A barge of secondhand equipment is bringing a military antimony refinery to Port MacKenzie

A barge left Seattle on Aug. 26 carrying almost 500 tons of crushing, ore sorting, milling, flotation and refining equipment. When it reaches the Matanuska-Susitna Borough in early September, ground work begins on a $43.4 million military project to refine a metal the United States has not mined domestically since the early 1990s.

Antimony hardens lead. It goes into bullets and armor-piercing ammunition, and into night vision goggles, infrared sensors and precision optics. China has supplied about 63 percent of American imports, and in August 2024 it imposed export licensing requirements on antimony, then banned shipments to the United States that December.

Nova Minerals Corp. disclosed last October that its subsidiary, Alaska Range Resources LLC, had received the award under the Defense Production Act, which lets the federal government pay companies to build industrial capacity. The money is for extracting, concentrating and refining stibnite — the ore antimony comes from — into military-grade antimony trisulfide, drawn from the Estelle project in western Susitna.

The equipment on the barge is secondhand. Nova pulled it from a decommissioned North American facility and other suppliers rather than ordering a plant built for the site, which the company says cut both cost and time. The works is a pilot plant, running at first on a test batch, and Nova still describes Estelle itself as exploration and development. It is targeting first production in 2027.

The feed is already moving. More than 50 tons of bulk sample from the Stibium and Styx prospects has gone to a camp called Whiskey Bravo for crushing and sorting, with selected material traveling on to Port MacKenzie by air or snow road. The site is 42.81 acres, within two miles of the port's deepwater infrastructure. Nova's plan of operations still awaits final review by the Alaska Department of Natural Resources.

The parcel also sits near where a proposed rail spur would meet the proposed West Susitna Access Road. On Aug. 27 the board of the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority voted unanimously to put up to $25 million toward geotechnical drilling and other road work across 2026 and 2027, benefiting Nova's Estelle project, U.S. GoldMining's Whistler prospect and Terra Energy's Susitna basin coal project.

That road does not exist yet in any buildable form. It would run 78.5 miles, it has no constructible design, and it needs a permit from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to fill wetlands before construction can start. The Susitna River Coalition, which obtained the file through a public records request, says AIDEA applied on July 24, 2025, and that the Corps called the application incomplete a month later. No public comment period can open until it is complete. Inletkeeper has warned that fast-tracked reviews, with comment periods as short as four or 30 days, could limit consideration of wetlands, rivers and subsistence resources.

Everything above about the shipment, the award and the site comes from Nova's own filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.