Short & light, unlike the metal itself. This is a follow-up on earlier Tin, Niobium & Lithium editions, but given the recent geopolitical fireworks, you probably should be paying attention to this Tungsten atm (Vanadium next?). I’m not predicting price trends, I’m not telling you what to buy, this is purely a general overview for educational purposes so you can try and impress your friends at the bar (lol) #NerdAlert. Enjoy! And eat your veggies!
Tungsten (W), also known as wolfram, is a rare metal famous for two things: it is incredibly dense (almost exactly the same density as gold) and it has the highest melting point of all discovered elements (a blistering 3,422 °C). It is primarily used to make tungsten carbide (WC), an insanely hard compound used in metalworking, mining, and construction tools. It is also a critical metal for military applications (armor-piercing munitions) and semiconductors.
In layman’s terms: If you need to cut steel, drill through solid rock, or punch a hole in the armor of a tank, you need tungsten. There is no viable substitute that doesn’t significantly degrade performance.
The concentration of the supply (see below) coupled with the importance to the defense and high-tech industries, makes it so that Tungsten is on every ‘Critical Minerals’ list, from the EU to the US to Australia.
Deposit types
Tungsten is generally found in two main economic minerals: Wolframite (an iron-manganese tungstate (Fe,Mn)WO₄)) and Scheelite (a calcium tungstate (CaWO₄)). You’ll typically see juniors exploring a few main deposit types:
- Skarn deposits: Formed when magma intrudes into limestone or carbonate rocks. These are often massive and can host very high grades of scheelite. Examples include the legendary Sangdong mine in South Korea (Almonty Industries) and the Mittersill mine in Austria (Sandvik). Often by-product Mo, Bi, Cu.
- Vein deposits: Quartz veins containing wolframite (and sometimes tin or molybdenum). These are often higher grade, but be aware of dilution (selective mining). Mt Carbine in Australia (EQ Resources) is a classic example of this style.
Most of the current exploration and operating mines for tungsten outside of China have grades between 0.15% and 0.8% WO3 (Tungsten Trioxide). Anything approaching 0.5% to 1.0%+ in a bulk minable scenario is to be considered high grade.
Source: USGS Grade and Tonnage Model for Tungsten Skarn
Deposits—2020 Update
A modest attempt by myself to list the current companies chasing the Tungsten (retail) dopamine:
Processing
Tungsten is mined using both open-pit and underground methods. The real challenge for junior miners isn’t usually getting the rock out of the ground; it’s the metallurgy. Mining Tungsten is a bitch.
Mining the ore is typically easier than the beneficiation and metallurgy required to upgrade a low-grade tungsten ore into a marketable concentrate. Tungsten ores are often:
- Complexly mineralized, with fine dissemination of wolframite or scheelite in gangue (aka, not in clean crystals)
- Brittle, producing very fine particles if over-ground (bad for gravity recovery)
- Mineralogically diverse, requiring tailored flowsheet design instead of “plug-and-play” processing.
Two main types of processing:
- Gravity separation: Wolframite is very heavy, so it can often be separated using gravity methods (jigs, shaking tables, X-ray sorting). It’s cheaper to build the plant, but recoveries can sometimes be lower depending on the ore body (65-80%)
- Froth Flotation: Scheelite often requires ultra-fine grinding and complex chemical flotation to separate it from the waste rock. It’s more expensive and highly sensitive to water chemistry, but mature plants can push recoveries up to 70-85% once fully optimized.
Retail basic checklist:
| Factor | Wolframite | Scheelite |
|---|
| Chemical formula | (Fe,Mn)WO₄ | CaWO₄ |
| Primary recovery method | Gravity | Flotation (often + gravity) |
| Typical plant complexity | Low–Moderate | Moderate–High |
| Sensitivity to grind size | Moderate | Very high |
| Reagent dependency | Minimal | Significant |
| Variability risk | Moderate | High |
| Capex intensity | Lower | Higher |
| Opex volatility | Lower | Higher |
| Typical recovery range | 65–80% | 70–85% (after optimization) |
| Junior failure risk* | Moderate | High |
*Juniors can fail at 99 other points before even reaching this milestone. Also, each project is unique, so DYODD at all times
Supply
The majority of the world’s tungsten production comes from China, which accounts for roughly 80-85% of global supply. Not only do they mine it, but they control around 90% of the downstream processing capacity for Ammonium Paratungstate (APT)—the intermediate chemical form that most tungsten is traded as. So always be looking for the APT Price for your point of reference.
Apart from China, tungsten is also produced in places like Vietnam (Masan), Russia, Kazakhstan, Bolivia, and increasingly in Western jurisdictions like Australia and Spain.
