Nova wins $43.4M Pentagon award to build antimony hub, shares skyrocket

Nova Minerals (NASDAQ, ASX: NVA) has been awarded $43.4 million by the US Department of War (DoW) to support the production of antimony trisulfide at its Estelle project in Alaska. Shares of the Australian miner skyrocketed on the news.The DoW funding, provided under Defense Production Act Title III, will go towards Nova’s US-based subsidiary Alaska Range Resources, which holds an 85% interest in the Estelle project.Located 150 km northwest of Anchorage, Estelle is a district-scale project that spans a 35-km mineralized corridor and hosts 20 identified gold prospects, including four large, near-surface gold deposits. Together, these deposits hold nearly 10 million oz. in resources, calculated under JORC standards, making it one of the world’s largest undeveloped gold assets.The property covers 514 km² of Alaska public land and lies within the Tintina gold belt, a province with more than 220 million oz. of documented gold endowment and some of the world’s largest gold mines and discoveries, such as Kinross’ Fort Knox gold mine.Alaska antimonyThe Tintina belt is also known to host significant Antimony deposits and was once a supply of the mineral to the North American market, in particular during wartimes. Government data shows that antimony ores from at least 25 deposits in the state were shipped to markets between 1905 and 1986, and the mineral is found to be associated with some of Alaska’s major gold deposits.The grey-colored metal is currently listed by the US government as critical to national and economic security, due to its high use and importance in defense and high-tech applications. However, the US has not produced antimony commercially since 2016, making domestic supply a priority in light of President Donald Trump’s executive order earlier this year to bolster American production of critical minerals.Recently, Nova discovered antimony coincident with the gold in surface sampling on numerous prospects across the Estelle mineral claims, elevating the project’s status as a critical mineral play that aligns with the Trump administration’s strategy.While no resource has yet been established for antimony, the company has said it plans to publish a resource estimate for the critical mineral some time this year.The DoW award, the company says, will enable its ARR unit to accelerate development of a fully integrated US supply chain to extract, concentrate and refine stibnite to produce military-grade antimony trisulfide to assist in meeting the nation’s defense industrial base demands.Nova’s CEO Christopher Gerteisen said this partnership would support America’s buildout of a “fully domestic, redundant supply chain” for the munitions and other defense products, as well as future supply to the US industrial base for a wide range of traditional and high-tech applications, including semiconductors and energy systems.He went on to say that the DoW award “provides further confidence in the quality of antimony mineralization and highlights the potential scale and scope of future antimony production from the Estelle project.”The $43.4 million funding, according to Gerteisen, will be used for the initial phase of a state-of-the-art antimony mining and refining hub based in Alaska to supply refined antimony products to the US industrial base and beyond.The award follows the Pentagon’s recent $245 million contract with United States Antimony Corporation (NYSE: UAMY), which operates the only two smelters in North America with long-standing capacity to process the metal.Shares of Nova Minerals jumped by as much as 20% to a 52-week high of $20.87 on the NASDAQ, taking its market capitalization to about $130 million.Weiter zum vollständigen Artikel bei Mining.com Weiter zum vollständigen Artikel bei Mining.com