America Imports Nearly All of It — and One Utah Mine Is Trying to Change That

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Issued on behalf of Ares Strategic Mining Inc.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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The Mineral Hiding in Plain Sight

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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.

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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.

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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.