America has a tungsten problem

https://www.noleary.com/blog/posts/1

by noleary • 5 months ago

205 201 5 months ago

MisterTea3• 5 months ago

I really would like to see answers to the four questions at the end. Though I would hazard a guess that the answers to the first three can be summed up as "it's easier and cheaper to let China do the dirty work." The last question I cant answer as I don't understand boom-bust mining cycles.

Edit to add:

After all, it turns out tungsten actually isn't hard to find! It's all over the United States. In fact, it's pretty much all over the world.

The Wikipedia Tungsten article states the largest reserves are in China followed by Canada, Russia, Vietnam and Bolivia. This contradicts the articles claim. Just because it's all over does not mean it is easy to dig up and refine. Some clarification is needed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tungsten#Production

noleary4• 5 months ago

Reserves means something specific in the context of minerals! Reserves measure 'economically viable' deposits. [1]

There used to be tons of tungsten mines in the USA, e.g. in Colorado linked below.

[1] https://resourcecapitalfunds.com/insights/rcf-partners-blog/...

[2] https://coloradogeologicalsurvey.org/publications/tungsten-m...

bell-cot2• 5 months ago

Yes, but it should be emphasized how dependent "Reserves" are on both exploration work, and current assumptions about future mining/refining/market conditions.

China's secret to having most of the world's Reserves may be that they bored a lot more test holes (to actually know "the rock in >THIS< spot is X% tungsten") than anyone else, then made some more-optimistic assumptions.

lkbm• 5 months ago

The Wikipedia Tungsten article states the largest reserves are in China followed by Canada, Russia, Vietnam and Bolivia. This contradicts the articles claim. Just because it's all over does not mean it is easy to dig up and refine.

It doesn't contradict the claim.

Just because it's all over does not mean it is easy to dig up and refine, but just because it's not the largest reserve doesn't mean it's not easy to dig up and refine.

Tuna-Fish• 5 months ago

The Wikipedia Tungsten article states the largest reserves are in China followed by Canada, Russia, Vietnam and Bolivia. This contradicts the articles claim.

No, it does not, it's just a confusion of the term reserves. That's not on you, though, because everyone constantly gets it wrong.

Reserves are not estimates of the amount of a mineral underground. To be counted as proven reserve, you need to show that the mineral is economically extractable at market prices. Specifically, by starting to extract them. They are "working inventory" of mines that have been developed, they are not our understanding of how the minerals are distributed. They are also a function of commodity prices, not something that remains constant unless you dig them.

China has so much of the worldwide production and reserves because mining is an extremely capital-intensive industry, that is also sensitive to labor costs and environmental legislation. For a long time, China had the trifecta of lax legislation, cheap labor, and sufficient political stability to attract investment. US or Europe can't compete because mining there is more expensive, the third world can't compete because people are wary of investing billions into projects that might go to zero for political stability reasons.

Should the market prices of key minerals rise to the point where it makes sense to mine them outside of China, reserves will be developed and production will shift. This will probably require political will to either tariff Chinese production or subsidize production outside China, because so far China has wielded mineral exports as a weapon only for brief periods, being careful to release exports to crater prices often enough to kill competing projects.

a2tech3• 5 months ago

The US has lots of tungsten and other minerals. The problem is mining them here--people really don't want to see huge holes in the ground, industrial run off, and ecological collapse.

If the fundamentals of international resource extraction changes (which because of the increase in wages and living standards and expectations in China is happening) then we might see wide spread and rapid mining happening in the US. My questions in that scenario are 1) who will work these mines? The US is running at very high employment right now, and mining is very hard work 2) where would our ore refinement equipment and skills come from? China has 50 years of ore refinement development behind them. They have infrastructure to BUILD the infrastructure for ore extraction and refinement. My understanding is that they're uninterested in selling that currently 3) then all the other local issues like where will they be able to sell locals on building giant mines, dealing with the heavy traffic, potential environmental concerns, etc.

nullhole• 5 months ago

To be counted as proven reserve, you need to show that the mineral is economically extractable at market prices. Specifically, by starting to extract them.

