The Crushed Pile in Nevada: How a Forgotten 1989 Gold Heap Is Becoming One of America's Few Near-Term Antimony Solutions

A brownfield site in eastern Nevada is delivering exactly what the U.S. critical minerals strategy has been asking for — antimony at surface, in every drillhole, ready to process without breaking new ground.

NEW YORK, May 25, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- World Street Intelligence News Commentary — There are not many places in America where you can walk onto a mine site that was last worked when George H.W. Bush was in the White House, pick up a fistful of crushed rock from a pile that has been sitting in the sun for 35 years, and have it assay at a grade of antimony the U.S. defense industry would gladly pay a premium for. There is at least one such place. It sits in White Pine County, Nevada, on a property called Limousine Butte, and as of May 14, 2026, every single sonic drillhole punched into the historic Crushed leach pad there has come back with positive, consistent oxide antimony and gold mineralization. [1]

The company doing the drilling is NevGold Corp. (TSXV:NAU) (OTCQX:NAUFF) (Frankfurt: 5E50), a Vancouver-headquartered junior with a portfolio of four 100%-owned gold, antimony, and copper projects across Nevada and Idaho. The flagship is Limo Butte. The story everyone is paying attention to right now is the crushed pile.

Here is what happened. Between 1989 and 1990, the previous operators of the Golden Butte pit ran a gold heap leach operation on the site. They crushed the ore, stacked it on lined pads, sprayed it with cyanide solution, and recovered gold. They did all of this in a sub-US$400 per ounce gold price environment, and they did all of it without anyone in the industry caring about a metal called antimony. Antimony was in the rock. They simply did not process for it. They walked away. The pads sat there for the next 35 years.

Fast-forward to 2026. Gold is trading in the mid-$4,000s. China has banned antimony exports to the United States, then partially suspended that ban in November 2025 — a suspension that expires on November 27, 2026. The Department of Defense, recently renamed in part the Department of War under a 2025 executive order, has been writing checks under the Defense Production Act to anyone who can credibly show they can produce military-grade antimony from American rock. There are no operating primary antimony mines in the United States. None.

Against that backdrop, NevGold reported the following results from its sonic drilling on the Crushed leach pad. Drillhole LBS26-014 returned 0.32% antimony and 0.39 grams per tonne gold over 14.9 meters. LBS26-019 returned 0.30% antimony and 0.37 grams per tonne gold over 16.5 meters. LBS26-016 came in at 0.27% antimony and 0.37 grams per tonne gold over 14.0 meters. LBS26-015 hit 0.27% antimony and 0.41 grams per tonne gold over 18.0 meters. The average across the company's 15 Phase I test pits on the Crushed pad sits at 0.27% antimony and 0.34 grams per tonne gold, and the elevated grades are showing up in the lower levels of the pad. [1]

Read that again. Antimony grades, in every drillhole, in surface material that has already been mined, crushed, and stacked. There is no new pit to dig. There is no environmental impact statement waiting on a federal Record of Decision. There is no $2 billion EXIM Bank loan needing congressional notice. There is a permitted brownfield site, in the world's top-ranked mining jurisdiction, with antimony sitting on top of it. Full project overview is available here.

NevGold CEO Brandon Bonifacio put it this way in the May 14 release: "With consistent oxide antimony and gold in all drillholes from the Crushed leach pad, Limo Butte is emerging as one of the most important Critical Minerals projects in the United States. The Project has a near-term opportunity to play a key role in establishing a vertically integrated, domestic antimony supply chain. We have oxide antimony mineralization at surface in the historic leach pads that is ready to be processed without large-scale mining activities." [1] That last clause is the operative one. The Company is advancing a maiden antimony-gold Mineral Resource Estimate covering the leach pads and the broader project area at Resurrection Ridge and Cadillac Valley, with the production target being antimony output by 2027 — not 2030, not 2032.

To understand why a 2027 production target is unusual in this sector, it helps to look at what the rest of the U.S. antimony peer set is doing. Perpetua Resources Corp. (NASDAQ:PPTA) has the only currently identified U.S. antimony reserve at its Stibnite Gold Project in central Idaho. It is a phenomenal asset. It also requires roughly $2.5 billion in direct construction capital — and on May 21, 2026, the Board of the U.S. Export-Import Bank unanimously approved a $2.9 billion senior secured 13-year loan in support of the project under EXIM's Make More in America Initiative. [2] Combined with cash on hand, the financing package is expected to fully fund construction. Disbursement is subject to definitive documentation and customary conditions precedent, expected to be completed in the second half of 2026. Perpetua broke ground on early works construction in October 2025. Full commercial antimony production from Stibnite is targeted for 2028.

Up in Alaska, Nova Minerals Limited (NASDAQ:NVA) has been working its Estelle Gold and Critical Minerals Project, a 514-square-kilometre district-scale property in the Tintina Gold Belt. On May 11, 2026, Nova confirmed the successful completion of its 2026 winter freight mobilization, moving approximately 1.5 million pounds of mining and processing equipment to the Estelle camp under a US$43.4 million U.S. Department of War award. [3] CEO Christopher Gerteisen has said publicly the company believes it can produce military-grade antimony trisulfide by late 2026 or early 2027 — six to nine months ahead of its original schedule. That timeline puts Nova in the same approximate window as NevGold's targeted 2027 antimony production from the historic leach pads in Nevada.

