Antimony is having a moment. At the end of 2023, a tonne of the brittle, grey metal was fetching around $17,240. By the end of May this year, that figure had jumped to about $26,575, and climbed even further to roughly $33,367 per tonne in early October.
Few commodities can lay claim to such a trajectory, which has made antimony at least a temporary staple in global headlines as companies, governments, and investors all scramble to identify and exploit the new reality.
But what’s behind this sharp price rise? And how do things look going forward?
It is, predictably, a matter of supply and demand.
What is antimony used for?
In addition to antimony’s application in flame retardants and cladding, which boomed after the Grenfell Tower fire incident in 2017, military applications account for a significant chunk of its usage. As a key hardening alloy in lead and tin, it’s vital to the manufacturing of arms and ammunition, as well as other advanced technologies.
“War is the great swing factor in antimony demand,” according to a report published in September by New York-based Hallgarten & Company.
“There is no other application that disturbs the water like war for this metal in particular.”
With no less than two major wars currently raging, plus dozens of other conflicts — from insurgencies in Africa to the drug wars in Mexico — it’s little wonder the world’s antimony market is in a net deficit.
“You don’t even have to look at a forecast increase. What we’re using now is really a huge amount,” Ron Heeks, Managing Director of Larvotto Resources (ASX:LRV), tells Mining.com.au.
“You’ve got traditional uses in fire retardants, and that’s increasing because of the requirement now for a large chunk of the world that if you’re building a building more than five stories high, you’ve got to have antimony in your cladding. Then there’s the military uses, of course. Every bit of lead the military uses has got some antimony in it. And there’s a fair bit of lead flying around the world.”
While Mandalay Resources’ (TSX:MND) Costerfield mine in Victoria is currently Australia’s only antimony producer, Larvotto owns the Hillgrove Project in New South Wales. According to a Prefeasibility Study released in August, Hillgrove is expected to produce 41,000 ounces of gold and 5,400 tonnes of antimony annually over the course of its seven-year life, delivering earnings of more than $1 billion in the process.
Solar grows antimony demand
Of course, war isn’t the only factor underpinning antimony’s price rise. With an ever-growing emphasis on renewable energy, solar panels have come to account for a significant chunk of usage.
“That’s been a 20% year-on-year growth for a few years now,” Heeks says.
“I think everybody who’s in solar panel production is not going to decrease in the near-term.”
Such steep growth is expected to tighten the available supply of antimony over the coming years.
A forecast earlier this year by China Merchants Securities suggested antimony demand from the photovoltaic sector will increase from roughly 16,000 tonnes in 2021 to 68,000 tonnes in 2026, with the industry’s share of total consumption rising from 11% to 39%.
China restricts antimony exports
Though the above factors are well-established, antimony prices were dealt an additional boost this year with China’s decision to restrict exports of the metal from mid-September.
Given China’s status as the world’s dominant supplier of antimony, it was big news, and came in the name of national security. A brief explanation at the time said the Chinese Government opposes any country using items from China “to engage in activities that undermine China’s national sovereignty, security, and development interests”.
It covers six antimony-related products, including antimony ore, antimony metals, antimony oxide, and gold-antimony smelting and separation technologies. Anyone seeking to export such products will need to apply for a licence through China’s Commerce Ministry.
China imposed similar restrictions last year on exports of gallium and germanium, two metals used in computer chips and solar cells, to “safeguard national security”.
Notably, there is some well-founded speculation that China simply doesn’t have the antimony reserves it used to.
“What tends to happen is you get 200m or 300m of high-grade antimony from surface, and then you get a sort of gold-antimony zone, about equal weighting,” Heeks explains.
“Then below that, you get the Fosterville-type thing, where you get incredibly high-grade gold. And that’s got significance around the world because deposits that have been mined for 20, 30, 40 years — as in China — they’ve pretty well depleted all that near-surface antimony and are moving into gold-antimony.
So by definition, they’re producing less antimony.”
It’s this sort of thing that makes the US nervous, having no antimony production of its own, and instead relying on China for some 63% of its imports.
To that end, the US Export-Import Bank indicated its willingness in April to hand a US$1.8 billion ($2.67 billion) loan to Perpetua Resources (NASDAQ:PPTA) to build its Stibnite Gold Project in Idaho. The project is expected to meet 35% of US antimony demand in its first six years.
“Antimony trisulfide is essential to national defence as a key component for munitions and to clean energy technology applications, yet no domestic mined supply currently exists,” Perpetua said in its April statement.
“China, Russia, and Tajikistan control 90% of the global antimony supply chain. Perpetua’s proposed Stibnite Gold Project is designed to re-establish a US source of the critical mineral antimony as a by-product of one of the highest-grade open pit gold resources in the United States.”
How high can antimony go?
All this begs the question: Where will the price of antimony go from here?
“What the price is going to, I really don’t know. I can’t see it going backwards for any reason,” Heeks says.
“When we bought (the Hillgrove Project) it was US$9,000 a tonne, and that was about 11 months ago. Now, it’s US$26,000 a tonne. If it stays right where it is, I’m going to be the happiest bloke in town. What it will do, I don’t know.”
In the end, maybe it doesn’t matter. Unlike lithium, for example, antimony prices are unlikely to go so high that it becomes a problem.
“If lithium doubles — what’s lithium, 60% or 70% the cost of a car — then the car becomes unaffordable,” Heeks adds.
“What antimony gets used for, it actually doesn’t make a difference. If it keeps going up, it’s not going to be, ‘Oh, God, it’s too expensive’, because it really doesn’t make a lot of difference in the big picture.”
For now at least, it’s a good time to be in the antimony game. And as the world continues to change and evolve, so will the rules.
