By 
Issued on behalf of Ares Strategic Mining Inc.
There is a mineral inside almost every refrigerator, smartphone screen, steel beam, and aluminum can in the country — and the United States produces virtually none of it. A small-cap miner in the Utah desert is working to become the domestic exception.
VANCOUVER, British Columbia, June 09, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Most investors have never heard of fluorspar. Almost all of them depend on it. The mineral — also called fluorite, chemically calcium fluoride — is the starting point for hydrofluoric acid, and from there it threads through an astonishing share of the modern industrial economy: the refrigerants in air conditioners, the fluoropolymers behind Teflon, aluminum smelting, steelmaking, cement, semiconductors and touchscreens, and even the electrolytes in lithium batteries. The U.S. Geological Survey has reported that of the roughly 445 tons of fluorspar consumed or sold in the United States in 2024, about 440 came from abroad. For two decades, domestic production has been effectively dormant, with buyers leaning on cheaper imports — a large share of which originate in China.
That backdrop is what makes Ares Strategic Mining Inc. (CSE: ARS) (OTCQX: ARSMF) (FRA: N8I1) an unusual story. By the company's own account, and as reflected in industry coverage, Ares operates the only permitted fluorspar mine in the United States — its Lost Sheep mine in the Spor Mountain district of Juab County, Utah. On June 8, 2026, the company filed a US$100 million base shelf registration with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, a housekeeping-style step that nonetheless says something about ambition: it gives Ares the standing capacity to raise capital as it pushes its mine from development into a sustained production ramp. The same prospectus confirms the company has applied to list its shares on the Nasdaq Capital Market under the ticker “USAM.”
None of this means the work is done. Ares is candid in its filings that it is still transitioning from mine development into initial mining, stockpiling, and processing-plant commissioning, and that it has not yet begun sustained commercial processing or sales. This is a build-out story, not a cash-flowing producer — a distinction that matters enormously for how investors should weigh both the opportunity and the risk. But it is a build-out aimed squarely at a gap in the American supply chain that policymakers have suddenly decided they care about.
The Mineral Hiding in Plain Sight
Fluorspar rarely makes headlines, which is part of why its supply situation went unaddressed for so long. It is classified as a critical mineral in the United States — a designation reserved for materials deemed essential to the economy and national security whose supply chains are considered vulnerable. The vulnerability here is stark: the country imports essentially all of it.
The reason is not geology so much as economics and inertia. Fluorspar deposits exist in the U.S., but for twenty years it was simply cheaper to import the mineral than to mine and process it domestically. Foreign producers, with China prominent among them, filled the gap. As global prices have risen and as Washington has grown wary of concentrated, foreign-controlled supply chains for strategic inputs, the calculus has begun to shift. A mineral that was once an afterthought is now framed as a piece of industrial security.
Ares has built its entire identity around being early to that shift. Its Lost Sheep property sits within a fluorspar anomaly that stretches roughly 16 kilometres along Spor Mountain, with mineralization that company technical work has described as high-grade with relatively low impurities. The project is fully permitted, including approval from the Bureau of Land Management, and the company holds a large land position across the district. CEO James Walker, who is also the qualified person behind the company's technical disclosure, has spent much of his public commentary simply explaining to investors why fluorspar matters at all.
From Development Toward Production
The past several months have marked the most tangible progress in the company's history. In February 2026, Ares announced that mining operations at Lost Sheep were actively underway, with several thousand tons of fluorspar ore mined and stockpiled at surface in preparation for processing. The company framed that as a decisive transition from development into production build-up — ore coming out of the ground, organized into stockpiles, readied for processing runs.
Crucially, this is a ramp, not a finish line. The flotation plant at the company's Delta processing site has been designated a top-priority build, because stockpiled ore only becomes saleable product once it is processed into acidspar — the high-purity grade used to make hydrofluoric acid — and metspar, a lower-grade product used mainly in steelmaking. Management has publicly described a target annual output in the range of roughly 45,400 to 54,500 tonnes of final product once operations are running, with the potential to expand by opening additional mining areas across the Spor Mountain site. Those are forward-looking targets, not current production figures, and investors should treat them as such.
The June 2026 shelf registration fits into this arc. The filing itself disclosed roughly 267.8 million shares outstanding, a comprehensive loss of about $3.65 million for the fiscal year ended September 30, 2025, and a $10 million private placement completed in February 2026 at $0.60 per unit. A development-stage miner with negative operating cash flow needs access to capital to finish building, and a base shelf is the mechanism that keeps that door open over the next two years. It is dilutive by nature — the prospectus is explicit about that risk — but it is also the conventional tool for a company at exactly this stage.
The Pentagon Enters the Picture
What elevated Ares from an interesting niche play to something investors started paying real attention to was Washington. The company has secured an Indefinite Delivery / Indefinite Quantity contract with the U.S. Department of Defense, structured over five years, under which Ares has said it could receive up to US$250 million through future orders. In February 2026, the company announced an expedited roadmap to acidspar production specifically to meet those contract obligations, accelerating both mining expansion and flotation-plant construction. Ares was also named a Department of Energy subcontractor in late 2024 under a multi-billion-dollar domestic low-enriched-uranium initiative.
