The picture shows crystals of antimony stibnite (antimony sulfide) ore.
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BEIJING – China’s recent export controls have alarmed those in the vital metals industry, with some fearing that Beijing will exploit its dominance of the global supply chain in unprecedented ways.
China's commerce ministry said Thursday that controls on antimony exports will take effect on Sept. 15. Antimony is used in the manufacture of lead, nuclear weapons and lead-acid batteries. It can also be used to strengthen other metals.
“Three months ago, no one would have thought they would do this. It’s controversial in that regard,” Lewis Black, chief executive of Canada’s Almenti Industries, said in a phone interview. The company said it will spend at least $125 million to reopen a tungsten mine in South Korea later this year.
Tungsten is almost as hard as diamond and is used in weapons, semiconductors, and industrial cutting machines. Both tungsten and antimony are on the U.S. list of critical minerals, separated by less than ten elements on the periodic table.
“My industry now thinks this is closer to home than graphite,” Black said, referring to China’s previous export controls. Last year, Beijing, the world’s largest producer of graphite, said it would impose export permits on the vital battery material amid scrutiny from foreign countries concerned about its dominance.
“I can't explain this move and I think it has worried a lot of people in the industry and my clients, and they don't have a plan B, which China knows very well. There hasn't been a plan B for 30 years,” he said.
“There has always been a balance… They have never been armed because it could create a snowball of escalation,” he said.
According to the latest annual report from the US Geological Survey, China accounted for 48% of global antimony mine production in 2023, while the United States extracted no marketable antimony. The report said the United States has not mined tungsten commercially since 2015, and China dominates the world’s tungsten supply.
“I think this is the beginning of some export restrictions on a number of rare earths,” Tony Adcock, chief executive of Tungsten Metals Group, said in a telephone interview, adding that he found it hard to believe China would impose restrictions on antimony.
“The way the Chinese Commerce Ministry statement was worded, we concluded that this would apply to tungsten and other rare earths. This may not be the case,” Adcock said, noting that “tungsten is probably the most economically important.”
China's Ministry of Commerce did not respond to a request for comment.
Military importance of tungsten
The United States has sought to restrict China's access to high-end semiconductors, and Beijing has since announced export controls on germanium and gallium, two metals used in chipmaking.
While tungsten is also used in the semiconductor industry, this metal, like antimony, is used in defense production.
“China is seeing a decline in tungsten production, but tungsten is very vital, much more so than antimony, for military applications,” said Christopher Eccleston, chief mining strategist at Hallgarten & Company.
China is expected to impose controls on tungsten exports by the end of the year, if not in the next month or two.
“If there is a race to secure the metals in case of any kind of tensions, frankly when we talk about the South China Sea or Taiwan, you want to have as much tungsten as possible. But you also want the people on the other side to have as little tungsten as possible,” Ecclestone said.
The United States is already looking to reduce its dependence on China for tungsten.
Starting in 2026, the US REEShore Act bans the use of Chinese tungsten in military equipment. This refers to the Rare Earths Land-Based Energy Reserve Recovery and Security Act of 2022.
In June, the Committee on U.S.-CPC Strategic Competition announced the formation of a new working group on U.S. critical minerals policy.
Eccleston said the specialty antimony trading market last week noticed that the purchase price of the metal from Rotterdam in the United States was significantly higher than the delivery price from Shanghai. He said this came after antimony prices continued to rise even after the pandemic-related shipping disruptions ended.
“There are suspicions that the Pentagon has been replenishing its reserves of certain minerals, most notably antimony, because it needs antimony for munitions,” said Eccleston, who founded Mining Strategy in 2003.
The US Department of Defense did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
China is acting more in response to “what it sees as interference in its national interests,” Markus Hermann Chen, co-founder and managing director of China Macro Group, said in an email.
He noted that the third policy meeting in China in July “put forward a completely new policy goal of better coordinating the entire mineral value chain, likely reflecting the growing importance of the supply of ‘strategic mineral resources’ to both commercial and geoeconomic interests.”
Emerging Alternatives
As China seeks to ensure its national security, companies in the United States and elsewhere are looking to exploit an emerging opportunity.
“Energy Fuels has been the largest supplier of uranium oxide to the United States for many years to support domestic nuclear power generation,” Mark Chalmers, chairman and CEO of Colorado-based Energy Fuels, said in a statement, adding that the company is working to build a U.S. production line for rare earths.
“We realized that our 40 years of experience working with naturally radioactive materials gave us a competitive advantage to replicate China’s success in separating many of the (rare earth elements) from low-cost and abundant monazite,” Chalmers said, referring to a mineral from which the desired metals could be extracted.
It remains unclear whether China will continue to implement its recent export controls comprehensively.
“They don’t want to acknowledge that this could escalate,” Black said. “But I don’t think China wants to escalate either. The last thing they want to create is another scary guy at the start of the US election. Let’s see in a week whether this is really a policy or not.”
Correction: This story has been updated with the correct name of Tungsten Metals Group's CEO.
