Molybdenum’s price surge to about $65,500/t in May 2026, nearly $30/lb and up 48.9% year-on-year, signals a shift from simple by-product tightness to a security premium on alloying metals as China’s February 2025 export controls on tungsten, tellurium, bismuth, indium and molybdenum inject licensing risk into defence, aerospace and tooling supply chains. Partial substitution away from tungsten via molybdenum carbides, Mo-bearing steels and superalloys is driving small absolute but material demand gains in a roughly 300,000 t/y market, where supply is constrained by copper mine plans. Chile and Peru already export about US$2.48 billion and US$1.65 billion of molybdenum respectively, with higher prices materially improving copper by-product credits and project economics.

Copper tailings reprocessing is framed as a near‑term supply solution, with S&P Global projecting demand rising from 28 million tonnes in 2025 to 42 million tonnes by 2040 while new copper mines take an average 17.9 years to reach production and are expected to meet only about 70% of 2035 demand. Andrew Dennan, CEO of Halo Minerals, points to advances in flotation, leaching and fine‑particle recovery and to projects such as Halo’s Playa Verde in Chile, where 250 million tonnes of historic Potrerillos and El Salvador tailings at Chañaral could be reworked. With an estimated 282 billion tonnes of tailings globally, he argues that above‑ground material, already blasted and crushed, can be rapidly mobilised using existing infrastructure while also remediating legacy arsenic‑rich pollution.

New drilling at Dakota Gold’s Richmond Hill project in South Dakota has returned high-grade intercepts inside the planned open pit, including 26 metres at 11.36 g/t gold and 14.92 g/t silver from ~75 metres in hole RH26C-432 and 38 metres at 2.89 g/t gold and 8.18 g/t silver from ~145 metres in RH26C-437. The 2026 programme totalled 17,273 metres across 112 infill, expansion and geotechnical holes, with assays from 350+ holes feeding a prefeasibility study due by 31 December and long-lead items such as an electrical substation already queued with Black Hills Energy. Richmond Hill, a large oxide gold system amenable to open-pit and heap leach, carries 244.7 Mt measured and indicated at 0.46 g/t Au and 4.83 g/t Ag (3.6 Moz Au, 38 Moz Ag), with an S-K 1300 Initial Assessment outlining 2.6–3.9 Moz Au production over 28 years and a post-tax NPV of $1.6–2.1 billion at a 55–59% IRR.