U.S. Army Looks To Build Small Refineries For Critical Minerals
December 10th, 2025Via: ZeroHedge:
The U.S. Army will develop small-scale refineries to ensure domestic supply of critical minerals for defense and military purposes as the United States and the Western allies look to reduce their dependence on China.
“We need to come up with a way to ?make our own (critical minerals) domestically that we can actually monitor and control within our borders,” Mark Mezger, a munitions procurement adviser for the U.S. Army, told Reuters.
The Army is currently developing a project with the Idaho National Laboratory and gold mining company Perpetua Resources to process antimony.
In September, the U.S. Army’s Joint Program Executive Office Armaments and Ammunition (JPEO A&A) joined Perpetua Resources Inc. to launch the Stibnite Gold Project in central Idaho. The project seeks to redevelop an abandoned mine site in Stibnite for gold and antimony sulfide, a critical component used in ammunition production. The U.S. previously obtained antimony sulfide from foreign sources until 2021 when that supply ended.
