America's battery makers are having what you'd call a "well, this is awkward" moment. China has effectively cut off U.S. access to antimony, and suddenly executives across the industry are acting like they've just discovered fire – or rather, that they need certain materials to prevent fires.
I've been tracking mineral supply chains since before they became fashionable dinner conversation, and this situation has all the hallmarks of corporate amnesia. China gradually tightened export restrictions before slamming the door shut in December 2024, leaving U.S. manufacturers grasping at empty shelves.
The timing? Absolutely brutal.
Just as Washington was patting itself on the back for progress on domestic battery production, someone apparently forgot to check where a key ingredient actually comes from. It's like building an entire restaurant and then realizing you have no access to salt.
Here's the deal: China controls over half the world's antimony production and most of its processing capacity. The stuff is essential for lead-acid batteries—those clunky, unsexy power blocks that still start virtually every conventional vehicle on American roads. They also go into military equipment like night-vision goggles and signal flares, which explains why Pentagon officials are now having closed-door meetings that I imagine involve a lot of table-pounding.
"This is approaching a national emergency," one battery executive told me last week, requesting anonymity to speak frankly. "We're looking at price increases of 60% since January, and that's if we can get it at all."
Look, this isn't the first time we've been caught flat-footed on critical minerals. Remember the rare earths panic of 2010? Same playbook, different element.
What makes this situation particularly maddening (or fascinating, if you're a supply chain nerd like me) is how we collectively missed such an obvious vulnerability. While everyone was obsessing over lithium and cobalt for fancy new EV batteries, good ol' antimony was sitting there, critical as ever, with almost nobody paying attention to where it comes from.
Markets have responded exactly as you'd expect. Antimony prices have skyrocketed. American battery makers are calling suppliers who, from what I hear, are responding with variations of "sorry, new policies" or simply not picking up the phone at all.
The worst part? There's no quick fix.
You can't just open an antimony mine overnight—or even over a year. Alternative sources exist in places like Russia (great option, right?), Tajikistan, and Australia, but they don't have anywhere near the capacity to replace Chinese supply.
"We're looking at a three-to-five-year timeline minimum to develop meaningful alternative sources," a mining consultant explained to me over coffee yesterday. "And that's if everything goes perfectly, which... when does that ever happen in mining?"
The national security implications here can't be overstated. The Department of Defense classifies antimony as critical to national security, which makes our complete dependence on China all the more baffling. When Pentagon officials talk about "readiness," they probably didn't mean "ready to explain to Congress why we can't make ammunition."
Yet here we are.
This brings us to the bigger question about America's approach to industrial policy and critical supply chains. The U.S. has recently rediscovered its enthusiasm for industrial policy through the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS Act—both initiatives I've covered extensively. But these efforts have focused primarily on final assembly and high-value components, not on securing the full supply chain from mine to manufacturing.
It's like building a magnificent skyscraper while forgetting to connect it to the power grid.
There's historical precedent that offers some hope, though. During World War II, when Japanese advances cut off natural rubber supplies from Asia, the U.S. launched a massive synthetic rubber program that went from concept to producing 800,000 tons annually in just a few years.
Could we do something similar with antimony? Perhaps. But that would require a level of coordination between government, industry, and academia that I haven't seen in my twenty years covering manufacturing.
The irony in all this is thick enough to cut with a knife. While we've been obsessing over building a domestic battery industry for electric vehicles, we remained completely blind to our vulnerability in conventional battery technology—the kind that powers those 275+ million vehicles already on American roads.
Not so sexy, those lead-acid batteries. But try starting your car without one.
So what happens next? Battery manufacturers will pay more—a lot more. Those costs will eventually trickle down to consumers. Government agencies will form task forces (they're probably naming one right now), and alternative sources will eventually develop.
But not before a whole lot of pain.
And perhaps most importantly, procurement officers throughout American industry are suddenly developing a keen interest in the origins of previously ignored materials. Better late than never, I suppose.
The lesson here isn't that globalization is bad or that we need to produce everything domestically. That's neither realistic nor desirable. Rather, it's that resilience requires understanding dependencies and having contingency plans.
In the meantime, America's battery makers might want to double-check what other critical materials they're sourcing exclusively from potential adversaries.
Just a thought.
