of up to $245 million to replenish the national stockpile with antimony ingots. When the buyer of last resort is the Pentagon, and it is actively writing checks to build domestic supply, the strategic value of a large, well-located US resource is hard to overstate.

A Nevada Answer Takes Shape

That is the backdrop against which NevGold reported its milestone. On July 15, 2026, the company published a maiden gold-antimony Mineral Resource Estimate for its Limo Butte project in Nevada, the first resource defined there in more than 17 years. It outlined 29,600 tonnes of antimony in the measured-and-indicated categories at 0.26%, plus 48,100 tonnes inferred at 0.18%, alongside a substantial gold resource of 181,400 ounces measured-and-indicated and 1,203,500 ounces inferred. CEO Brandon Bonifacio described it as one of the largest, most strategic antimony-gold resources in the United States. Full details are available through the company's disclosures . What makes Limo Butte notable within the antimony crisis is not just size but type. Most of the world's antimony comes from sulphide, narrow-vein deposits that require underground mining and produce a concentrate that must be shipped elsewhere, often to China, to be refined, which is exactly the processing bottleneck the West is struggling with. NevGold has instead described Limo Butte as a large, near-surface footprint of oxide antimony mineralization amenable to leaching, with the potential to produce antimony metal at the project site and remove reliance on downstream refining. The company has pointed to a path toward near-term antimony production from historical leach pads, potentially by 2027, while it continues to expand the deposit. As with any exploration-stage project these are objectives and estimates rather than producing operations, and significant work, permitting, and financing remain before any production decision. But a domestic, near-surface, oxide antimony resource that could be processed on-site speaks directly to both halves of the crisis: the shortage of mines and the shortage of processing.

The Industries That Can't Live Without It

The clearest way to understand why domestic antimony matters is to look at the industries that consume it and the materials around it, because their demand defines its strategic value. The four companies below are major defense and industrial enterprises, referenced solely as market and sector context. They are vastly larger and more established than NevGold, are not peers, competitors, or financial comparables of NevGold Corp., and their results are not indicative of NevGold's prospects. NevGold is an exploration-and-development company with no revenue; the companies below are large, established, revenue-generating enterprises. All figures are approximate and subject to change.

RTX Corporation (NYSE: RTX)

RTX Corporation is one of the world's largest aerospace and defense companies, and its missiles-and-defense business is precisely the kind of operation that consumes antimony-bearing munitions and depends on a secure defense-industrial supply chain. As the US and its allies rebuild depleted ammunition stockpiles and ramp artillery and missile production, prime contractors like RTX sit at the demand end of the very supply chain that antimony bottlenecks threaten to constrain. RTX has operated against a backdrop of elevated global defense spending and a large multi-year order backlog, reflecting the durable munitions-and-systems demand environment that makes secure critical-mineral supply a strategic priority. It is referenced here to illustrate the scale of defense-industrial demand that turns a small, obscure metal like antimony into a national-security concern, a vast prime contractor whose materials needs sit at the opposite end of the chain from a development-stage resource company like NevGold.

GE Aerospace (NYSE: GE)

GE Aerospace is one of the largest producers of jet engines and propulsion systems for commercial and military aircraft, a business that depends on secure supplies of specialty alloys and critical minerals across its manufacturing base. Advanced aerospace and defense manufacturing sits squarely within the industrial demand for strategic materials, part of the broader ecosystem whose supply-chain security depends on reliable domestic sources of critical inputs. GE Aerospace has reported strong results and a record backlog on resurgent commercial-aerospace and defense demand, cementing its standing as one of the sector's standout performers. It is included to represent the scale of advanced-manufacturing and defense demand underpinning the strategic importance of secure critical-mineral supply chains, an enormous, established manufacturer whose scale contrasts sharply with NevGold's early development stage.

Honeywell International Inc. (Nasdaq: HON)

Honeywell is a diversified industrial and aerospace company with major defense, advanced-materials, and electronics businesses, all of which draw on specialty minerals and materials. Its advanced-materials and defense-and-aerospace operations place it among the large industrial consumers whose demand for critical inputs, including antimony-linked materials used in flame retardants, electronics, and defense applications, helps define the market a domestic antimony resource would ultimately serve. Honeywell operates at enormous scale across aerospace, industrial automation, and advanced materials, with the diversified revenue base of a global industrial leader. It is referenced to illustrate the breadth of industrial and defense demand for specialty materials that gives strategic minerals their value, a large, diversified enterprise whose scale and stage bear no resemblance to an exploration-stage junior, but whose materials demand is part of why domestic critical-mineral supply matters.