You don't need to be actually mining the stuff for it to be considered a reserve, at least in the Canadian (CIM) definitions. You do need at least a pre-feasibility study, and details on market prices & contracts.

The general point is right though, "mineral resources" means there's metal in the ground, "mineral reserves" means there's metal in the ground that can be economically mined, with consideration of the mining methods, infrastructure, legal title, environmental impact, metallurgy, market contracts, etc.

petre• 5 months ago

The Wikipedia Tungsten article states the largest reserves are in China followed by Canada, Russia, Vietnam and Bolivia

Easy one, then. The administration will kidnap the president of Bolivia, install a replacement and strike a minerals deal.

matheusmoreira3• 5 months ago

This doesn't even seem that far fetched at this point. The economic influence of the USA is being eroded at every turn. Their military capabilities could very well turn out to be their last hope one day. South America stands virtually no chance against even a decadent USA. It's actually embarrassing how weak South America is.

aeternum• 5 months ago

It's often hard to beat bulk mining. When you're already mining a quarter billion tons of iron and 5B tons of coal, you get a decent amount of all other trace(rare-earth) metals as part of that stream.

It's far easier to just collect tungsten as it rolls down your conveyor belt.

kbelder2• 5 months ago

The Minecraft paradigm.

CGMthrowaway• 5 months ago

I really would like to see answers to the four questions at the end

The bottom line is that China has the biggest most economical tungsten reserves, they have been able to flood the market with predatory pricing for the last 40 years and they almost completely control the ore processing bottleneck as well.

For this to change the US govt would have to enter major agreements w US mines, offering relaxed permitting and a guaranteed price

gmerc• 5 months ago

Wait until you find out the US is flooding the software market with "predatory" SaaS products. Point being, it's only "predatory" if others do it.

giantg2• 5 months ago

"it's easier and cheaper to let China do the dirty work."

This is true for just about any industrial due to the environmental regulation disparity.

josefritzishere• 5 months ago

It's worth mentioning that the US has tungsten mines, but they are not operating currently. https://www.usgs.gov/data/tungsten-deposits-united-states

burnt-resistor• 5 months ago

The raw GIS data of US tungsten deposits is linked to here:

https://www.sciencebase.gov/catalog/item/5ae385eae4b0e2c2dd3...

The site loads very, very slowly.

tomondev• 5 months ago

Not surprising. In addition to Tungsten or rare earth materials, I am sure there are many more "problems" that America is dependent on China.

irishcoffee2• 5 months ago

Yeah, the US let China do the dirty work because it was cheaper. And it was cheaper because China doesn’t care about dumping waste wherever they’d like and building suicide nets for their employees because of how they’re treated.

America depended on China to not care about the environment or people. China is pretty good at that.

actionfromafar• 5 months ago

Fear not, we will Make America Great Again. Back to the "gilded age".

Hikikomori• 5 months ago

China sounds a lot like a conservative wet dream. Are they just jealous?

Gravityloss• 5 months ago

Between stable and contract honoring entities it's also possible to trade for things that not everyone produces, or do large long term investments in things like mines or refineries outside your own territory.

01100011• 5 months ago

There is likely a good amount of tungsten, along with other useful elements, sitting buried in US landfills.

It may take a while, but one day our old landfills will turn into mines.

Gigachad• 5 months ago

With most resources, it’s usually not that they literally can’t be found, but that the cheap sources are gone. If tungsten costs 20x as much to extract, it doesn’t matter that it technically exists, a lot of users are just not going to be able to afford it.

dmurray• 5 months ago

The article says the US currently imports about 10,000 tons of tungsten per year, and has no active production, so that's also its current usage.

Tungsten costs about $200/kg [0]

So the total US tungsten usage is $2 billion/year.

