Almonty Industries CEO Lewis Black put the problem in a letter that ZeroHedge ran on Sept. 20. The United Kingdom just put £71 million into a tungsten restart and took an option on half the output. Other capitals will copy the cheque. Black has spent years asking the West to fund its own supply. He is not celebrating.
He has seen this movie. After 2008, Japan and South Korea poured billions into “critical” juniors across Australia and Canada. The boats in Monaco were happy. The metal did not show up. Governments are jacks of all trades. They cannot tell a good mine from a brochure. They hire engineers who write glowing studies with the waiver in the small print. Then they hire clowns who should not be left with a box of matches.
Japan and South Korea learned. They stopped picking winners and pushed the risk onto the companies that actually buy the metal. Those firms know how to protect a dollar. If the new money follows that model, some of it might land on rock that can ship. If it follows the old model, it will land on decks.
The shortage is raw material. Not a press release
Michael Dornhofer of ISBP, writing as of Sept. 11, said U.S. and European tungsten prices were still around $3,000 per metric ton unit of WO3. China’s domestic APT price was running at about one third of the Western quote. Chinese APT plants will not pay Western concentrate prices. They also cannot feed themselves without imported rock. So the West is short of feed. China is short of cheap foreign feed. The next weeks decide whether Chinese domestic prices climb toward the West, or whether China simply cuts downstream exports.
That is the simple sentence. There is not enough raw material.
A second door just closed. On Aug. 5, China put the Responsible Business Alliance under sanctions and barred it from operating inside the country. RBA runs the Responsible Minerals Initiative. More than 600 companies sit in that tent, including Apple, Tesla, Microsoft, and Amazon. Western downstream plants still want RMI certificates on the whole chain. If RMI cannot audit in China, those plants cannot take Chinese tungsten or Chinese-processed tungsten and stay clean.
Beijing wants its own stamp instead: CCCMC, the Chinese Chamber of Commerce for Metals and Chemicals. China also imports thousands of tonnes of concentrate from Myanmar and North Korea. Who trusts a Chinese audit of that feed? Dornhofer’s point is a firewall. Not a tariff. A paper wall between China and the rest of the world.
January 2027 is not a slogan. It is a date
Since 2023 the Pentagon has barred Chinese, Russian, Iranian, and North Korean tungsten from defense contracts. On Jan. 1, 2027, the rule moves upstream. What matters is where the tungsten was mined or processed. Ore, feedstock, scrap. If it started in one of those four countries, it is out. The old trick — mine in China, process somewhere friendlier, sell it as clean — dies.
Producer countries are shutting their own doors at the same time. Zimbabwe banned exports of tungsten ore and concentrate in July. The tonnes are small. The pattern is not. Vietnam, the world’s second-largest producer at about 3,400 tonnes a year, has drafted a proposal to pull tungsten off the permitted-export list. If that draft becomes law, the non-China pool gets smaller again.
This is why Black’s letter keeps circling the same idea. The West does not have time to open greenfield mines from a blank page. Rearmament, data centers, and machine tools all want tungsten now. A new shaft is a decade. A tailings pile is a quarter.
Almonty is buying time. That is the honest read
Almonty is doing the ugly work that policy papers skip. Last week it partnered with Rwanda’s government for a foothold in Africa’s largest tungsten-producing nation. Days later it signed a take-or-pay offtake with Sandvik’s Wolfram Bergbau und Hütten unit to retreat tailings at Los Santos in western Spain. WBH is the only integrated tungsten smelter outside Asia and Russia. The deal includes a $3 million pay-to-play cheque and a floor under the price. The rock has already been mined once. That is the point.
Jefferies has initiated coverage of Almonty with a Buy rating. Shares have run. Interest followed the metal, not the other way around. Black’s line is execution. Bring new supply to a market that already needs it. Sangdong in South Korea is in ramp-up. Los Santos is a recycle plant, not a dream. Rwanda is collecting material that small miners already produce.