For retail speculators, the big story right now is resource nationalism and quotas. In 2025, China started to choke the supply valve. The Ministry of Natural Resources established initial mining quotas at 58,000 tonnes in early 2025, representing a 6.45% year-on-year decrease from previous production levels. And restricted these export ‘rights’ to a strict “whitelist” of just 15 state-approved companies. Chinese customs data recently showed a 34% drop in physical export volumes for the first two months of 2026. The global supply of tungsten is currently undergoing a massive structural shock, and the West is scrambling to rebuild a non-Chinese supply chain. Spoiler: Two western suppliers stand out: Almonty & EQ Resources.
Pricing & the squeeze
Let’s zoom in on the price action, because frankly, this is why everyone is suddenly paying attention to a metal most people haven’t thought about since high school chemistry.
Tungsten is a niche, small market. It’s not traded on the LME or COMEX like copper or gold. It is priced largely through opaque, bilateral contracts and reported via pricing agencies (like Fastmarkets or Argus). The benchmark price is usually quoted in USD per MTU of APT.
(Quick refresher: MTU: Metric Tonne Unit. APT: Ammonium Paratungstate)
For years, the price of APT was a snoozefest, bouncing around the $250 to $350 per MTU mark. But over the last 12 months, the market has completely fractured. Spot prices recently blew past $2,500/mtu and have even seen panic-bids above $2800/mtu (late March)
Why the sudden moonshot? It comes down to a perfectly executed Chinese geopolitical squeeze over the last year. Here is the 12-month timeline of how the market broke:
- Mid-2025 (The Mining Cut): China, who controls ~85% of the market, realized they were depleting their own strategic reserves too fast while selling it to the West for pennies. So, Beijing cut their domestic mining quotas by roughly 6.5%.
- Late 2025 (The Whitelist): Next, China changed the rules of the game. They stopped letting anyone export tungsten and restricted all overseas sales to a strict “whitelist” of just 15 state-approved companies. Applicants needed to proof certain thresholds of past export volumes etc.
- January/February 2026: When the official Chinese Customs data rolled in recently, the reality was even worse: physical export volumes of tungsten products had plummeted by a massive 34% year-over-year. From a geopolitical and economic standpoint, this policy is a massive victory for Beijing.
- Physical Security: By cutting exports, they are keeping roughly 1,600 extra tonnes of critical tungsten inside their own borders to feed their own domestic defense and high-tech manufacturing base.
- Economic Win: Because the price skyrocketed, they are extracting significantly more capital from Western economies while depleting their own natural resources at a slower rate. They are literally being paid more to sell less.
- The Panic/Frantic Buying: You have to remember who buys tungsten. It’s not used to make cheap consumer junk; it’s bought by defense contractors building armor-piercing artillery and high-tech firms building semiconductors. Their demand is radically inelastic—they have to have it, no matter the cost. When physical shipments from China dropped by a third, Western buyers started bidding up whatever free-market metal they could find (read in your Drama voice). Even if the defense sector is only accounting for 10-12% of the customer base, they set the price at the margin. The price sky is the limit?
Every missile fired over Iran is burning through U.S. tungsten stocks
Reuters (March 23, 2026)
The Takeaway: This isn’t a temporary supply chain glitch; it’s a structural shift. The West is currently being starved of the physical metal required for the 21st-century defense and tech sectors. The recent wars are accelerating the demand and attention for Tungsten (& many other Critical Metals). Western governments (like Australia and the US) are now throwing billions in tax credits and floor-price guarantees at crirical metals to build a non-Chinese supply chain.*
*Let’s first see about that. Politicians being politicians and all that. Talk is cheap. And are floor-prices & tax credits even really the answer?
Cycles gonna cycles. So we (you should too) are expecting this madness to settle somewhere considerable closer to the ‘cost curve’. See the recent lithium boom & reset as an example. Will that be below $750/MTU or closer to $1200/MTU? Place your bets accordingly…
Cheers, Panda
- Tungsten – A retail starter pack
- Using AI in a mining speculator’s world
- Junior Mining spoilers series
- Niobium – A retail starters pack
- Lithium supply – A retail starters pack
Discover more from Pete's corner
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Thanks.Idontknow how i found your site and here i am. I have EQR and itsgone up. Il be holding for awhile.Saad Khan (substack) told me abot it. He has your style of doing the homework. I listen to RNTRtrading. His knowledge is commodities and alot more. He also does alot of homework. HE likes the rare earths. Check themout.Meanwhile Im offtoread your AI inmining. Thanks Christopher Reed.
Great article and well mapped deposits!
Do you think artisan miners from Africa could meaningfully contribute to western supply as the APT price keeps going up?
Have you mapped the estimated new production per project to understand how long this bull market will be?