Tungsten Balls-Up

Tungsten once lit our homes through incandescent filaments. Now it lights up the consequences of a planning culture based on preservation rather than future survival.

For full disclosure, I added shares in Tungsten West last week. I don’t really see it as a high conviction winner but as a low conviction trade with a high return should it come to fruition. A lottery ticket. This is certainly not advice to do likewise. I have previously owned shares in Wolf Minerals, the loss on which I consider a charitable donation towards those trying to force sense into national policy. What follows is a bit of an explanation as to why and a vent on UK strategic planning. It is NOT investment advice!

Tungsten prices have roared higher throughout 2025, with many products roughly doubling year-to-date in China amid ongoing supply tightness and speculation. Recent weeks have seen further sharp gains with concentrate breaking new highs above RMB 400k/ton. There are many forms of the tungsten metal markets, depending on ore or refinement type or delivery point, so rather than produce charts on all the different variables you can play around accessing them here https://www.metal.com/en/markets/24

Tungsten has always occupied an odd position in the modern economy, indispensable to almost everything that matters yet largely absent from the conversations that shape policy and capital, rather like infrastructure that only becomes visible once it fails.¹ It is not glamorous, it does not lend itself to slogans and it never acquired a constituency of enthusiasts insisting it would save the world, which turns out to be precisely the problem.

For decades tungsten has sat inside cutting tools, drilling equipment, aerospace components, armour-piercing munitions and high-temperature electronics, anchoring the physical economy while attention drifted elsewhere.² Copper takes the headline for electrification, iron as a benchmark for global infrastructure growth, rare earths for chips and resilience and uranium for those punting ten year views on six month books. And gold and silver outshine them all as they encapsulate dreams, aspirations, fiscal priors and jewellery cabinets. But Tungsten slips through the gaps of attention. It is not fashionable, not aspirational and not easily moralised, which makes it ill-suited to a political culture increasingly uncomfortable with the idea that some things need to be dug up if anything else is to be built.

That discomfort matters, because in 2025 tungsten stopped being boring.

Prices across Chinese domestic markets and downstream tungsten products rose sharply this year, not because demand suddenly surged but because supply became conditional, a distinction worth stressing since tungsten does not spike on sentiment or headlines but only when assumptions about availability finally give way.³

Global tungsten supply is extraordinarily concentrated. China produces well over eighty percent of global output, roughly sixty-five to seventy thousand tonnes a year, while the rest of the world is divided between Vietnam, Russia and a handful of smaller producers whose combined contribution barely alters the picture.⁴⁵ This is not diversification. It is dependence that everyone learned to tolerate because it was convenient and cheap.

When China tightened export licensing on tungsten and related products in early 2025 it did not need to announce a ban or make a geopolitical performance of it, because introducing friction alone was sufficient to change behaviour as approvals slowed, paperwork thickened and overseas buyers discovered that metal no longer arrived simply because it always had.⁶

As exports slowed and traders turned defensive, more material pooled onshore. This relative increase in domestic availability was quickly overwhelmed by robust inelastic demand from defense, aerospace, and electronics sectors, plus preemptive stockpiling amid tensions. Overall production stayed constrained by a ~6.5% cut in the first-batch mining quota (to 58,000 tonnes in 2025), declining ore grades, and environmental closures. Hoarding further tightened spot supply, pushing prices higher. Markets dislike uncertainty more than scarcity, and tungsten suddenly offered both.³

This inelasticity sharpened further in defense and strategic manufacturing, where tungsten alloys are critical for armour-piercing munitions, kinetic penetrators, and high-stress components. These are inputs no government risks sourcing casually amid deteriorating geopolitical conditions.¹²

This was not panic accumulation but strategic positioning, the predictable result of export friction pooling material onshore once participants stopped assuming continuity.³⁶

Seen plainly, the tungsten price move is not hysteria or speculation but the market repricing a supply chain that turned out to be far more politically exposed than most participants were prepared to admit.¹²

Which brings us to the British contribution to this particular balls-up.

A Strategic Asset Nobody Wants To Commit To

The UK hosts one of the largest tin-tungsten deposits in the world at Hemerdon in Devon, a mine I know well from skirting it on long treks across Dartmoor. It is reckoned to be the fourth largest tungsten deposit in the world, with scale that matters internationally, complete with an open pit, a processing plant and modern operational history, which in any serious discussion of supply security ought to place it firmly in the category of strategic asset.⁷⁸

Instead it is treated as something faintly embarrassing, as though the presence of economically useful rock were a moral inconvenience that must constantly justify itself in environmental (already massively delayed due to concerns that the processing is noisy) and aesthetic terms as the mine sits on the edge of Dartmoor. Ironically Dartmoor was historically an industrial concentration of mining and metal production but now, rewilded, one of the few escapes from modernity in the UK. However, this deposit should rather be considered a material advantage in a world where supply chains are becoming narrower and more political by the year.

