Antimony Resources Positions Bald Hill for North America’s Strategic Supply Race

Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Jim Atinson from Antimony Resources. And of course, Antimony is one of the hottest critical minerals in the critical mineral sectors right now. Can you tell us what Antimony is currently trading at and give us kind of an overview on why everybody out there should be doing their due diligence in finding out more about Antimony? Well, antimony, and I say this every time, is probably the most important metal nobody knows about. And it's it's important in several different ways. First of all, it is a military metal. It's used in bullets and artillery. It's also used as a hardener for lead anytime you have you use lead. So, it has industrial uses as well. Anthamonic triioxide is actually a flame retardant which is used in many places where where you need that kind of property. For instance, automobile uh interior uh upholstery, children's clothing, you know, one of the things that we found out is that most military tents are actually sprayed with antimony triioxide. So, it's a very important industrial and military metal. It's also very important as a strategic geopolitical metal and that is because in December 2024, China which produced about 75% of the world's antimony cut off all export of antimony. So there is no major supply of antimony anywhere in the world. In 2024, United States also imported about 140,000 metric tons of antimony triioxide. So they now have no source of antimony triioxide or any kind of antimony for that matter in the world. So they're scrambling for that. And as you can see if you look at the news they're busy putting money into antimony projects all over the place including uh all over the US. So one of the things about antimony that we think is important is its strategic political aspects. If you don't have antimony, theoretically, you don't have an army. That's as simple as it gets. But it's also, as I said, has very many industrial uses. So, we consider it after tungsten probably the most important strategic metal in the world. And people talk about lots of other ones, but we think it's it's up there with tungsten as far as being the most important in the world. So, that's the importance of antimony. The other importance of our project is our project is in North America and you know notwithstanding what's going on with other projects this is the highest grade antimony project in North America and as such you know has a tremendous value uh simply because it's you know because it's high-grade nature means that you can actually get a very good product that can be shipped to manufacturers or military whoever ever wanted. And I think that's another important thing about our project. It's, you know, it's high-grade. It's also well located. You know, it's it's located in southern New Brunswick. We're literally 85 kilometers from the US border. It is very important. We're 75 kilometers from a deep water port. You know, we have road access and hydro and power, all of that stuff. So it is very strategically and uh located in there in southern New Brunswick. New Brunswick also is a very very mining friendly province. They have put together a brand new mining act which is very supportive of of let's call it rapid turnaround for for permitting for for applications for for mining permits. They have also put together a new what they call strategic mineral strategic metals strategy. So they are focused very 100% on developing strategic metals in New Brunswick and of course Antimony fits right in with their with their plans. >> Um I was reading a report by Halgarten Plus Company. It said uh he was citing antimony at $60,000 per ton. Does that sound correct? >> It was that high. Right now, it's much less than that. Probably in the order of 30 to 35,000. The challenge with a spot price of antimony, it's not like other products like copper or gold which are sold basically on the open market. All antimony is really sold by contract. So, we know right now the Australians get around $35,000 a metric ton for their concentrate which they're shipping to China. So that's kind of a base a base price. I think as far as getting a spot price for antimony, it depends where you look. You'll get a different price in Shanghai, a different price in Vienna, different price in Philadelphia. It really depends on who's talking to you know and again all of the big let's call them market metal marketers, they set their own price based on contracts. So it's very difficult but it was at one time especially after the China shutdown export it was trading at least on the spot market for $60,000 a metric ton I would say 35,000 25 to 35,000 is a more reasonable price which again talks to the fact that our high-grade project our high-grade deposit becomes much more attractive because it has the grade that can withstand you know a price at that much lower than say $60,000 a metric ton. >> Uh Christopher Ecklestone in that particular whiplashed by war uh piece on antimony was talking about high-grade. Okay, grade being a big component and of course antimony resources is very competitive for grade and he talked about geography and of course you were in North America. Um one of the questions from investor talk this morning was was processing there's a lot of misinformation. One of the uh questions was, "Well, Jim, you're going to have to send this to China." And you corrected him. Would you mind sharing that with our audience on where an antimony exploration play like yours might be targeting processing moving forward? >> Well, of course, yes. Everybody talks about China. I don't believe any mine in Canada will be allowed to ship concentrate to China, but let's talk about where there are possibilities. For instance, the federal government recently put up $400 million to upgrade the the existing smelter in Kimberly, British Columbia, which has been upgraded to produce uh antimony is one of the metals. I think geranium is the other one. So, there's a possibility there. Now, it's a it's a refurbishment of an existing smelter. Probably take a couple years. That's how long those things take. There's also a new refinery that's just opened up to produce antimony down in southern Australia, a place called Byron Bay. It's owned by Trafigura. It is presently accepting concentrate from some of the Australian producers, especially one from Western Australia that does not that do not have contracts with the Chinese. So, there's some available capacity there. There's also, of course, the refinery in Montana and Thompson Falls, which is an antimony refinery, has been operating as such for quite a long time. They really don't have any secure supply. They're sort of, as I understand, looking around trying to find somewhere to get antimony uh to to antimony concentrate. So, those are three kind of options uh of where you know where a possibility of of a product would go. I would like to mention also that one of the things we're looking at and and several other companies in fact are looking at is hydrometallergical processing. Now hydromeergical processing would actually take place right at the mine site and would produce antimony metal right at the mine. Of course, that makes quite a bit of difference on the value proposition side. Difference between produc producing pure antimony or producing concentrate which is 65% antimony. So there are some possibilities outside of China. >> Uh the last time we spoke and for those of you following antimony resources of course you've had consistent output of