If the price goes up 20x overnight, and nobody changes their purchasing behaviours, that costs US businesses, consumers and government $38 billion.

That's a lot of money for most people, but it's being spread over a wide base.

For a comparison, the US uses about 20 million barrels of oil per day [1] or 7 billion per year. So a 20x shock in tungsten would be roughly equivalent to oil prices going up $5/barrel. In fact oil fluctuates by that much most quarters [2], if not most months. People complain a little when it goes up, but it takes more than that to really have a noticeable effect on the economy.

A 2x or 5x price increase - a huge shock in any context - would be problematic for a few companies, but really business as usual for the US as a whole.

[0] https://www.metal.com/tungsten

[1] https://ycharts.com/indicators/us_oil_consumption

[2] https://www.macrotrends.net/1369/crude-oil-price-history-cha...

bell-cot2• 5 months ago

Between the critical strategic/military need, the by-far largest producer being an unfriendly rival power, and commercial production looking like a very poor fit for the use case - the Old School solution would be for the gov't to own & probably operate the needed mines, refining facilities, and stockpiles.

But between our low-functioning gov't and our lower-functioning Capitalist-Ideological Complex, I'd be surprised if such a solution was even mentioned.

queenkjuul4• 5 months ago

Don't worry, it wasn't

HelloUsername• 5 months ago

Are they secretly building the "Rods from God"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment

a2tech3• 5 months ago

This website has no author attribution and this is the only article on it. I would be very suspicious of its claims (not that I disagree with them, just that unattributed works on brand new websites are not ALWAYS the most trustworthy).

The United States has exported the dirtiest businesses internationally for quite a few years (raw mineral extraction is a dirty, nasty business, with slim margins). Now that China has become more adversarial and also more established (you mean people want to actually get PAID to slave away in a mine, or even worse, refuse to even work in a dangerous and dirty pit mine?!) the US is facing some hard decisions. We need many of these materials, and we have them, but we haven't had the will to mine them. Lots of people want to open US government lands to these resource extraction outfits, but there's right worry about the potential for ecological destruction.

noleary4• 5 months ago

Hey, I wrote the article. This is my personal website that I wrote mostly over the weekend.

I went down a rabbit hole reading about metals and mining and just thought it was interesting. Not an expert or a nefarious actor, unfortunately.

stevenwoo• 5 months ago

The formatting of the website on iOS safari moves the left margin off screen so I could not read all of your essay. But you may enjoy reading Material World by Conroy based on what I could read, he does not cover Tungsten.

themanmaran• 5 months ago

Not an expert or a nefarious actor

If it helps, I know @noleary and can confirm this is a true statement!

hunterpayne4• 5 months ago

Nice work but no offense, but it comes off as you describe. I think you are overall right about needing to switch W sources. You are wrong that it will be used for fusion reactors. That won't happen in the lifetime of anyone alive today. It will get used for armor for weapons and possibly some fission reactors. We are nowhere near an actual breakeven fusion reactor. We are only close to theoretical break-evens which are themselves more than an order of magnitude from actual working powerplants. Ask yourself this, how do you efficiently harness 1,000,000C heat? Even at 900C we can only get about 55% and we have materials which can withstand that temperature for decades. We have nothing physical that can take anywhere near 1,000,000C.

emmelaich2• 5 months ago

To what extent is tungsten recyclable? i.e. What does it mean for a fusion reactor to consume tungsten?

gkanai• 5 months ago

You may want to attribute the site/article to yourself.

djoldman• 5 months ago

I'm not sure about some of the numbers. PCD is pretty dominant in gas and oil drilling.

rsync• 5 months ago

It's a website about metals.

Lady, why are you so interested in what I read or what I do ?

ericmay3• 5 months ago

Now that China has become more adversarial and also more established (you mean people want to actually get PAID to slave away in a mine, or even worse, refuse to even work in a dangerous and dirty pit mine?!) the US is facing some hard decisions.

