YELLOW PINE, Idaho – Behind the gleaming, forearm-sized golden scissors and the crowd of dignitaries sat a pile of rocks.
That seemingly useless heap, though, marked the reason the governor, an Army general and a U.S. Department of Agriculture deputy undersecretary all flew in by helicopter to one of the most remote places in the country for the ribbon-cutting of the Stibnite Gold Project. Within that ore lies what the federal government considers a critical mineral – antimony. Antimony is used to manufacture bullets, flame retardants, night vision goggles and even nuclear weapons. It also helped the U.S. win World War II.
Antimony is one of the numerous critical minerals abundant in Idaho needed not only for national defense but also for consumer electronics, wind turbines, solar panels and the advancement of artificial intelligence. Idaho, historically known for its gold, is rich in these critical minerals currently being imported from countries such as China and threatened by the disruption of supply chains, export restrictions and price manipulation.
A year ago, China banned antimony exports to the United States. And on Thursday, China restricted even more of its critical mineral trade, citing its own national security. But this past summer, the U.S. Forest Service helped expedite permits to Perpetua Resources to proceed on a $2 billion mining project expected to create 950 direct jobs during construction beginning later this year. The Stibnite site could employ as many as 550 people once production begins, which could happen as soon as 2028.
“Without stibnite, you can’t really make bullets,” said Mark Mezger, a senior technology advisor for the U.S. Army Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center. “You know what an army is without bullets? A parade.”
The International Energy Agency, a global authority working with countries, stakeholders and industries, forecasts that demand for critical elements used for clean energy alone could triple in five years and quadruple by 2040 worldwide to meet net-zero emissions goals. If quantum computing and humanoid robots like Elon Musk’s Optimus continue to develop, some estimates suggest that demand for critical minerals could increase by as much as 500%.
Perpetua expects to produce roughly 35% of U.S. demand for antimony in their first six years of operations.
“Permitting has been so difficult,” Idaho Governor Brad Little told The Spokesman-Review. “The President’s famous for saying, ‘drill, baby, drill.’ And Secretary (of the Interior Doug) Burgum is saying what’s important now for the defense of this country is ‘mine, baby, mine.’ ”
But that expedited permitting process ignited lawsuits by the Nez Perce Tribe, which claims the mining will devastate their way of life, clearing around 3,500 acres of vegetation, and generate billions of pounds of waste. The Tribe says new tailings from the mine will leach arsenic, manganese, mercury and other pollutants into the groundwater and surface water.
Antimony for national defense
The most important use for the antimony mined at the Stibnite project centers around national defense.
The mine is aligned with the Army’s strategy to provide a domestic supply chain from raw material to processing to ammunition production, Maj. Gen. John Reim said in a speech at the mine. He’s the commanding general and joint program executive officer for armaments and ammunition at Picatinny Arsenal, a military research and manufacturing facility. All of this is in an attempt to “modernize and fortify the Arsenal of Democracy.”
In March, Trump signed an executive order aimed at increasing the domestic supply of critical minerals. The order mandates fast-tracking permitting, using federal lands for mining, supporting investment-ready projects and deploying public capital, including through the Defense Production Act.
The sun was glaring, and mining executives, political leaders and locals commented on how wonderful the weather was for such a momentous day during the ribbon-cutting ceremony on Sept. 19 at the Stibnite Gold Project . Some say it’s history in the making, as a mine of that size, scale and importance hasn’t been approved in years.
Mezger flew in from the Picatinny Arsenal in New Jersey. From his pocket, he pulled out a small gray rock freckled with shiny, pewter-colored bits of antimony.
He explains how the Army is having to relearn from scratch how to process antimony trisulfide, and other critical minerals, to get military-grade materials. Antimony trisulfide is a chemical compound of antimony and sulfur. It’s used to make the primer, or what ignites the propellant powder in a cartridge.
Mezger said the Department of Defense awarded Perpetua Resources around $80 million. Of that total sum, about $59 million came from the Defense Production Act.
He said the next step for him and his team is going to be to go to the Idaho National Laboratory to begin to develop a process for separation and purification.
John Paulson, the billionaire American hedge fund manager famous for betting against the U.S. subprime mortgage market in 2007 on the eve of the Great Recession, was also in attendance on Sept. 19. He’s invested approximately $185 million into Perpetua Resources.