Axon Enterprise, Inc. (Nasdaq: AXON)

Axon Enterprise has grown from its origins in law-enforcement technology into a broader public-safety and defense-adjacent technology provider whose devices and systems draw on advanced electronics and specialty materials. It represents the expanding, technology-driven edge of the defense and public-safety market, a reminder that demand for critical minerals extends beyond traditional munitions into the electronics and hardware that increasingly define modern security. Axon has been one of the strongest performers in the broad defense-and-public-safety technology space, drawing heightened investor attention on its growth across hardware and software. It is included to round out the demand picture, illustrating how appetite for advanced materials spans traditional defense primes and newer technology-driven security companies alike, all far larger and more established than NevGold and referenced only as sector context, not as comparables.

Why the Market Hasn't Caught Up Yet

For a company defining a strategically significant resource of a metal the US military cannot source domestically, NevGold draws relatively modest attention, and the reasons are structural. It is a junior exploration-and-development company with a market profile far below the defense and industrial giants whose demand gives its resource meaning, and junior miners attract thin coverage by default. Antimony itself is obscure enough that many investors have never encountered it, which keeps even a strategically important resource out of most conversations until a supply shock forces it in. There is also the nature of the story, which spans two categories at once, a strategic critical mineral and a record-price precious metal, and blends exploration-stage mining with national-security policy, a combination harder to summarize than a single-commodity pitch. Compress the picture and it reads plainly: a designated critical mineral the US imports almost entirely, a processing deficit that industry analysis expects to persist through 2030 even if every announced project is built, a supply chain a strategic rival has already shown it can squeeze, and a Nevada project that has now defined one of the larger domestic resources of that metal, in a near-surface oxide form that could be processed on-site, with gold alongside it at record prices. Whether NevGold advances that resource to production is unproven, and this is a description of a company and its sector, not a prediction about its stock. But the distance between how urgent the antimony problem has become and how little attention the companies working to solve it receive is exactly what makes the sector worth understanding now.

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Article Sources:

[1] NevGold Corp., “NevGold Announces Maiden Gold-Antimony Mineral Resource Estimate for the Limo Butte Project, Nevada,” GlobeNewswire, July 15, 2026, and related company disclosures (project mineralization, oxide/leaching characteristics, and near-term production objectives). [2] Antimony market data drawn from industry and market research, including S&P Global critical-mineral market analysis, U.S. Geological Survey Mineral Commodity Summaries (2026), and U.S. Department of War and Defense Logistics Agency announcements, as compiled in critical-minerals sector reporting. [3] Public disclosures and market data of the referenced companies (RTX, GE Aerospace, Honeywell, Axon Enterprise) as cited in the body of this article.

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Cautionary Note Regarding Mineral Resources and Forward-Looking Statements. NevGold Corp. is an exploration and development company. Mineral resources that are not mineral reserves do not have demonstrated economic viability. The maiden gold-antimony Mineral Resource Estimate referenced, including measured, indicated, and inferred categories, is an estimate; inferred mineral resources in particular are the least certain category of mineral resource, are subject to greater uncertainty, and there is no assurance that any part of a resource will be converted into reserves or mined economically. References to near-term production potential from historical leach pads, on-site antimony metal production, expansion potential, and future development are objectives and are not producing operations; a production decision would be subject to further studies, permitting, financing, and other conditions. Market and industry data regarding antimony supply, demand, pricing, processing capacity, import reliance, and government programs are drawn from third-party sources believed to be reliable but are not guaranteed as to accuracy or completeness, are subject to revision, and involve forward-looking projections that are inherently uncertain. This publication may contain forward-looking statements, including statements regarding NevGold's resource, potential production, project development, and antimony supply-chain and policy dynamics. Forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties, including exploration, metallurgical, permitting, financing, commodity-price, and regulatory risks. Actual results may differ materially. Readers should refer to NevGold Corp.'s continuous disclosure record filed on SEDAR+ at www.sedarplus.ca for a full discussion of risk factors.

Cautionary Note Regarding Referenced Companies. References to RTX Corporation, GE Aerospace, Honeywell International Inc., and Axon Enterprise, Inc. are provided solely as market and sector context. Those companies are not peers, competitors, or financial comparables of NevGold Corp., and differ substantially in size, stage, capitalization, operations, and business model. Any reference to their consumption of critical minerals or specialty materials is general industry context and does not imply any commercial relationship with NevGold. Their results and share performance describe those companies only, are not indicative of NevGold Corp.'s prospects or results, and must not be relied upon in evaluating the profiled company. No partnership, affiliation, or endorsement is implied.

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GlobeNewswire

August 18, 2026 - 9:10 AM PDT

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