There is an implication here that the United States is immune or afraid of doing “hard” or “dirty” work and so we outsourced refining and mining to China.

This doesn’t seem to be correct.

China has a national strategy to dominate refining of rare earth minerals and critical components and our entire society wants cheap products and China was the cheapest place for this stuff and environmental rules are more lax, and with an authoritarian regime supporting and fast tracking the business for strategic reasons, well there you have it.

Part of the strategy involves decoupling China from a weak link in the energy supply chain infrastructure: oil and refining rare earths, manufacturing products that use them, and more is how they are pursuing some level of energy independence from the USA which controls oil flows globally, for the most part.

With respect to avoidance of “dirty” jobs. The EU is far, far worse in this respect than the United States is or was.

pixl97• 5 months ago

A good way to put it as "China was very willing to subsidize the cost of mining these elements as environmental damage".

a2tech3• 5 months ago

People in the US will do dirty jobs if thats what there are, but like people everywhere (in aggregate), would rather not.

We outsourced refining and mining to China because 1) it was cheap 2) it meant poisoning the ground and air and ripping up vast tracts of land somewhere else.

China's rare earth metals stratagem I believe grew out of this--it didn't happen immediately, but rather some bright bulb saw the growing reliance on access to the minerals and encouraged internal growth and acquisition competing resources. Absolutely, very clever.

wolvoleo2• 5 months ago

With respect to avoidance of “dirty” jobs. The EU is far, far worse in this respect than the United States is or was.

Well yeah. Because we care about the environment and people like to enjoy their retirement instead of sitting in a wheelchair with COPD due to inhaling a lifetime of toxic dust.

China is getting better at it too, but only a few years ago I remember a story of all the toxic lakes where all the byproducts of neodymium mining were dumped.

maxglute10• 5 months ago

West fine with migrant labours doing hard and dirty work hidden from prying eyes (agriculture fields, meat packing plants). Mining just as strategic, but hard to hide big holes in the earth from constituents. I'm sure push comes to shove, US can import a bunch of central Americans to do hard and dirty work in mining.

seg_lol• 5 months ago

Don't make China the boogey man here, when it was America's rich that exported all those things (jobs, manufacturing, solid supply chains) to China.

Night_Thastus• 5 months ago

It's a frequent pattern of:

1: "We need to be more self-sufficient with minerals!"

2: "Let's try to kick-start more of our own industry digging it up!"

3: "Wow, that's expensive and can't compete with international prices."

4: "Better shut it down!"

5: Goto 1

Without ever getting that the point was never to be as profitable as overseas sources. Or getting the point and ignoring it.

terminalshort4• 5 months ago

The worst part is that most of number 3 is self imposed by the ridiculous amount of environmental review and litigation delays surrounding that process. Sure, cost of labor is some of it, but really it's not very much in comparison.

Supermancho• 5 months ago

Tungsten demand is real and bulk sources are quite scarce, today. It would be helpful if the historical charts went back farther than 2016. Where did the US get Tungsten in the 80s and 90s? South Korea, China, and Russia. The US and Canada had Tungsten mines, but the value wasn't there due to international pricing undercutting the industry. America's dogged federal agenda to break free of all Chinese influence or Capitalism, which will go first? We know the answer.

incahoots• 5 months ago

Now that China has become more adversarial

I think it's the other way around here. I say that as China's policy has primarily focused on self-reliance to the degree that it's overshadowed the west in several sectors with the exception of a few (Tech/AI, Finance, Bio) and given their persistence to close the gap I'd say we aren't too far from being eclipsed entirely.