History of Stibnite
“In World War II, the miners of Stibnite produced the antimony and tungsten that the munitions board credited with shortening the war by a year and saving over a million American lives,” said Perpetua CEO Jon Cherry as he addressed the crowd of 150 hard-hat wearing mining enthusiasts. “That’s a legacy that we’re proud to build on. But we also know the site tells another story, one of environmental challenges left behind by past operators and a different era of mining.”
Bearing a wide grin and a friendly demeanor, Deb Filler isn’t an army official, a mining executive or a politician. She’s a local.
Filler lives here, the nearest community to the Stibnite Gold Project about 14 miles away from the site. It has a population of around 25 people during the winter months. She’s on the Stibnite Advisory Council, a coalition that brings together eight communities closest to the site to discuss challenges and opportunities presented by the mining of gold and antimony.
Because Stibnite is a brownfield site, meaning it was previously mined, Filler said her grandfather used to work there for 50 cents a day. Back in her grandfather’s time, a person could address a letter to SB2S3 – the chemical formula for antimony – with Idaho attached on the end, and the package would end up at the mine.
According to Perpetua, the Stibnite site produced approximately half of the U.S. demand for tungsten and close to 90% of the antimony needed for the war. Most of the Stibnite Mining District was largely abandoned after the 1950s. But there were pockets of small gold operations up until 1997.
Marty Boughton, the public affairs manager for Perpetua, said that today there’s one ton of arsenic leaving the site via waterways and 10 million tons of legacy waste and tailings strewn throughout the Stibnite Mining District.
Perpetua Resources, known as Midas Gold until 2021, has already spent more than $20 million to improve water quality on site by cleaning more than 375,000 tons of legacy waste.
“Once we start construction, we will create a fish tunnel that gets fish from where they’re currently blocked and restores their access to their native spawning grounds (in Meadow Creek),” Boughton said. “It opens about 20 miles of habitat. It restores over 12 miles of waterway and fish habitat. So there will be that temporary fish tunnel during construction and at the end of our process, we will actually permanently restore fish passage. So for the first time in over 80 years, fish will be able to access those areas that have been out of reach for so long.”
Boughton said Perpetua plans to pick up all the old tailings and reprocess them, and then they will go, along with new mine tailings, into a tailings storage facility with “the most robust safety measures” in place.
In addition, Perpetua has donated $750,000 and given the Stibnite Foundation 150,000 shares of their company. The purpose of the Stibnite Foundation is to support education, infrastructure opportunities in Valley County and to ensure that the generational impact of the Stibnite Gold Project outlasts the lifespan of the mine itself. One of the last things Perpetua must do before beginning construction is to post its financial assurance, which means they’re liable for potential environmental impacts and the eventual cleanup of the site.
Whether you’re Governor Little or a resident like Filler, Stibnite getting the “go-ahead” is a remarkable moment. For some, it may even be a sign of things to come as the United States ramps up its critical mineral efforts.
“We believe that we’ve put in the time, we’ve done it right, we’re setting the standard and there’s now a process by which we can get to the finish line,” Cherry, the company’s CEO, told The Spokesman-Review. “I think that’s very encouraging for the industry in general.”
Concerns mount
Situated just outside the border of the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness and nestled in the headwaters of the East Fork South Fork Salmon River, the Stibnite Gold Project, including three separate open-pit mines, has environmental groups and the Nez Perce Tribe concerned about potential environmental impacts.
But this concern has escalated beyond mere worry and into the courts.
The Nez Perce Tribe filed a lawsuit against the Forest Service toward the end of August for giving Perpetua the final federal permit they need to begin construction. The complaint, seeking to halt the project, states that the Forest Service’s approval of the Stibnite Gold Project is “arbitrary, capricious and contrary to law.”
But what about the state-of-the-art tailings storage facility with the most robust safety measures ?
“That sounds great until you realize that they’re going to scoop all those millions of pounds of hazardous materials up and dump it into this pristine drainage,” said John Robison, Public Lands and Wildlife director for the Idaho Conservation League, “and then pile about 120 million tons of new toxic waste on top of it. And so instead of shrinking the footprint of disturbance, and consolidating things, they’re actually doubling the acres of disturbance.”
Josh Johnson, Central Idaho director for the ICL, said they have serious concerns with Stibnite’s air permit granted to them by the state. His belief is that dust raised from operations, potentially mingled with arsenic emissions, is not safe for humans. Perpetua has modified its plan of operations over the course of time to better align with criticism from local groups, but Robison said it’s still not good enough.
