Pictured are crystals of the antimony ore stivnite (antimony sulfide).
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BEIJING — China’s latest export controls have rattled insiders in the critical minerals industry, and some worry Beijing will leverage its global dominance of the supply chain in unprecedented ways.
China’s Ministry of Commerce announced Thursday that antimony export controls will come into effect on September 15. Antimony is used in bullets, nuclear weapons production and lead-acid batteries. It can also strengthen other metals.
“Three months ago, no way [any] one would think they would do that. It’s pretty controversial in that sense,” Lewis Black, CEO of Canada-based Almonty Industries, said in a telephone interview. The company said it is spending at least $125 million to reopen a tungsten mine in South Korea later this year.
Tungsten is almost as hard as a diamond and is used in weapons, semiconductors and industrial cutting machines. Both tungsten and antimony are on the US critical mineral list and are less than 10 elements apart on the periodic table.
“My sector now believes this hits much closer to home than graphite,” Black said, referring to China’s previous export controls. Last year, Beijing, the world’s biggest graphite producer, said it would impose export licenses for the critical battery material amid scrutiny from foreign countries worried about its dominance.
“I can’t explain this move and I think that’s what shook a lot of people in this area, my clients, and they don’t have a plan B, which China knows very well. There hasn’t been one in 30 years.” , he said.
“There was always a balance … weapons were never used because they could create this snowball of escalation,” he said.
China represented 48% of the world’s antimony mine production in 2023, while the U.S. mined no commercial antimony, according to the U.S. Geological Survey’s latest annual report. The US has not mined tungsten commercially since 2015, and China dominates global tungsten supply, the report said.
“I think it’s the beginning of some export restrictions on a number of rare earth minerals,” Tony Adock, executive chairman of Tungsten Metals Group, said in a telephone interview. He said he found it hard to believe that China would simply limit antimony.
“The way it [Chinese Commerce Ministry] statement was written, we have extrapolated it to tungsten and other rare earths. It may not happen,” Adok said, noting that “tungsten is probably of the highest economic importance.”
China’s commerce ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The military importance of tungsten
The US tried to limit China’s access to high-tech semiconductors, after which Beijing announced export controls on germanium and gallium, two metals used in chip manufacturing;
While tungsten is also used to make semiconductors, the metal, like antimony, is used in defense production.
“China has a declining production of tungsten, but tungsten is absolutely vital, much more so than antimony, in military applications,” said Christopher Ecclestone, chief strategist and mining strategist at Hallgarten & Company.
He expects China to put controls on tungsten exports by the end of the year, if not in the next month or two.
“During a situation where there’s a little bit of a race to secure metals in case there’s any kind of flare-up, frankly we’re talking about the South China Sea or Taiwan, you want to have as much tungsten as you can,” Ecclestone said. . “But you also want the people on the other side to have as little tungsten as possible.”
The US is already keen to reduce its dependence on China for tungsten.
Beginning in 2026, the US REEShore Act bans the use of Chinese tungsten in military equipment. This is referred to in the 2022 Basic Energy Restoration and Onshore Rare Earth Mining Security Act.
The House Select Committee on Strategic Rivalry between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party in June announced a new working group on US critical minerals policy.
Ecclestone said that last week, the specialist antimony market noticed that the US price to buy the metal from Rotterdam was exponentially higher than the price for delivery outside Shanghai. That’s after antimony prices continued to rise even after pandemic-related shipping disruptions ended, he said.
“There is a suspicion that the Pentagon has replenished its stocks of certain metals, and mainly antimony because it needs antimony for ammunition,” said Ecclestone, who founded the strategic mining company in 2003.
The US Department of Defense did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
China is acting more in retaliation “against what it sees as an invasion of its national interests,” Markus Herrmann Chen, co-founder and chief executive of China Macro Group, said in an email.
He pointed out that China’s Third Plenary Session in July “proposed a completely new policy goal of better coordination of the entire mineral value chain, likely reflecting the further increased importance of sourcing ‘strategic mineral resources’ for both business and geo-economic interests.”
Emerging alternatives
As China seeks to ensure its national security, companies in the US and elsewhere are looking to seize a new opportunity.
“Energy Fuels has been the largest supplier of uranium oxide in the US for several years supporting domestic nuclear power generation,” said Mark Chalmers, president and CEO of Colorado-based Energy Fuels. He said the company is creating a range of rare earth products in the US.
“We recognized that our 40 years of expertise in naturally occurring radioactive materials gives us a competitive advantage to replicate China’s multiple-splitting success [rare earth elements] from low cost and abundant monaziteChalmers said, referring to a mineral from which the desired metals can be extracted.
It remains unclear whether China will pursue a blanket implementation of the latest export controls.
“They don’t want to acknowledge that this could escalate,” Black said. “But I don’t think China wants this to escalate. The last thing you want to create is another bugger [at] the start of the US elections. Let’s see in a week if this is really politics or not.”