One just has to look at the economics of it all and come to the conclusion that many have already arrived at...

hunterpayne4• 5 months ago

cough Wolf warrior diplomacy cough

tehjoker• 5 months ago

Now that China has become more adversarial

Just a nitpick, but it is the reverse, the United States has become more adversarial. China isn't kidnapping heads of state.

strangegecko• 5 months ago

They've both become more adversarial. China has been using economic blackmail to advance political goals for a long time (e.g. wrt Japan and Taiwan and SEA). They also continue to expand military based in the SCS that don't belong there, hold exercises to simulate blockades outside of China. Etc.

Saline95153• 5 months ago

This is plainly false. China bought the refining companies doing the extraction for rare earth in the US, extracted knowledge, then shipped the tooling to China and closed the US factories. Having no environmental regulation probably helped as well cost-wise, but that's not the fault of the USA.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2006/04/07/the-saga-of-magneque...

queenkjuul4• 5 months ago

That article doesn't say anything about selling a mine, it says the only mine was already in China. China bought an American magnet manufacturer which had been using Chinese neodymium to make magnets. It doesn't say anything at all about extraction.

Also, nobody forced US companies to sell those assets.

SV_BubbleTime• 5 months ago

Probably just Big W trying to run the markets.

Same as it ever was.

SoftTalker• 5 months ago

1. Fusion is not going to be a reality any time in the next 50 years.

2. Why does the US import tungsten? Is it that we don't have any, or it's cheaper to just buy it from China?

AceJohnny2• 5 months ago

The US govt already tracks the geopolitical status of "Critical Minerals" at the USGS:

https://www.usgs.gov/tools/critical-minerals-atlas

sholladay• 5 months ago

So we are finally building the Rods from God

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment

chwtutha• 5 months ago

Just want to say respect for making the blog and leading with a self-taught post about tungsten. Very cool dude stuff. Add an RSS feed.

goopypoop• 5 months ago

obligatory simpsons reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTLYris4kJU

h4kunamata• 5 months ago

Tungsten is the least of their problem. When a population cannot afford health care system, and have to walk with their passport so they are not sent to jail, you have a broken country. Not to mention the financial problems.

Tungsten won't matter when there is no country.

PKop8• 5 months ago

walk with their passport so they are not sent to jail

No, it's broken because we've allowed millions of foreigners to come in and raise said healthcare and housing costs. Checking that people here actually belong here else they're deported is part of the "cost of living" solution, in addition to crime.

skulk• 5 months ago

No, it's broken because we've allowed millions of foreigners to come in and raise said healthcare and housing costs.

The idea that deporting every undocumented person will reduce the bloat and profit extraction in our health care system is making me giggle.

And do you really think checking every person is a strategy that scales? Why not just indiscriminately jail the people who hire them and thereby create a strong incentive to come?

Maybe those workers actually belong here more than you'd like to admit, but the powers that be enjoy keeping their status uncertain to use as a piñata they can beat whenever they need political candy.

dtauzell• 5 months ago

I think overall immigration is a net benefit: https://www.cato.org/white-paper/immigrants-recent-effects-g...

queenkjuul4• 5 months ago

Get a load a this guy, he thinks immigrants invented private health insurance

robocat4• 5 months ago

we've allowed millions of foreigners to come in and raise said healthcare and housing costs

They also raise your GDP by a lot more than they cost.

Australia and New Zealand have about 30% foreign born population, and we do fine.

Maybe add 100 million more people into the US before you would have problems that get difficult.

The biggest cost of healthcare is staff, and a lot of the staff here come from overseas so it's kinda self-sustaining (in the short term). The biggest cost of housing is people whinging and whining about it. NZ and AU does build plenty of housing (land isn't a constraint). Many people in the building industry were born overseas.

It isn't all rainbows, but it mostly works for us.

The US has about 290 million native-born citizens and 25 million naturalized citizens. It has maybe 15 million unauthorized immigrants (of which approx 80% are of working age).

One should always compare population densities, rather than absolute numbers.

phendrenad2• 5 months ago

One wonders: Why does China produce >80% of the world's tungsten? Why has there been zero domestic tungsten mining in the United States?