“Every time we push on it, there’s some significant flaw that is revealed,” Robison said.
Robison believes that the water temperature in nearby streams will be far too high for local bull trout, salmon and other populations of fish for the next 100 years. Thousands of trucks carrying diesel fuel, sodium cyanide, sulfuric acid and other kinds of hazardous material used to crush ore on site will travel along narrow riverside roads to get to the Stibnite Gold Project. The potential for spills to occur is high, Robison said.
Striking gold and
broken promises
Johnson said that the “golden ticket” for Perpetua, the real money maker, isn’t antimony. It’s gold.
He said that 95% of Perpetua’s profit is going to come from the gold mine. A spokesperson from Perpetua said in an email that gold makes up “90 to 95% of the economic value of the project, depending on the price of gold.” Since there’s an estimated 4.8 million ounces of gold and 148 million pounds of antimony, most of their volume is antimony.
Robison said the ICL went to the Forest Service and told them there’s a more sustainable and less damaging antimony-only mine design that would include two instead of three pits. Ultimately, the Forest Service rejected that idea.
The Nez Perce Tribe did not respond to a request for comment before publication, but they have a history with mining interests in the area. In 1855, they signed a treaty establishing a 7.5-million acre reservation. When gold was discovered on their land shortly after, a new treaty was drafted in 1863 that reduced the size of their reservation to just 750,000 acres. The approximate 90% reduction of the Nez Perce’s land because of the 1863 treaty is why many in the Tribe refer to it as the “Steal Treaty.”
Kevin Knesek, deputy forest supervisor for the Forest Service, was at the ribbon-cutting event, but said he couldn’t comment on active litigation. He did mention, however, that modern mining is much more environmentally sensitive and cares for water, fish and soil more than ever .
There are two other major sites still in the exploration phase that the ICL is challenging: the Kilgore project, an effort to explore for gold about 60 miles west of Yellowstone, and the CuMo project, an open-pit operation seeking copper and molybdenum in the headwater of the Boise River.
Exploration is the research and consideration phase of a project that looks at a site’s viability for a mine. In the United States, the two most common forms of mines are either open-pit or underground. The choice between the two usually depends on the depth, grade and location of the deposit.
For Johnson, the Stibnite Gold Project is not reconcilable. He did say that the ICL recognizes mining isn’t black and white; they try to identify where and when mining is needed by evaluating projects on a case-by-case basis. As for the Stibnite site, Robison called it the best case of greenwashing he can think of.
Mining the laws
The law of the land when it comes to mining in the United States is the General Mining Act of 1872, which governs hard -rock mineral exploration and the extraction of minerals on federal lands. Many conservation groups and Indigenous tribes have tried to repeal the law for years with little success.
The laws layered on top of the General Mining Act of 1872 are mostly from the 1960s and ’70s, including the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act and National Environmental Policy Act. NEPA acts as a framework that coordinates federal environmental review and is designed so agencies can assess environmental effects before making decisions.
“We have a range of different laws, that kind of patchwork quilt in to help address a range of those issues,” said Aimee Boulanger, the executive director of the Initiative for Responsible Mining. “And the 1872 mining law does still make agencies like the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management feel like they can’t say no to mining.”
Corby Anderson, a professor at the Colorado School of Mines and director of the Kroll Institute for Extractive Metallurgy, said that the average permitting time for a mine in the United States is 29 years. Boughton said it took 18 years for the Stibnite Gold Project from exploration to the final federal permit. She said the only other country in the world that has a longer permitting timeline is Zambia.
“You can look all over the United States and see tragedy after tragedy of people investing time and money into a property, trying to move forward and being unable to do it,” Anderson said. “Our permitting system is ridiculous… What the Chinese really own, although they invest in minerals, what they really own is the processing and refining sector. And we have totally given that away.”
Anderson said that there are only two functioning smelters in the country for copper, zero for lead and one for zinc. Even if a mine is permitted, almost all the raw material goes to China because they’ve invested heavily in technology for processing and refining.
He said the U.S. Bureau of Mines shut down in 1995, which means there’s no government agency dedicated to mining in the United States today. The closest thing to a government agency for mining is the Department of Agriculture. On top of this, the mining industry is faced with another challenge: a rapidly retiring workforce.
