A pile of leftover rock that a gold miner walked past in 1990 is turning into one of the highest-grade antimony stories in America — right as Washington pours billions into breaking China’s grip on the metal.
VANCOUVER, British Columbia, May 29, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Equity Insider Market Commentary - Sometimes the best discoveries are the ones somebody already dug up and left behind. In 1989 and 1990, a gold mining operation at Golden Butte in Nevada stripped away the rock sitting on top of the ore it actually wanted, piled it off to the side, and never processed it. That pile — the Pre-Strip Dump — sat untouched for more than three decades. NevGold Corp. (TSXV: NAU) (OTCQX: NAUFF) (Frankfurt: 5E50) just sampled it, and the numbers are striking: surface grades up to 53.7% antimony, six samples over 10% antimony, and fourteen samples grading better than 2% antimony.
To put 53.7% in plain terms: more than half the rock, by weight, is antimony. That is not a trace anomaly you chase with a thousand metres of drilling. That is high-grade material sitting at surface, in a pile that has already been moved once.
Why antimony, and why now
Antimony is not a metal most investors thought about two years ago. They think about it now. It is a critical mineral with no easy substitute in flame retardants, military munitions, night-vision optics, and increasingly in next-generation batteries and solar-panel glass. And the supply chain has been, until very recently, dominated by a single country.
China historically controlled the lion’s share of global antimony — mining, refining, and processing. In December 2024, Beijing escalated a series of export controls into an outright ban on antimony shipments to the United States. The ban caused real shortages and drove Western antimony prices to record highs through 2024 and into mid-2025. Then, on November 9, 2025, China suspended that ban — but only through November 27, 2026, and crucially, the metal remains on China’s dual-use export-control list, meaning shippers still need licenses from Beijing. Prices have eased from their 2025 peak since the suspension, but they remain multiples above pre-2024 levels and structurally elevated by the same supply concentration that caused the spike. In other words: the door is open a crack, on a clock, at China’s discretion. For any US manufacturer or defense planner, that is not a supply chain you build a strategy around. It is exactly the kind of fragility that has Washington moving fast.
How fast became clear on May 21, 2026, when the Export-Import Bank of the United States approved a US$2.9 billion loan to Perpetua Resources for its Stibnite gold-antimony project in Idaho — the only large-scale domestic antimony reserve currently advancing toward production. NevGold publicly congratulated Perpetua on that milestone, and the reason is strategic rather than ceremonial: a single project, however large, does not close America’s antimony gap. As NevGold framed it, advanced US antimony projects need to co-exist to achieve genuine mineral independence. That is the lane NevGold is driving into.
What the Pre-Strip Dump actually shows
The headline number — 53.71% antimony in sample LRSUD-27 — is the kind of grade that gets attention, but the real story is the spread. The Company reported six samples above 10% antimony (53.71%, 35.62%, 24.32%, 16.68%, 16.27%, and 11.89%), several of them carrying gold credits alongside the antimony, and fourteen samples in total above 2%. That is not one lucky rock. That is a consistently mineralized body of material sitting at the surface.
Pre-Strip Dump Sample Results (samples over 2% Sb)
| Sample ID | % Sb | g/t Au |
| LRSUD-27 | 53.71% | 0.05 |
| LRSUD-31 | 35.62% | 0.20 |
| LRSUD-28 | 24.32% | 0.07 |
| LRSUD-30 | 16.68% | 0.21 |
| LRSUD-29 | 16.27% | 0.16 |
| LRSUD-33 | 11.89% | 0.11 |
| LRSUD-32 | 7.60% | 0.22 |
| LRSUD-10 | 5.19% | 0.09 |
| LRSUD-18 | 4.01% | 0.48 |
| LRSUD-09 | 3.95% | 0.05 |
| LRSUD-24 | 3.87% | 0.21 |
| LRSUD-07 | 3.48% | 0.15 |
| LRSUD-11 | 2.44% | 0.30 |
| LRSUD-15 | 2.17% | 0.03 |
Source: NevGold Corp. news release, May 28, 2026. Surface grid and grab samples are a preliminary indicator of mineralization. Twenty-nine samples were reported in total; those over 2% Sb shown above.
The geological backstory explains why. NevGold estimates the Pre-Strip Dump material came from rock adjacent to the historical Nevada Antimony Mine and the Lage Antimony Prospect — sites that produced high-grade antimony during the World War II era, when the metal was a wartime priority for exactly the same reasons it is a priority today. Those two historical sites are now key drill targets for NevGold in 2026. The Pre-Strip Dump, in effect, is a surface fingerprint pointing back toward the source.
There is an important near-term wrinkle here. After the grid and grab sampling, NevGold ran a follow-up test-pit program — digging pits to roughly 3.5 metres — using the same methodology it applied to the project’s historical gold leach pads. Those test-pit results are still pending. If they come back consistent with the surface grades, the Pre-Strip Dump could be folded directly into the resource estimate NevGold is racing to complete.
The bigger prize: a maiden resource
Everything at Limousine Butte right now is building toward one milestone: the first-ever modern Mineral Resource Estimate for the project. NevGold’s maiden antimony-gold MRE — covering the historical gold leach pads, the Pre-Strip Dump, and the broader project area including the Resurrection Ridge and Cadillac Valley zones — is described by the Company as advancing and nearing completion. CEO Brandon Bonifacio noted it will be the first time in modern history this milestone has been reached at Limo Butte, and that it will draw on an approximately 130,000-metre drillhole database spanning the entire project.
That database matters. A maiden resource built on 130,000 metres of drilling is not a back-of-the-envelope estimate; it is a substantial body of historical and recent data finally being pulled into a single, modern, NI 43-101-compliant picture. And the Pre-Strip Dump results land at precisely the moment that picture is being assembled.