Mining and refining rare earth is a dirty process. NIMBYs pushed it farther and farther away until it was on the other side of the world.

maxglute10• 5 months ago

PRC tungsten reserves are also depleting, mines are processing more rocks for same output and sooner or later PRC going to quota tungsten exports even more for domestic stockpile and prevent over extraction.

Also related tangent, remember that anecdote about PRC finally making ball point pen tips? That was basically central gov slapping PRC metallurgists to speedrun tungsten carbide precision manufacturing for advanced munitions (penetrators), not ball point pen tips which was rounding error consideration.

lovich• 5 months ago

Looking up details on this because I had never heard of the situation, and I was unaware that the ballpoint pen was only produced by so few countries.

I didn’t realize the tips were tungsten carbide either.

dexwiz• 5 months ago

Very small, high precision spheres are hard to make. Ball bearings also fall into this category. Many modern machines depend on this. I never see it "recreate society manuals," but they should be.

maxglute10• 5 months ago

Switzerland + japan and now PRC, i.e. US also can't build ballpoint pen tips (not that US couldn't). The TLDR is it's like a 20m per year market, TISCO china has revenue of 15B, it wasn't worth rounding error effort until politics compelled them to. And even then it wasn't really about metallurgy but submicro tungsten manufacturing to close precision gap for other strategic industries. The meme/rumor is TISCO made one batch of ball point tip metal to prove a point and that chunk is enough to last PRC ballpoint tip industry for decades.

fnord77• 5 months ago

Fort Knox is full of tungsten

icegreentea2• 5 months ago

Btw, the paper referenced for tungsten production is co-funded by a US tungsten exploration/mining company: https://www.innovationnewsnetwork.com/harnessing-tungsten-fo...

I can only read the free part of the paper (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09203...). I wish it would elaborate more on the challenges with recycling.

trebligdivad• 5 months ago

The UK has a big tungsten deposit; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemerdon_Mine

Come buy our tungsten! (We'll throw in a choice of Eccles cake or Tunnocks tea cakes as a special offer)

riwsky• 5 months ago

Am I the only one who finds this material rather dense?

david927• 5 months ago

Now try copper, aluminum and more. I saw a clip from a conference that said for copper, at 3% GDP growth, the global demand in the next 18 years will exceed the last 10,000 years, but 80% of known reserves have already been mined.

It seems to me that development in the future is going to be constrained. Not to be dramatic but are we in the sort of happy pre-pandemic days not knowing the changes heading our way? Or am I being too dramatic?

russdill2• 5 months ago

Good news, we have big plans to send significant quantities of copper and aluminum into orbit with zero possibility of recovery.

throwup2383• 5 months ago

Good news, that’s a tiny drop in the bucket compared to mining operations. Rocket payloads are measured in the metric tons; copper mining is measured in tens of millions of metric tons per year. It’s not even a rounding error, you’d have to launch hundreds of solid copper rockets a day to even make a dent.

kasperset• 5 months ago

This reminds me of another article I read today about Gallium.

https://archive.ph/YgRUv

Original Link: https://www.wsj.com/business/the-defense-department-is-infat...

Animats2• 5 months ago

There are at least three US tungsten mining startups.[1][2][3] It looks like the product is the stock, not the mineral. They're all in the money-acquisition stage. Two have animated American flags on their sites. The third is Canadian-owned.

It's worse than the wannabe rare earth mining companies.

[1] https://www.unitedstatestungsten.com/

[2] https://investornews.com/critical-minerals-rare-earths/ameri...

[3] https://www.patriotcritical.com/

dwd5• 5 months ago

There are some Australia startups with the American flags everywhere.

Resolution Minerals (which has some dodgy connection to the Trump boys) might have been the first to go with the heavy US patriotic tilt.

