Antimony plant equipment lands at Port MacKenzie before its air permit clears

Nearly 500 tons of processing equipment has come ashore at Port MacKenzie for a plant meant to refine one of the metals the U.S. military most urgently needs — even though the plant doesn't yet have the state air permit it needs to operate.

The equipment is for an antimony refinery that Nova Minerals and its Alaska subsidiary are building near the Mat-Su port, part of a national scramble to produce a mineral the country has almost none of. Antimony hardens ammunition and goes into night-vision gear, missiles and flame retardants, but the U.S. hasn't mined it domestically since the early 1990s and imports essentially all of it. When China — which controls most of the world's supply — banned antimony exports to the United States in late 2024, prices spiked roughly tenfold and Washington began pouring money into building a domestic source. Nova's project runs on a $43.4 million federal award tied to the Defense Production Act, the law the government uses to stand up supply of strategic materials.

The company told federal securities regulators that its crushing, sorting, milling and refining equipment — more than 40 containers plus oversized loads, bought secondhand from a decommissioned North American plant — left Seattle by barge in late August and would let construction begin on arrival, with first antimony production targeted for 2027. It has since landed at Port MacKenzie.

The permit is the piece that hasn't caught up. Nova's air-quality application for the Port MacKenzie facility, filed July 31, has sat unopened to public comment for about a month, on hold while the state waits for information from the company. No comment period has opened for residents on either side of Knik Arm, and there's no issue date or effective date yet. State records show the application has spent 35 days on hold against just three days of actual review — meaning the delay is mostly the company owing the state answers, not the state sitting on the file. The permit isn't a rejection, and it's filed as a "minor source," meaning the plant falls below the pollution thresholds that would trigger the strictest review.

One wrinkle: the permits aren't under Nova's name. The owner of record on the company's three Alaska air sources is Alaska Range Resources of Palmer, with Nova Minerals CEO Christopher Gerteisen listed as the responsible official.

The company has hit permitting friction before, at its Estelle mine upriver, where the antimony and gold would come from. The state denied a rock-crusher permit there in June; Nova reapplied under a different permit type, and that one cleared public comment and was issued in August. The mine is also the reason for a separate, much larger public expense: the West Susitna Access Road, a proposed 78.5-mile route to Estelle that the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority is helping fund. The authority committed up to $25 million more to the road in late August. "This is the work that turns a route on a map into a road that can actually be built," said Brandon Brefczynski, the authority's deputy executive director, who said the board's unanimous vote keeps the project on schedule.