An IDIQ contract is a ceiling, not a guarantee — actual revenue depends on orders the government chooses to place, and on the company's ability to deliver qualifying product. But the strategic signal is meaningful. When the Pentagon writes a domestic fluorspar miner into a five-year supply arrangement, it is making a statement about how seriously it now treats the import-dependence problem. For a company whose entire thesis rests on being the domestic alternative, government validation is arguably worth as much as the dollars themselves.
Ares in the Context of the Reshoring Trade
Ares is not operating in a vacuum. It is one expression of a much broader 2026 theme: the scramble to rebuild domestic supply chains for critical minerals that the United States had quietly ceded to foreign — and especially Chinese — producers. Washington has leaned in hard, including a reported $12 billion “Project Vault” initiative aimed at building a strategic reserve across dozens of critical minerals, and a string of direct government equity stakes in individual miners. Looking at how the market has treated other names leveraged to that same thesis helps frame where a company like Ares sits.
MP Materials Corp. (NYSE: MP) is the bellwether of the entire trade. The owner of the Mountain Pass mine in California is widely described as the only large-scale rare-earth producer in the Western Hemisphere, and it became the template for government-backed reshoring when the Department of Defense took a roughly 15% equity stake through a $400 million preferred-stock investment, later joined by a high-profile Apple partnership. MP shows what the market will reward when a domestic critical-mineral producer pairs a genuinely scarce asset with explicit government backing — the same two ingredients Ares is trying to assemble at a far earlier stage and a fraction of the size.
USA Rare Earth, Inc. (NASDAQ: USAR) may be the closest stage-for-stage comparison. Rather than scaling an existing producer, USA Rare Earth is building a domestic rare-earth supply chain largely from scratch — developing its Round Top deposit in Texas and standing up a magnet facility — and has been candid that it is still pre-commercial on much of that buildout. That is a recognizable mirror of the Ares situation: a development-stage company asking investors to underwrite execution risk today in exchange for exposure to a strategically vital, domestically produced material tomorrow.
Almonty Industries Inc. (NASDAQ: ALM) offers the tungsten version of the same narrative — another critical mineral long dominated by Chinese supply. Almonty has been moving its Sangdong mine in South Korea from development into commissioning and reported turning cash-flow positive in early 2026, and the stock has reacted sharply to U.S. stockpiling headlines. For Ares investors, Almonty is a useful illustration of how a single-commodity, China-displacement story can re-rate as it crosses from building to producing — the same threshold Ares is approaching.
Perpetua Resources Corp. (NASDAQ: PPTA) rounds out the group from the antimony angle. Perpetua's Stibnite Gold Project in Idaho is designed as a dual-purpose asset, pairing gold production with a domestic source of antimony — yet another critical mineral where the U.S. has leaned heavily on imports and where China has used export controls as leverage. Perpetua underscores how the reshoring thesis spans a whole basket of obscure but strategically essential materials, of which fluorspar is simply one more chapter.
These companies are referenced to illustrate the market theme Ares is part of, not to suggest any partnership, endorsement, or comparable financial performance. They span different minerals, different scales, and different stages — from a multi-billion-dollar established producer to pre-revenue developers — and Ares sits toward the earlier, smaller end of that spectrum.
What to Watch — and What to Weigh
For all the strategic appeal, Ares remains a speculative, development-stage company, and its own filings say so in plain language. It has a history of losses, no commercial production cash flow yet, and a stated need for additional financing to complete its buildout and reach sustained operations. Mining carries inherent execution risk — equipment, permitting, supply chain, commodity prices, and timing can all move against a junior. The shares trade at penny-stock levels (the prospectus referenced a CSE close of C$0.28 and an OTCQX close of US$0.202 on June 4, 2026), and the planned Nasdaq listing under “USAM,” while a potential visibility catalyst, is an application, not a certainty.
The near-term markers worth tracking are concrete: progress on commissioning the flotation plant and converting stockpiled ore into saleable acidspar; the first actual orders and deliveries under the Department of Defense IDIQ contract; the outcome of the Nasdaq listing application; and how the company funds its remaining buildout against the US$100 million shelf without over-diluting existing holders. Each of those is a step on the path from “only permitted fluorspar mine in the U.S.” to “only producing one.”
The bull case is easy to state: a fully permitted, government-backed, domestic source of a critical mineral the U.S. currently imports almost entirely, arriving exactly as policy turns toward reshoring. The bear case is just as clear: a small, pre-revenue miner that still has to prove it can process, sell, and scale before any of that promise becomes earnings. Both can be true at once, and for now they are. What is no longer in doubt is that fluorspar — a mineral most investors could not have defined a year ago — has become part of the conversation about American industrial independence, and that Ares has put itself at the center of it.
CONTINUED … Learn more about Ares Strategic Mining at: https://www.aresmining.com
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