Trigg Minerals was more normal, but have recently rebranded as American Tungsten and Antimony and has gone full patriot as well to attract US buy-in.

sgnelson• 5 months ago

What about cobalt? For the largest part of the market, tungsten carbide cutting tools, it's usually a composite of tungsten carbide and cobalt.

Thankfully, in most industries that use tungsten carbide, there is a lot of recycling of the material (though probably not enough.)

Like anything, it's a complex problem, with no easy answers.

pstuart2• 5 months ago

FYI: https://www.npr.org/2023/12/14/1219246964/cobalt-is-importan...

tl;dr there's currently no overarching plan to help the US catch up to China, and we're going to let "the market" fix that problem. Being that "the market" in the US is about quarterly earnings reports and strategic bonuses for the C-suite, I'm keeping my expectations in check.

dwd5• 5 months ago

They're working on it.

Invested in an Australian tungsten miner late last year. Has an operating profitable mine in Spain and active Government support to restart the large Mt Carbine mine in Queensland.

Antimony is another critical mineral. A number of smallcap Antimony/Tungsten miners are exploring potential deposits in Idaho and Tennessee and Australia, but timelines are long.

ricksunny2• 5 months ago

That's cool - I'd imagine 'invested in a mining concern' is rare on the spectrum of HNers' resumes. May I ask how did you come to be confident enough to risk capital on something that's not typically within the average tech person's familiarity space? Asking b/c I would like to be able to develop such confidence if I could credibly (even just to myself) do so.

lightedman• 5 months ago

"I'd imagine 'invested in a mining concern' is rare on the spectrum of HNers' resumes."

You'd be surprised how many of us actually have a mining claim or two ;)

55555• 5 months ago

Actually, if you follow stock tip accounts on X, investing in Australian commodity miners is like the current hot trend, for a few weeks already.

This is not to assume that the parent commenter invested for this reason.

dwd5• 5 months ago

My foray into rare earths, critical minerals and some defense stocks was initially as a hedge against Trump starting a trade war with China, the increasing risk of military confrontation and the rearming of Europe. All three concerns have occurred to some degree, but it's a long game and actually took a lot longer to play out than I had expected in some cases.

And I get your lack of confidence, I did miss some quick opportunities that I felt were there but I wasn't confident at the time.

The only way to really gain confidence is do your research; read the presentations of each company, particularly their JORC-compliant estimates, time frames to production, how far along the funding path they are, etc.

Use your preferred LLM for deep dives. Whatever you're question, just ask and you'll be surprised at what you learn. For example asking for a cost/effort comparison of the metallurgic processes required for each type of rare earth host material really helped me understand what they were doing, and how each company differed in their approach.

If you like learning random things on Hacker News, deep diving into any technology or industry will not be an issue.

jandrewrogers• 5 months ago

A key aspect is being able to read the geology of the ore body. That is still more of an art than a science. If you are a nerd, it is actually super-interesting. Not too hard to pick up if you have the interest. It isn’t for the casual investor though. In the US there is a regulatory thicket you have to get through to develop it, and it often isn’t cheap, which factors into the value of the minerals.

I built a small catalog of ore deposits primarily by hiking deep into areas of the US mountain west that no one has gone into, albeit not for the purposes of prospecting. There is still quite a bit out there. Mostly gold-copper ores in my case.

ridgeguy• 5 months ago

Caught my eye due to family events. One of my uncles was killed in the Pine Creek mine in California. He was repairing an ore crusher when somebody switched it on. Pre-OSHA and tagout days.

I doubt we'll be pinched by tungsten shortages. The fusion application isn't going to come on for at least two decades. Smaller apps will be met by known reserves.

That said, it is a cool material. Looking for aluminum bars at Alan Steel (CA) years back, I was stunned when I tried (and failed) to pick up a 12" long by 6"diameter piece of what turned out to be tungsten misfiled in the aluminum section. Density, thy name is tungsten.

Quarrel• 5 months ago

This is not the first time that this has been a problem.