Hemerdon has been restarted, stalled, refinanced and re-explained repeatedly over the past decade. Wolf Minerals brought it back into production and then collapsed, not because tungsten lacked relevance but because mining demands unglamorous virtues such as capital discipline, operational competence and the ability to endure periods when reality diverges from the spreadsheet.⁷ The asset survived. The company did not.

That episode should have prompted urgency and learning. It prompted hesitation and paperwork instead.

Tungsten West is now attempting to restart the mine again and deserves credit for persistence, but the broader pattern remains unmistakably British, marked by technical revisions, planning complexity, financing gaps and endless negotiation with a system that treats mining not as a strategic necessity but as an activity that ought to feel apologetic.⁹¹⁰

Mining in the UK is not debated primarily as a question of supply security or industrial resilience but as an ethical dilemma that must be continually rehearsed. Environmental restrictions, planning delays and conditional approvals pile up not because anyone has decided mining is impossible but because nobody is willing to decide that it is necessary. Possessing a resource is treated as morally equivalent to supplying it, rather like owning a cookbook and assuming dinner will eventually sort itself out.

While Britain refines strategies and polishes frameworks, China refines metal, prices adjust and leverage shifts.⁶

Planning As A Substitute For Commitment

The deeper issue here is not tungsten. It is temperament.

In the UK planning has become a substitute for decision-making, a way of signalling seriousness while deferring outcomes indefinitely. Delay is reframed as care. Difficulty is mistaken for responsibility and environmental concern becomes an all-purpose veto rather than a constraint to be managed.

This approach may work tolerably for domestic renovations. It is wholly unsuited to strategic supply chains.

Tungsten does not respond to consultations. It responds to capital, energy, engineering and permission. Every year of delay transfers leverage elsewhere and every additional layer of process quietly subsidises the dominant supplier.

The tungsten price surge is not an anomaly or a warning shot. It is the invoice for years of muddled thinking, a reminder that supply concentration matters, that export controls do not need to be dramatic to be effective and that strategic materials do not wait patiently for British planning culture to reach consensus.¹²

Britain still has a choice. It can continue with this tungsten balls-up, treating Hemerdon as an environmental embarrassment and hoping global supply chains remain benign, or it can accept that producing strategic materials in a tightening world requires commitment, trade-offs and decisions rather than endless rehearsal.

There are plenty of global tungsten companies to play on, but my attention is drawn to TW because it is a stress test for UK policy. The higher the price of tungsten goes, the tighter Chinese control of its supply becomes, the greater the demand for clarity over the UK's policy on China relations become - the more their policy on the Hemerdon deposit becomes the canary in the policy mine.

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References

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tungsten — overview of tungsten uses and industrial importance
² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolframite — tungsten mineral and applications
³ https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/tungsten-tipped-answer-wests-critical-metals-dilemma-andy-home-2025-02-19/ — pricing and supply chain geopolitics
⁴ https://investingnews.com/where-is-tungsten-mined/ — country-by-country production data
⁵ https://www.miningvisuals.com/post/charted-tungsten-production-2024 — visual confirmation of China’s dominance
⁶ https://news.sky.com/video/sky-news-visits-the-western-worlds-largest-tungsten-deposit-13331033 — Ed Conway reporting on tungsten and strategic supply
⁷ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemerdon_Mine — Hemerdon deposit history and scale
⁸ https://www.tungstenwest.com/overview-and-strategy — current operator and restart strategy
⁹ https://www.miningweekly.com/article/tungsten-west-unveils-restart-plan-for-hemerdon-mine-2025-05-30 — restart plans and projected output
¹⁰ https://www.mining.com/tungsten-west-produces-first-trial-concentrate-at-hemerdon-mine-in-uk/ — trial production confirmation
¹¹ https://www.londonstockexchange.com/news-article/TUN/development-and-economic-plan-for-hemerdon/17061075— economic and strategic context
¹² https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/what-are-five-new-critical-metal-exports-restricted-by-china-2025-02-04/ — export controls and critical metals policy