Right, wrong or indifferent, Anderson said that mining has socially became a “bad word.” Many people in the United States associate old pictures of mining from the early 1900s as a reflection of what modern mining is today. In reality, he said mining is a sophisticated, technical, financial and social endeavor filled with talented, multifaceted individuals.
“You can’t have a new Tesla that is made from materials in the United States, unless you mine more,” Anderson said. “If we keep kneecapping ourselves, the Chinese are laughing all the way to the bank.”
Anderson pointed to the Sibanye-Stillwater mine near Columbus, Montana, as one example of modern mining. There, the company extracts palladium and platinum. He said the project has two underground mines in a wilderness area and has zero discharge of water. Half of their production comes from the mine, while the other half stems from recycling catalysts.
The Sibanye-Stillwater mine is also admired for another thing: its Good Neighbor Agreement.
Boulanger and Anderson both praised the legally binding agreement between the mining company, ranchers and local conservation groups aimed at protecting the environment, while still encouraging responsible economic development.
A 2021 report from Morgan Stanley Capital International found the vast majority of critical minerals in the United States, including 97% of nickel, 89% of copper, 79% of lithium and 68% of cobalt reserves, are within 35 miles of Native American reservations.
There are other agreements similar to the Good Neighbor Agreement in place around the region, such as the one between the Shoshone-Paiute Tribe and Integra Resources in southwest Idaho. Still, concerns remain, even with more nuanced mining practices in place, that the welfare of Indigenous communities will drift by the wayside as the government continues to ramp up extraction efforts.
The most recent example of these concerns being ignored occurred when Trump signed an order on Monday approving the construction of a 211-mile road to cut through the Alaskan wilderness in order to mine for copper, cobalt, gold and other minerals. The Biden administration previously blocked the Ambler Road project, saying it would harm caribou and other wildlife populations, as well as disrupt the Alaskan Indigenous tribes that depend upon hunting and fishing.
Rare earths in Idaho
Vintage wooden floors, ancient mining equipment and photos of miners from the early 1900s make up the retrofitted interior of the former train station in downtown Coeur d’Alene that Idaho Strategic Resources calls their headquarters.
The company owns the only operating gold mine in Idaho, called the Golden Chest Mine, just outside of the town of Murray. The profit they make from the gold they produce is then invested into three separate rare earth projects, all in the exploration phase. These three sites – Lemhi Pass, Mineral Hill and Diamond Creek – are located near Salmon, Idaho, which is about a five-and-a-half hour drive from Coeur d’Alene. Their rare earth land package is the largest in the United States.
There are at least 50 critical minerals in the United States, 17 of which are considered rare earth elements.
There’s only one operating rare earth mine and processing facility in the United States: the Mountain Pass Mine in southern California, owned by MP Materials. Recently, the United States government bought $400 million worth of MP Materials shares. The government also agreed to set a floor price of $110 per kilogram for their rare earths.
“Our rare earth element mix is the highest (grade) in the world, that we know of,” said Travis Swallow, the director of stakeholder relations at Idaho Strategic. “Now it’s just a matter of, is it there at depth and how far (down), how big is it and can we get to it?”
Grade refers to the concentration of valuable minerals in an ore. Volume, or tonnage, refers to the total amount of material. While the samples they have are the highest grade in the world, the samples they’ve gathered so far are mostly from the surface. Swallow said it’s fairly safe to assume that the grade will remain consistent below.
So far, the company has done surface mapping, soil sampling and some trenching, which involves digging long, narrow ditches down to a maximum of 8 to 10 feet to take samples. They’ve even used drones to conduct magnetic surveys to look for carbonatites, a type of rock that often holds a variety of rare earth elements. Some of the drones can make projections at a depth of up to 500 meters below the surface. The company’s next step is to conduct drilling, which will dig even further into the Earth’s crust to determine the right point of access.
Swallow said Idaho Strategic is only looking to extract six kinds of rare earth elements, out of the 17 total, because those are the most profitable. The six rare earths they’re targeting are used in the two main types of rare earth magnets.
“There’s the neodymium iron boron magnets, which are more widely used commercially in things like electric vehicles and wind turbines,” Swallow said. “Then (there’s) Samarium-cobalt magnets, which are used in a lot of the high value defense applications, like your F-35 fighter jet and precision guided missiles.”
