An antimony project's construction schedule began before comment opened

The construction schedules in Alaska Range Resources' own filings for its antimony mine and refinery began in June. The state opened public comment on whether to approve that work on Friday.

The plan for the Whiskey Bravo site lists construction running from June 16 through Dec. 14, with commissioning and production from Dec. 15 to Jan. 4. The plan for Port MacKenzie lists construction from July 7 through Jan. 25. Processing equipment for the Port MacKenzie plant came ashore on Sept. 7, four days before the comment period opened. The drafts do not establish whether construction actually began on those dates, or what has been built at Whiskey Bravo, which sits on state land inside the authorization now under review.

Two draft approvals are at issue, one for the plan of operations, which sets how the work may be done, and one for reclamation, which sets how the ground is put back. They cover the Estelle Gold and Critical Minerals Project, and comment closes Oct. 12. The applicant is Alaska Range Resources LLC of Palmer, a subsidiary of Nova Minerals Corporation.

The project would take bulk antimony ore from two prospects on state land about 80 miles southwest of Trapper Creek. At the Stibium prospect, building the access trail alone means placing roughly 71,000 tons of material to fill the slopes below it, with sampling areas accounting for four acres of disturbance and 200 to 400 tons of ore projected in the first season. Ore would move to a crushing and sorting facility near the exploration camp at the Whiskey Bravo airstrip, and concentrate would go to Port MacKenzie, where a pilot plant would mill, float, refine and package antimony trisulfide to a military specification. The Whiskey Bravo plan says the project is supported by a $43.4 million award from the Department of War.

Samples from the two prospects indicate the material "may be geochemically reactive" and could generate acidic and metal-laden leachate, which is why the waste facility at Whiskey Bravo would be lined. The flotation tailings at Port MacKenzie are described as relatively benign by comparison.

The state has set financial assurance for reclamation at $6.63 million, the bond the company must post before operating. About $5.47 million of that, or 83 percent, covers decommissioning Whiskey Bravo. The drafts do not establish whether the bond has been posted. The approvals would run five years, to 2031, though the effective dates in the drafts are blank.

The two sites are not governed the same way. Work on state land falls under the Alaska Land Act, the reclamation statute and two chapters of regulation. Activities located solely on Matanuska-Susitna Borough land "are only subject to" the reclamation rules. Port MacKenzie, where the refining would happen and where the tailings would be buried, is borough ground. The borough is not absent from it: the company secured a land use permit for the refinery there in October 2025, operations cannot begin until both the state and the borough approve a bond, and the borough may extend the closure period or require different reclamation.

The drafts also contradict each other in ways that matter. The Port MacKenzie plan's own location table places the site in Section 14, Township 04 North, Range 23 West, while the public notice places it in Section 23, Township 14 North, Range 4 West; the plan's coordinates match the notice, which suggests the numbers defining where work may happen are transposed in the company's document. The two plans specify the containment liner by measures that differ by a factor of roughly forty, with Port MacKenzie calling for an "80-millimeter (mil)" polyethylene liner and Whiskey Bravo for an 80-mil liner. A mil is a thousandth of an inch. And the Port MacKenzie schedule lists commissioning and production beginning Jan. 1, 2026, six months before that plan's own construction start.

A second deadline arrives first. The Department of Environmental Conservation is handling an air permit for the same Port MacKenzie site under fast-track rules, and unless someone requests a comment period by Sept. 25, the state will issue or deny that permit by Oct. 9, three days before comment on the mining approvals closes.