Australia’s antimony mines don’t yet guarantee reliable supply
Australia has spent years discussing the strategic importance of critical minerals. We have identified the resources, developed the strategies and established financing mechanisms to encourage investment. Yet there remains a considerable distance between having antimony in the ground and being able to supply it when national security depends on it.
Antimony is used in ammunition, military alloys, flame retardants and advanced electronics. China accounts for 70 to 80 percent of global antimony production and processing. This dominance gives Beijing considerable influence over supply. Its export restrictions have demonstrated how readily critical minerals can become instruments of economic coercion.
Australia has an opportunity to reduce that vulnerability. But we need to be clear about what we’re trying to achieve. Producing more antimony isn’t the same as building a resilient supply chain.
Recent developments are encouraging. In February, Nyrstar shipped its first commercial-grade antimony metal from its demonstration plant at Port Pirie in South Australia. In October, Larvotto Resources shipped 68 tonnes of antimony concentrate from its Hillgrove mine in New South Wales under an existing purchase agreement with Wogen Resources. Wogen can therefore bypass Chinese traders and work directly with Western supply chains. This aligns with Australia’s critical minerals strategy and with the diversification efforts of the United States, European Union, Japan and South Korea.
These are significant achievements. They demonstrate that Australia can move beyond exploration and resource announcements towards actual production.
They also reveal the next challenge. Mining, producing refined metal and manufacturing the specialised materials required by defence and industry are different activities. Success at one stage doesn’t guarantee capacity at the next.
A mine can be commercially successful while sending its concentrate overseas for processing. A refinery can produce antimony while depending on imported feedstock. Neither arrangement secures the value chain from end-to-end or necessarily guarantees Australia access to the materials it needs during a crisis.
The financial challenge is equally important. Antimony prices are volatile, processing requires substantial upfront investment and small domestic markets can make long-term commercial commitments difficult. Investors cannot be expected to fund expensive facilities simply because governments consider their products strategically important.
But Australia isn’t starting from scratch.
The federal government’s Critical Minerals Strategic Reserve, which prioritises antimony, has access to A$1 billion for project support and A$150 million for selective stockpiling. Its mechanisms include long-term supply agreements, pooling supplies from different producers and financial instruments that can help manage price volatility. Export Finance Australia, the government’s export credit agency, also has an expanded role in supporting transactions.
The tools exist. The question is whether they’ll produce the industrial capability Australia actually needs to mine, process and stockpile antimony to meet strategic needs.
That requires confronting an uncomfortable reality: a strategically important supply chain likely won’t be the cheapest supply chain.
Chinese producers benefit from established scale, integrated processing capacity and industrial advantages that new Australian facilities cannot readily reproduce. If governments want alternative sources of supply, they may have to accept higher costs.
There is nothing inherently wrong with that. Governments routinely pay for defence capabilities that commercial markets cannot provide. The important question is what strategic benefit taxpayers receive in return.
A permanent subsidy for an uncompetitive operation isn’t an industrial strategy. Neither is refusing to support a viable capability simply because cheaper imports are available today.
The distinction is what public investment delivers.
Australia should begin by establishing what quantities and forms of antimony its defence industry, advanced manufacturers and allied partners actually require. Defence demand alone may be insufficient to sustain commercial processing. Aggregating civilian and military demand across trusted markets offers a more credible foundation for investment.
Next, the government should use existing reserve mechanisms to test commercially realistic proposals linking Australian production, domestic processing and guaranteed access to finished materials. Those proposals must account for energy costs, feedstock, technical performance, environmental requirements and price movements.
Allied participation should be encouraged, but Australia should resist assuming every stage of production must occur domestically. Processing undertaken by reliable partners can strengthen resilience, provided Australia retains assured access and avoids simply replacing one concentrated dependency with another.
Where domestic processing is justified, government support should come with enforceable conditions. These might include minimum operating capacity, supply commitments during emergencies, transparent ownership arrangements and measurable investment in Australian skills and industrial infrastructure.
We also need to decide how much redundancy is necessary. Concentrating production in one large facility may reduce costs but create another point of failure. Building several facilities may improve resilience while making every operation less commercially competitive. These trade‑offs cannot be solved simply by calling for industry coordination; they require explicit decisions about Australia’s desired level of redundancy and resilience.
Nyrstar’s progress at Port Pirie and Larvotto’s production at Hillgrove show that Australia has genuine opportunities. The challenge is connecting such investments into a reliable industrial system and resilient supply chain rather than celebrating each project as an isolated success.
The government should judge its critical minerals policies against a straightforward test: if access to Chinese antimony – or the trade routes, ports or choke points that supply it – were severely disrupted tomorrow, what could Australian industry actually produce, in what quantities, and for how long?
Until we can answer that question, Australia has an antimony opportunity, not an assured antimony capability.
Success isn’t measured by funding levels or project announcements. The key metric is resilience, not activity, and it’s measured by whether Australian and allied industry can continue operating when the supply chains we rely on fail.
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