Perpetua Resources announced on October 26 a new 36 month, $40 million award through the US Army’s Defense Ordnance Technology Consortium, from the Portfolio Acquisition Executive Agile Sustainment and Ammunition at Picatinny Arsenal, New Jersey. The award funds a programme to evaluate the technical and economic feasibility of producing tungsten concentrate at the historical Stibnite Mining District in central Idaho. It is structured as a cost share programme between the company and the US government: the initial 18 month phase is expected to cost about $18 million, shared equally, with later phases subject to results and incremental funding approvals. Perpetua’s related securities filing describes a total programme cost of up to about $85 million through October 2029, which is the ceiling if all phases proceed, not committed spending today.
The work programme is concrete. Funding supports drilling to define a potential tungsten mineral resource, collection of material for laboratory and bench scale metallurgical testing, and permitting and engineering of an exploration decline to access areas of known tungsten mineralisation. The decline target is beneath the currently permitted Hangar Flats pit, which contains about 1.37 million ounces of gold resources and over 95 million pounds of antimony resources that are not in reserves. Recent drilling at Stibnite has identified high grade zones of antimony and tungsten mineralisation, the company says.
The strategic framing is explicit. Stibnite supplied tungsten and antimony to the United States during the Second World War, and there has been no commercial tungsten mining in the country since 2015, leaving the US reliant on imports from a small number of countries at a time of Chinese export controls and federal sourcing restrictions. President and chief executive Jon Cherry said: “Resilient mineral solutions start here in America,” and argued that historical production and recent exploration suggest Stibnite has the potential to be one of the world’s highest grade tungsten sources. That grade claim is the company’s, and the drilling funded by this award is what would test it.
For Perpetua, tungsten is additive rather than a pivot. The permitted Stibnite project remains a gold and antimony development, and the Army programme funds exploration underneath it with defence money rather than shareholder capital alone. The next evidence points are drill results defining whether a tungsten resource exists at economic grades, metallurgical test work on concentrate production, and permitting progress on the exploration decline.