Barclays’ Christian Keller put charts under the same argument. Transition-mineral mining is concentrated. Processing is worse. China owns almost the entire midstream in several of those metals. Without critical materials, Western rearmament and reindustrialization are speeches. Wall Street, Keller said, should look at miners that can deliver now. Those firms are the building blocks. Everything else is a slide deck.
Canada already drilled this problem once
The West’s other inventory is not only Spanish sand. It is old Canadian core. The Tombstone tungsten belt in the western Northwest Territories already hosted Cantung, once a flagship Western mine. Cantung has been on care and maintenance since 2014. About 60 kilometres by road to the north sits Lentung, the old Lened system that Union Carbide drilled from 1977 to 1982.
That file is now in the hands of Rackla Metals Inc. (TSX-V: RAK; OTC: RMETF). The company staked it. It owns the ground 100 percent, subject to a small royalty. Union Carbide left 26,900 metres in 178 holes and 15 tungsten zones along a long strike. Historical internal work put mill grades in the neighborhood of 1.1 to 1.3 percent WO3. Those numbers are not a current NI 43-101 resource. They are a map. Rackla is trying to turn the map into a modern estimate, targeted for early 2027 if the season cooperates.
This summer the company put two rigs on the property. A diamond program is twinning old holes. An RC rig is stepping out. The plan was about 10,000 metres. Assays are pending. An airborne magnetic and radiometric survey started in mid-September. None of that is a mine. It is the only honest way a junior can help in a market that has run out of patience for PowerPoints.
The geography is the quiet argument. Lentung sits in a belt that already proved tungsten at Cantung and at Fireweed’s Mactung to the north. High-grade skarn systems do not appear in every jurisdiction. If Western buyers need non-Chinese feed after 2027, they will look first at places that already had mills, roads, and decades of holes. That is why a name like Rackla belongs on a research list next to the producers who can ship this year. Not instead of them. Behind them, if the drills confirm what Union Carbide thought it had.
How to read the gap without lying to yourself
Black’s warning about governments still holds. A cheque to “the sector” is not concentrate. A junior with historical holes is not a mill. A tailings deal with Sandvik is closer to metal than a resource target in Q1 2027. Rank the stack that way.
First, names that already produce or can retreat waste in friendly jurisdictions. Almonty is in that bucket. Second, permitted brownfield restarts in allied countries. Third, high-grade historical systems next to known mines, with drills turning and a path to a compliant resource. Lentung is in that third bucket. Treat it as optionality on Western feed, not as a substitute for tonnes already under contract.
Watch three clocks. The Jan. 1, 2027 defense rule. Chinese APT licenses and domestic prices. And whether Vietnam and other mid-tier producers lock the gate. If those clocks keep tightening, capital will chase any credible non-Chinese ounce that can be verified. Canada’s old tungsten belt is one of the few places where that ounce was already found once.
The West asked for a mine boom. The rock is answering with leftovers and with core boxes from 1982. That is not romance. It is the supply that can still arrive before the policy date.
People also asked
Why is tungsten suddenly a strategic metal? It hardens steel, cuts metal, and shows up in munitions, turbines, and tools. China still dominates mine supply and processing. Export licenses and audit bans have split the market in two.
Can new Western mines fill the gap quickly? Greenfield mines take years. That is why Almonty is retreating Spanish tailings and collecting Rwandan feed, and why old Canadian systems with historic drilling are back in the file.
Where does Rackla Metals fit? It is an explorer, not a producer. Lentung is a historical high-grade tungsten skarn next to Cantung, with a 2026 drill program aimed at a modern resource. It is a watch-list name for the next layer of Western feed, not a substitute for tonnes already being shipped.
Disclaimer
This article is for information only. It is not an offer, a solicitation, or investment advice. Tungsten prices, export rules, and company plans can change. Historical grades at Lentung are not current NI 43-101 mineral resources and must be verified. Rackla Metals Inc. (TSX-V: RAK; OTC: RMETF) is an exploration company. There is no certainty that Lentung will become a mine or will supply Western industry. Canadian Mining Report has previously published on Rackla. Readers should do their own work and treat every name here as a research file, not a recommendation. Past performance is not a guide to future results.