In WW2 all sides needed more tungsten, hence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfram_Crisis

As a side note, Tungsten is a Swedish word ("heavy stone"). It was first "discovered" by a Swede, and they called it Tungsten. Its atomic symbol is W, for wolfram, the German word for it, which even the Swede's use. I find it mildly amusing. (it is to do with tungsten rich ores and the name of the ores that had been known about for a while)

danielodievich• 5 months ago

My fireplace has 1" cubes of tungsten, aluminum, and magnesium, plus a cube of selenite and quartzy-style synthetic prism, all arranged on little stands really close to the floor, so reachable by children. Neighbor 2.5 year old last year was very put out when he couldn't lift the W cube. It is really a lot of fun to hold. Dropping it on one's foot is ill-advised, particularly if you are 2.5 years old.

anigbrowl2• 5 months ago

Counterpoint: Tungsten is about $1100/ton, so if demand averages 10k tons/year the annual US spend is about $10-12 million. That's peanuts in economic terms. If relations with China deteriorate the US could just set up a front company in some third country, buy tungsten, and re-export it.

noleary4• 5 months ago

FYI, Tungsten prices are quoted in metric ton units (MTUs) [1], which surprisingly aren't metric tons. They're actually 1% of a metric ton -- or 10kg. [2] So the price of Tungsten is actually 100x that.

[1] https://www.fastmarkets.com/metals-and-mining/minor-metals/t...

[2] https://quoteddata.com/glossary/mtu/

anigbrowl2• 5 months ago

My bad! Although I think at even $1 billion/year the US is probably not too worried about it for the time being. Thanks for schooling me on this!

mullingitover• 5 months ago

China learned from watching the US use export controls against them, and they've adapted them to their rare earths exports[1]. They're not going to be as easily bamboozled as the US has been with nVidia cards.

[1] https://www.iiss.org/online-analysis/charting-china/2025/02/...

yanhangyhy• 5 months ago

its a system failure, you can write 100000 articles on ‘America has a xxx problem` from now on. find the root cause, solve it.eg: copy,war...anything that works.

Animats2• 5 months ago

High value metal price volatility is huge. Here's copper.[1] Demand is relatively inelastic because, while substitution is possible, it takes years to switch. Supply is relatively inelastic because mines are big, capital-intensive operations. So small supply-demand imbalances produce large price swings.

We keep hearing about rare earth shortages, but the mining industry is now worried about a coming rare earth glut.[2] Everybody who can is adding rare earth capacity. Last glut was in 2015. A side effect of Trump's tariffs is a copper glut.[3] Tungsten is in a shortage mode but production is increasing.[4] Tungsten demand for incandescent lamps is down, but other uses are up.

This oscillation has real effects. Mines shut down and companies go bankrupt.

China operates on a five year plan and can, to some extent, force price stability by having the government control production. This has political risk; it can lead to huge stockpiles of useless material to maintain employment. The US has a National Cheese Reserve due to badly designed milk price supports. Canada has a potato glut. It's worse for food products. Metals don't spoil.

[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/1476/copper-prices-historical-ch...

[2] https://rareearthexchanges.com/news/beyond-beijing-the-uneas...

[3] https://logistics.maritimeprofessional.com/transport-infrast...

[4] https://www.coreconsultantsgroup.com/tungsten-market-outlook...

kopirgan• 5 months ago

Strange...was just watching the old Glenn Ford / Rita Hayworth classic Gilda on YT. Also featured a Tungsten cartel. Was wondering why they picked Tungsten of all things. Now I know!

nephihaha• 5 months ago

"Why has there been zero domestic tungsten mining in the United States?"

Maybe part of their plan is to have tungsten while exhausting everyone else's‽

samspot• 5 months ago

If we use our tungsten to make quality Big Mining Drills (https://wiki.factorio.com/Big_mining_drill), we can improve the efficiency of known resource patches.

America has a tungsten problem

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