Lemhi Pass, Mineral Hill and Diamond Creek are located in a 70-mile section of Idaho referred to as the thorium belt. Thorium, commonly found around rare earth elements, is a radioactive element that can be used as a nuclear fuel. It’s significantly less radioactive than uranium and can’t be used to make nuclear weapons. Thorium’s half-life is 500 years, compared to uranium’s 10,000 years.
Swallow said that in the 1950s and ’60s, researchers stated that once the world wasn’t so focused on blowing each other up because of the Cold War, thorium would become the nuclear fuel of choice.
As countries begin to look for more renewable forms of energy, Swallow believes that thorium will attract more attention. That’s why Idaho Strategic is talking with the Idaho National Laboratory and the company Clean Core to turn thorium into a nuclear fuel called aneel.
For their gold operation, Idaho Strategic takes the leftover tailings – mining waste – and turns them into a paste. Their tailings “pond” isn’t liquid at all; it’s just a pile of sandy clay material. Swallow said one of his engineers told him that it costs around $5 per ton more to turn the tailings into paste compared to the classic liquid tailings. Swallow said he’s not sure yet if they can do the same for rare earth tailings.
Even without the permitting process, the journey to take a mining prospect from the exploration to production stage is arduous. Because Idaho Strategic has a continuous cash flow from its gold mine, they aren’t in any hurry to start producing rare earths and don’t have to beg for help from investors.
Take for instance, the Australian mining company Jervois Global. Jervois planned to open a cobalt mine in Idaho, but when China flooded the market with cheap cobalt, any chance they had of making a profit quickly disappeared. The company filed for bankruptcy in January.
Matthew Lengerich, the executive general manager for Jervois Global in the United States, said they’ve been spending about $1 million a month since March of 2023 to sustain operations, even though they can’t economically produce cobalt. More likely than not, they will completely cease operation in the United States in the next couple of months.
“In my opinion, (the government is) putting the cart way in front of the horse, where they’re funding all these processing facilities, but they don’t necessarily have the ore to feed them,” Swallow said. “It would be nice to get more government focus at the upper end of the supply chain, actually getting it out of the ground.”
Swallow said he appreciates the government’s attempt to streamline permitting processes by setting hard deadlines for the Forest Service and other permitting agencies. Slowly, he believes the government is starting to realize that the free market philosophy may not apply to critical minerals.
“Everybody in the industry today doesn’t want to go back to how it was in the past,” he said. “They all lived through this offshoring of our industry overseas because the old timers did not do it right in the past.”
Experimental extractions
As the country attempts to scale up mining for critical minerals, more innovative approaches are also being explored to extract desired materials.
Swallow said Idaho Strategic has given a professor from the University of Idaho, Amin Mirkouei, rare earth-bearing soil to grow plants in. Through a process called phytomining, special “hyperaccumulator” plants absorb metals and minerals, including rare earth elements, from the soil and concentrate them in their tissues.
Mirkouei’s team is also looking at bioleaching, which uses specific bacteria or fungi to “leach” into ore, which in turn breaks down minerals and releases the desired elements. Swallow said both of these more eco-friendly alternatives to traditional mining may be difficult to implement on an industrial scale. But phytomining could be used as a reclamation tool after an area has already been mined.
Rare Earth Salts is a company based in Wyoming that’s working on developing molten salts to pull apart rare earths. The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is also fine-tuning a method for extracting critical minerals from seaweed, among other innovations.
Elizabeth Holley, an associate professor at the Colorado School of Mines, recently released a study that stated if 90% of byproducts were recovered from existing mines, the United States could meet its demand for dozens of different critical minerals. Swallow said that most of these mineral extraction methods are still a work in progress. He said the “tried and true process” for separating metals of interest is still the solvent extraction method, which separates specific critical minerals from a complex liquid mixture.
Back at the Stibnite Gold Project, the current dusty and dirty condition of the ite serve as a stark dichotomy to the serene, pulchritudinous landscape full of trees, meadows and bountiful streams. Perpetua claims they want to leave the area better then they found it, but some fear a repeat of the past.
“There is no security of the supply chain of critical minerals without community consent, and in the United States, specifically without Indigenous consent,” Boulanger said. “It’s not some touchy-feely thing that’s good for lefty Democrats. Having responsible business practices in the American West is good for everyone.”
