Smells like Antimony – Jono King moves from one underground rock scene to another

Jonathan King, Managing Director of Summit Minerals, says he was a music-obsessed teenager before he found his late calling as a geologist bedevilled by the mysterious critical mineral antimony.

“I was a drummer back then, covering things like The Church, Died Pretty, Sunnyboys, The Triffids, etc,” King recalls. He quickly points out they ‘weren’t all hairstyles and funny clothes.’

“We played some shows, but really it was just a group of mates having fun—I can’t even remember the original name of the Cottesloe pub we played at,” he says, perhaps deciding to play the whole thing down a tad.

Summit Minerals has just gone global after picking up a high-grade antimony project in central Morocco. As an ASX-listed battery metals explorer, they hold many highly prospective assets in New South Wales, perhaps making them the most active antimony explorer in the country. 

Additionally, the company is doing well in the rare earth sector and is eagerly anticipating metallurgy results from their highly mineralised Stallion project in Western Australia.

According to King, experts commonly say that antimony is the most important critical mineral you’ve never heard of. He says this saying has been around for a while but is now more accurate than ever.

“The advancements made in the Ambri battery technology using low-cost antimony and calcium have made this space suddenly very exciting,” King says.

“The Ambri is a battery with liquid metal electrodes comprising affordable everyday products, is easy to scale up, has a low cost and long cycle life, and doesn’t suffer any of the effects we see from lithium-ion batteries.”

But keep your phone on charge for now!  Although there are promising theoretical findings regarding the use of antimony and antimony composites as anodes for rechargeable Li, there is still a need to review their practical commercial application.

“Antimony could have a massive future application within the cathode of large-scale energy collection systems and the grid, it stabilises energy flow from passive energy collection which is fundamental to improving the efficiencies of our power grid,” King explains.

I now understand the importance of antimony, but why are you going to Morocco to look for it?

It is a blessed country and dramatically underexplored with a proactive government very supportive of exploration and mining, looking for foreign investment to grow its GDP.

And are also fortunate to have paired with a local explorer who knows the ins and outs and how to do business in-country. They will oversee our affairs and fast-track that, but it will take time to come to terms with the processes.

The market got excited about the exceptional drilling results from your Stallion REE Project in Western Australia last month – will Morocco take the focus away?

Stallion is the fast track.

The key for Summit, near term, is the fortunes of Stallion, where we have drilled rare earth numbers of quite substantial value, targeting a hopefully leachable, ionic adsorption deposit.

Given our share price and current market cap, if we show we can grow and leach the potential resource, we could expect to see a dramatic rerating.

But …?

Like everybody, I’ve made mistakes, and you learn from that. One of the critical aspects is that you want to save people’s money. You’re in an expensive industry, the burn rate can be very high, and I wouldn’t say I like seeing good money wasted.

Stallion is a good example. We could go out and drill, drill, drill, and drill through the 3 million dollars in our bank account very quickly with an overreaching drill program when we still need to meet the basic economic parameters.

We want to show we can leach it to justify expanding the drill program substantially. That’s where we add value to the shareholder, and there’s only a point in drilling if you show something likely to be viable.

OK, back to Morocco – is it just about the antimony, or is there more?

The big thing about Morocco is that up until around 2016, we viewed it as a phosphate mining opportunity, and even then, it was government controlled. The royal family controlled everything.

Since then, they’ve created a new mining act, very proactive for Western companies to come in and benefit. You have none of the issues you see in the south of Africa. We see a safe jurisdiction with sound legislation recognised by the Fraser Institute. The 2021 survey ranked it the only African country in the top ten jurisdictions.

It gives you an idea of how supportive everything is for companies like us to take on the risk and move forward.

What we love about Morocco is the country is very open, and mineralisation is daylighting. We collected those samples with astounding numbers from one of several historical pits where antimony was handpicked and bagged. No mobile plant or mechanical tools are anywhere to be seen. It’s a relatively straightforward exploration, and the skillset in the company is more than adept at dealing with these environments.

The big thing about Morocco is that we deal with similar aged systems as New South Wales. From what we have seen, the structural controls on mineralisation are very similar in Morocco. Everything is related to structure, and we’ve got dilation events happening, volume changes in the rocks, with fluids filling the spaces that are created, and that’s where mineralisation lies.

It’s all straightforward, we’re comfortable with the geology, we’re applying similar strategies to what we do in Oz, and we have yet to see any real need to change our perspective, but the proof will be in the pudding once we get to work. And the great thing about Morocco is that you can do the work, even drill, quickly without excessive red and green tape.

We see a fantastic opportunity for many commodities in Morocco, and we will do whatever we need to see the company grow.

But the price for antimony remains a little uninspiring?

The Seattle music scene was around for quite some time before the world heard Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit!

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