Locksley’s 93% pure antimony process could reshape $2.4B US defense supply chain

For the US defense industry, antimony is a strategic chokepoint: essential for ammunition primers, flame-retardant fabrics, and lead-acid batteries, yet over 70% of global supply flows from China. Locksley’s DeepSolv process, now demonstrating 93% purity directly from low-grade ore, offers a laboratory-proven pathway toward domestic processing. If scalable, it could reduce dependence on adversarial supply chains at a time when the Pentagon is actively seeking alternatives under the Defense Production Act.

Locksley Resources claims a significant hydrometallurgical breakthrough that could help establish a long-sought domestic antimony supply chain in the United States. In collaboration with Rice University, the company's proprietary DeepSolv technology was used in laboratory tests to upgrade low-grade antimony ore grading between 9 and 12 percent directly into a high-purity product containing up to 93 percent antimony. Crucially, this was accomplished without conventional pre-concentration steps such as flotation, potentially reducing both cost and environmental footprint.

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For the US defense industry, antimony is a strategic chokepoint: essential for ammunition primers, flame-retardant fabrics, and lead-acid batteries, yet over 70% of global supply flows from China.

The technology is an emerging low-temperature process that Locksley positions as a cleaner alternative to traditional high-temperature smelting. The most striking result, however, involved electrodeposition: the lab team dissolved higher-grade concentrates (65–70 percent antimony) and recovered pure metallic antimony at grades between 91 and 96 percent. Combined with the production of phase-pure antimony oxide, the series of tests suggests a complete, integrated processing pathway from ore leaching through to finished metal and oxide products.

Antimony is a critical mineral with highly concentrated global supply—China dominates production and processing, accounting for over 70 percent of world output. The United States has zero domestic mine production and relies entirely on imports, primarily from China. For defense applications, antimony is indispensable: it is used in munitions primers, armor-piercing bullets, flame-retardant fabrics for military uniforms and vehicle interiors, and as an alloy hardener in lead-acid batteries that power ground-support equipment. The Defense Production Act has previously designated antimony as a strategic material, yet progress toward domestic sourcing has been slow.

Locksley's announcement, however, must be viewed with appropriate caution. The results are laboratory-scale and have not been validated at pilot or commercial scale. The DeepSolv process remains an unproven technology outside controlled conditions, and no economic feasibility or life-cycle analysis has been disclosed. Nevertheless, the reported purity levels—exceeding 93 percent from raw ore and up to 96 percent from concentrates—are technically promising and, if reproducible at scale, could attract interest from both private capital and government defense agencies eager to reduce supply-chain vulnerabilities.