“The initial surface sampling program on the Pre-Strip Dump has yielded some of the highest antimony grades seen at Limo Butte,” Bonifacio said, pointing to the up-to-53.7% antimony and the six samples over 10%, and framing the new area as a potential addition to the at-surface, near-term antimony production scenario alongside the historical gold leach pads.
The phrase worth underlining there is “at-surface, near-term.” NevGold’s thesis at Limo Butte is not a decade-out development story. It is built around oxide antimony-gold material sitting at or near surface — the historical leach pads, and now potentially the Pre-Strip Dump — that could feed a near-term production scenario rather than waiting on the multi-year permitting and construction timeline a from-scratch underground mine would require.
Context, and a fair word of caution
NevGold is an exploration and development company targeting large-scale mineral systems in Nevada and Idaho. It owns 100% of the Limousine Butte and Cedar Wash gold projects in Nevada, and the Nutmeg Mountain gold project and Zeus copper project in Idaho. The antimony story at Limo Butte has moved to the front of the queue, but the broader portfolio gives the Company more than one card to play.
The honest caveats apply, as they do to every exploration story. Surface grab and grid samples are, by the Company’s own statement, a preliminary indicator of mineralization — they are selective by nature and are not necessarily representative of the deposit as a whole. The test-pit results are pending. The maiden MRE is not yet published. And antimony’s price strength is partly a function of a geopolitical situation that could ease as quickly as it tightened. None of that erases the significance of half-the-rock-is-antimony surface grades in a country desperate for domestic supply — but it is the difference between a promising signal and a proven mine, and that distinction is worth keeping in view.
How NevGold sits among its antimony peers
For investors trying to place NevGold in the rapidly heating US antimony space, a few reference points help — not as equivalents, but as markers of how the market is treating the theme.
Perpetua Resources Corp. (Nasdaq: PPTA) (TSX: PPTA) is the benchmark. Its Stibnite project in Idaho is the only large-scale domestic antimony reserve advancing toward production, and the US$2.9 billion EXIM loan approved in May 2026 is the single clearest signal of how seriously Washington takes domestic antimony supply. Perpetua sets the strategic backdrop against which every other US antimony developer — NevGold included — is now measured.
United States Antimony Corporation (NYSE American: UAMY) is the producer-side reference point. It operates the only significant antimony smelter in the United States, at Thompson Falls, Montana, plus a smelter in Mexico, and has restarted domestic mining while holding defense-related supply contracts. UAMY illustrates the downstream end of the chain — the processing capacity that domestic feedstock ultimately needs to reach.
Military Metals Corp. (CSE: MILI) (OTCQB: MILIF) is a closer read on the explorer-stage end of the spectrum, with an antimony-focused portfolio spanning the Trojárová project in Slovakia, West Gore in Nova Scotia, and the Last Chance antimony-gold property in Nevada. Like NevGold, its thesis leans heavily on high-grade historical antimony districts being re-examined with modern tools.
Nova Minerals Limited (ASX: NVA) (Nasdaq: NVA) rounds out the picture with its Estelle gold-antimony project in Alaska, where high-grade stibnite targets sit alongside a multi-million-ounce gold resource — and where a US$43.4 million US Department of War grant has helped fund the antimony work. Nova’s dual gold-and-antimony profile is a useful parallel to NevGold’s own gold-plus-antimony setup at Limo Butte.
None of these companies is NevGold, and each carries its own risks, jurisdiction, and stage of development. But together they map a sector that has gone from obscure to strategic in roughly eighteen months — and NevGold’s at-surface, high-grade antimony at Limo Butte places it squarely on that map.
The bottom line
The most compelling thing about the Pre-Strip Dump result is how little it cost to find. This was not a discovery hole drilled hundreds of metres down. It was surface sampling of material a previous operator had already excavated and set aside as waste — and it returned some of the highest antimony grades the project has ever produced. With test-pit results pending and a maiden, 130,000-metre-database resource estimate nearing completion, NevGold has stacked several catalysts into a tight window, against a policy backdrop that is actively rewarding domestic antimony supply with billions of dollars.
Whether Limo Butte becomes a producing antimony source is a question the MRE, the metallurgy, and the permitting will ultimately answer. But for a company chasing near-term, at-surface antimony in Nevada at the exact moment America has decided it cannot afford to depend on China for the metal, the timing is hard to script better.
For full project detail and ongoing updates, visit NevGold’s Equity Insider landing page: https://usanewsgroup.com/nau-landing/
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Sources:
[1] NevGold Corp., “NevGold Announces Up To 53.7% Antimony, And Fourteen Samples Over 2% Antimony, From Surface Sampling On Pre-Strip Dump,” company release dated May 28, 2026, distributed via GlobeNewswire May 28, 2026.
[2] NevGold Corp., “NevGold Congratulates Perpetua Resources On US$2.9 Billion Loan…,” GlobeNewswire, May 22, 2026; “NevGold Commences 20,000 Meter Drill Program at Antimony-Gold Limo Butte Project, Nevada,” GlobeNewswire, May 21, 2026.
[3] Perpetua Resources Corp. / Export-Import Bank of the United States, US$2.9 billion EXIM loan approval, May 21, 2026.
[4] United States Antimony Corporation Q1 2026 results and operational updates, 2026 (Thompson Falls smelter; defense supply contracts).
[5] Military Metals Corp. corporate disclosure, 2025–2026 (Trojárová, West Gore, Last Chance antimony projects).
[6] Nova Minerals Limited corporate disclosure, 2025–2026 (Estelle gold-antimony project, Alaska; DoW grant).
[7] China Ministry of Commerce antimony export-ban suspension (effective Nov 9, 2025 through Nov 27, 2026); Fastmarkets / Reuters antimony market coverage, 2025–2026.
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