Perpetua Resources says Defense Production Act award kept Stibnite antimony project alive and unlocked private investment

Perpetua Resources told the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee that a Defense Production Act award of $59 million was decisive in moving the Stibnite Gold Project in central Idaho past a permitting impasse, allowing the company to secure all required federal permits and attract private investment.

Mackenzie Lyon, vice president for external affairs at Perpetua Resources, said the award helped the company finish an extended permitting period, brought federal agencies together to prioritize the project, and "kept our permitting process on track." Lyon said the federal investment attracted an additional $54 million in private capital and put the project on the "precipice of a $2,000,000,000 investment in rural Idaho, meaning hundreds of jobs and more than a half billion dollars in federal and state taxes."

Lyon described Stibnite as one of the largest antimony resources not controlled by China and said antimony is critical to munitions, including as a primer component in many ammunition types. She told senators the United States currently lacks a domestically mined source of antimony and that global production is concentrated in China, Russia and Tajikistan. Lyon said delays before DPA support had left the company nearly out of options: "We were almost out of funds and running out of options that wouldn't stall development. These are the moments that the Defense Production Act was created for."

Committee members pressed Lyon on permitting timelines. She said the project’s full timeline from identification to production could be about 18 years under current expectations. About nine years of that span, she said, were absorbed by permitting and represented roughly $400 million of company investment; in an earlier phase the company had spent about $300 million and faced another permitting delay in 2022. Lyon and senators said the U.S. permitting timeline is unusually long; Lyon noted the industry average she cited of a 29‑year average from identifying a mineral resource to producing it.

Lyon also emphasized that part of Perpetua's plan includes environmental restoration of an abandoned mine site and framed the project as both a mineral‑production and cleanup effort. She said the Army's Picatinny Arsenal, the Industrial Base Policy Office, the Defense Logistics Agency and Air Force contracting teams acted to bring the project into DPA programs in response to a decline in Chinese exports of antimony trisulfide.

Senators asked whether permitting reform could reduce the need for financing interventions. Lyon said Department of Defense engagement signaled federal prioritization and improved interagency coordination, helping the project finish the permitting cycle but that broader permitting reforms are needed to accelerate domestic mineral production. She concluded that DPA authority was the temporary scaffolding the business needed to survive until permitting was completed.

Perpetua’s claims at the hearing are company statements about the project's financing, permitting timeline, economic projections and environmental restoration plans; the company reported the numbers cited to the committee but no formal vote or federal action beyond the DPA award was made at the hearing.