Deep in the wooded Little Carpathian hills near Bratislava, a Soviet-era mine shaft bores into a hillside above the Slovakian wine town of Pezinok The Trojarova antimony deposit, discovered by Soviet engineers in the 1980s and abandoned when the Iron Curtain fell, has become an unlikely symbol of Europe's failure to match its critical minerals ambitions with the money and institutional resolve to act on them
Military Metals Corp, the small Canadian company that acquired Trojarova almost two years ago, is pitching the project as a chance for Europe to secure domestic supply of a metal used in munitions, night vision goggles, infrared sensors, fire retardants and nuclear energy If reactivated, the site could supply as much as a third of the continent's annual antimony demand of approximately 6,000 tonnes and be operational within two to three years