drilling results. with the most recent one. You've identified another win obviously for shareholders with visible gold. Can you comment on this? >> Yeah. Yes, we did see we always knew that there was gold in the project associated with the antimony and also a little bit on its own in some places and we've only just begun to try to evaluate what what the possibility value of that gold would be. But one of the things that that happened recently, one of our loggers who a young woman actually identified visible gold in the core. And it's always exciting to find visible gold. And now I would just mention also that that drill hole was from the central zone, which is a zone that we're only just beginning to explore. And you know, would it it would perhaps indicate that that zone may have a higher gold content. We don't know that yet because we've only just started getting results from the central zone, but it's always exciting to find visible gold. >> We were also discussing about timelines uh you know there is a real timeline uh for getting antimony from exploration to production. Of course, you are one of the few people in the actual industry who has run an antimony production uh uh mine in the past. Can you tell us a little bit more about what's happening in North America for the evolution of a supply chain in uh producing antimony? >> I yeah that's a difficult question. I think a lot of people focus on perpetua because perpetua is in the process of building a mine. It's a gold mine and it has some antimony and so they are in the process of building that mine. So, they sort of have a timeline. You know, as as we all know, when you're building a $3 billion project, there's always delays and cost overruns and all of that, but they have put out a they put out a a timeline. They reckon they'll be in production by 2030. So, that let's say 3 years and more from now. I would say that our timeline, you know, may be similar because we will be submitting our permit application at the end of 2026, early 2027. The New Brunswick government has has said that they would have a very rapid turnaround time for the approval of that. We also, I would mention, sort of decided to to speed that up. We had a meeting with what was called the technical review committee. And this is a group that actually does the review of permit applications. And so we had a meeting with them and we just asked them straight out, what is your what is your main concern? What are the things you're going to be looking at in the in the permit application and we made sure that we addressed all of those issues. So we expect a fairly short turnaround time for the permit application. that will give us a mining a mining uh mining permit and that will mean that from then we can then start to talk about okay what's the construction going to take how long is that going to take it's a small operation seven you know let's say 7 or 800 tons a day a small operation small capex and though you know although those things take time we think that would be a short amount of time so you know we could see two or three years for construction and then a year for runup. So maybe, you know, three, three and a half years from now, you know, we would be talking about potentially being in production. >> So what's happening now into the fall? What should shareholders be looking forward to, Jim? >> Well, we are in hiatus right now. We're taking I know it's fall. Damn, I hate that. But anyway, we we have taken a bit of a what we call a summer hiatus. Uh we've stopped all of our drilling and all of our work. Uh that's for for the main reason is to let the assays catch up. Uh the assay turnaround times are are very slow right now because it's summertime that labs are very busy. So we're looking at four to five weeks sort of average turnaround time. So we'll be shut down for that for that amount of time. Let the assays catch up. Let us you know update our modeling, update all of our database, all of that all of that work that needs to be done. We are also putting together a plan for a metallurgical drilling program which will probably collect about 150 to 200 metric uh a kilogram sorry of material for metallurgical testing. So that's that's what what we're working on. So those are the things coming up. So coming up for shareholders when we get back to drilling in in a month or two months however long um we will be focusing some of our attention as I mentioned in the main zone metallergical drilling but also we'll be focusing a lot of our attention on the new zones that we have identified. So we have identified three new zones of mineralization which we call the central zone, southern zone and the west zone which is also called the Marcus zone. Um we have done a fair amount of drilling on the central zone. Part of that drilling was to try to understand the distribution of mineralization. We had a lot of antimony mineralization in the form of stibite in the surface trenches where we trenched this zone over about 200 m but it had never been drilled. So we we did a significant amount of drilling on that and we'll see how that turns out. We'll also be starting up drilling on what we call the south zone which has been drilled in the past had had a couple of drill holes into it and we again trenched that one over 200 mters and we'll be exploring that and we'll be exploring the west or Marcus zone. Uh the reason we couldn't do that in the past even though we discovered it last winter was because the mineralization occurs right underneath our our drill road and we needed the drill road to be in place to drill to continue some drilling uh from the west side into the main zone. So, we'll be digging up that road, doing some additional trenching work, exposing the west zone a little bit more, and also probably putting in a new drill road so that we can access drill locations to drill that off. So, most of the news coming out, you know, starting in the fall, I think, will be focused mainly on these new zones where what we're trying to understand, people ask all the time about a maiden resorts. We still don't know how big this is. So it's hard for us to say, "Yeah, let's, you know, let's do a maiden resource when we really don't know how big the thing is that we're trying to do a resource on." So th that additional drilling will be part of that. We also will probably do a little more drilling on the main zone. It has not been closed off to depth, nor has it been closed off to the north. So there's still expanded drilling there to do. So yeah, we'll be drilling. That's that's what we do as an exploration company and our news will be about that. I think there'll be some interesting news from metallurgical work as well because one of the things we're trying to understand in the metallergies we know we can collect the antimony mineralization very easily you know this has been shown many times in many various places but what we want to know is can we recover the gold that's there we think the gold averages between let's say 7 g and point and one gram per ton that kind of grade and can we recover cover that and of course that would be significant for the overall economics of the project. >> Thank you so much for the excellent overview and update on antimony resources. And for those of you that want to continue to find out more about uh loggers sec uh finding visible gold, please go to the following website and to stay on top of the drilling and assay results. Thank you so much, Jim, for joining us today. >> Well, thank you very much for having us. We always enjoy talking about this project.