Both Perpetua and Nova are tier-one, well-financed names. The Perpetua story is gigantic but back-end loaded and capital-intensive. The Nova story is happening in Alaska, which means a winter freight season of its own, plus the logistics of getting equipment 150 kilometres northwest of Anchorage onto a property that is largely fly-in or snow-road. Neither of those things is bad. Both are simply expensive. The structural question both companies face — and that the entire U.S. antimony peer set faces — is the gap between the day Washington needs metal and the day the metal actually shows up.

NevGold's pitch is that the gap is shorter at Limo Butte because the work has, in a sense, already been done. The leach pads were stacked. The pit was excavated. Phase II metallurgical testwork released earlier in 2026 confirmed a sequential processing path: leach the antimony first, recover the gold second, both from the same crushed feed. Antimony extraction across the tested samples ranged from 54% to 92%, and the residual gold recoveries after antimony leaching averaged above 93% with individual samples reaching 99%. That metallurgy is what makes the 2027 production target feasible. Full landing page detail here.

The financing piece has also fallen into place. On April 20, 2026, NevGold upsized its previously announced C$25 million brokered private placement to C$42 million — a roughly 69% increase on strong institutional demand — led by Clarus Securities Inc. as sole agent and bookrunner. That financing closed May 12, 2026, and is earmarked for advancing Limousine Butte, the Nutmeg Mountain gold project in Idaho, working capital, and general corporate purposes. With over C$50 million in the treasury and a maiden antimony-gold MRE expected within weeks, NevGold enters the back half of 2026 in a financial position that most explorers chasing the same critical minerals theme do not enjoy.

The broader market context here is also worth pausing on. Idaho Strategic Resources, Inc. (NYSE:IDR) reported record first-quarter 2026 results on May 14, 2026 — the same day NevGold dropped its leach pad assays — with revenue up 98.97% year-over-year to $14.48 million and record quarterly net income of $6.39 million. [4] Idaho Strategic is a different kind of company: it is an operating gold producer in Idaho that has used its cash flow to fund rare earth and thorium exploration along the Idaho REE-Th Belt. But the underlying market signal is the same. Investors are paying for U.S. mining companies that produce, or are credibly close to producing, the critical materials the country has decided it cannot continue to import from China.

Tungsten producer Almonty Industries Inc. (NASDAQ:ALM) offered another data point in the same week. On May 11, 2026, Almonty reported first-quarter 2026 revenue up 221% year-over-year to $25.4 million, with adjusted EBITDA of $6.1 million versus a loss in the prior year period. [5] The company's flagship Sangdong Mine in South Korea, which is one of the largest and highest-grade tungsten deposits outside China, transitioned toward commercial operations following its March 17 commissioning ceremony. Tungsten APT prices have risen by more than 200% since the beginning of 2026, and Bank of America raised its price target on Almonty to $23 per share on the same day the results were reported. Tungsten and antimony sit on the same U.S. critical minerals list, and the Almonty result is essentially a preview of what revenue inflection looks like when a Western-aligned critical minerals producer comes online into a tight market.

There is also the question of what comes after the leach pad. Earlier 2026 drilling at the adjacent Resurrection Ridge target returned 1.93 grams per tonne gold equivalent over 100.6 meters from surface (1.07 g/t Au plus 0.22% Sb), including a 1.11% antimony intercept over 6.1 meters within the broader envelope. That is in addition to whatever the upcoming maiden MRE turns up across the leach pads, Cadillac Valley, and the broader project area. Bonifacio has flagged additional drill results from the Run-of-Mine leach pad, sampling results from a newly defined at-surface pre-strip dump from the historic Golden Butte pit, and the 2026 20,000-meter drill program focused on expansion and new discoveries, all of which are scheduled to land in the coming weeks and months. [1]

Pull all of that together and the picture comes into focus. The United States has decided, through three different administrations and across three different policy regimes, that it cannot continue to import its antimony, its tungsten, its rare earths, or its critical mineral supply more broadly from a single geopolitical adversary. The federal government has put real money behind that decision, in the form of EXIM loans, DPA awards, Section 232 tariff threats, FAST-41 permitting, and Department of War contracts. The companies that get to monetize that capital are the ones who can credibly deliver tons of metal into the supply chain inside the next 24 months. That list is short.

NevGold's Limo Butte sits on that short list because the material that needs to be processed is already on the surface, crushed, and waiting. The drill bit has done its job: every hole on the Crushed leach pad has come back positive. The metallurgy has done its job: antimony first, gold second, both recoverable from the same feed. The capital markets have done their job: C$42 million raised, no warrants. What remains is the maiden Mineral Resource Estimate, the additional drilling on the Run-of-Mine pad, and the path to 2027 production. Investors who want the full project overview can find it here.

Article Sources

[1] NevGold Corp. — "NevGold Intercepts Consistent Oxide Antimony-Gold Mineralization in All Drillholes From Historic Crushed Leach Pad Including 0.32% Antimony And 0.39 g/t Au Over 14.9 Meters" — May 14, 2026. Source

[2] Perpetua Resources Corp. — "Export Import Bank of the United States Approves $2.9 Billion Loan for Development of Perpetua Resources' Stibnite Gold Project" — May 21, 2026. Source

[3] Nova Minerals Limited — "Nova Winter Freight Season Complete" — May 11, 2026. Source

[4] Idaho Strategic Resources, Inc. — "Idaho Strategic Reports Record First Quarter 2026 Operating and Financial Performance" — May 14, 2026. Source

[5] Almonty Industries Inc. — "Almonty Industries Reports First Quarter 2026 Financial Results" — May 11, 2026. Source

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