Simon

Tungsten Tripled in 2026 and the U.S. Still Mines None of It - Which May Change Very Soon What happened to tungsten in 2026 was not an ordinary commodity move. Export licensing requirements introduced in early 2025 and formalized in China’s January 2026 dual-use catalogue restricted seaborne availability of ammonium paratungstate in particular, and the mechanism that once tied domestic Chinese prices to international ones stopped functioning properly. Traders describe a rupture in the price relationship, with mid and downstream customers outside China unable to obtain material and paying whatever it takes. The result is a two-tier market. Inside China, price formation continues under a domestic mining quota that has itself been reduced against falling ore grades at mature deposits. Outside China, buyers are bidding against each other for a restricted pool released by fifteen authorized exporters. Demand on the western side of that divide is not softening either: defense procurement of kinetic penetrators and armor-piercing ammunition sits alongside fast-growing tungsten wire demand for diamond wire solar wafer cutting. There is a second-order effect worth naming. When a metal reprices this violently, the first companies to benefit are the ones already selling it, and the second are the ones holding processing capacity. The United States has some of the latter. American plants convert tungsten concentrate, ammonium paratungstate, oxide or scrap into metal powder, carbide powder and finished parts, and that downstream capability never went away. What disappeared was the front of the chain. Net import reliance has stayed above half of apparent consumption, which means the conversion plants are running on material that mostly starts somewhere else. The Deadline Nobody Can Reschedule The policy side of this is more specific than the general critical minerals conversation suggests. Through the end of 2026, the DFARS restriction on tungsten from China, Russia, Iran and North Korea turns on where the material was melted or produced. From January 1, 2027 the clause widens to the mine or ore stage, and it names recycled and scrap material explicitly, so material that has passed through a recycling stream does not reset its country of origin. The commercially available off-the-shelf carve-out narrows on the same date. For a defense supplier, that converts a paperwork question into a sourcing question. For an exploration company holding past-producing American tungsten ground, it sets a date by which domestic material becomes structurally more valuable than it was the day before. Permitting and building a mine takes years and the deadline does not move, which is why federal money has been arriving ahead of production rather than after it.

First, US banning tungsten scraps export Second,UK government investing in Tungsten West Third, Zimbabwe banning Tungsten concentrates export Forth, Vietnam does the same Who's next?!

CEO @oliverjfriesen sits down Inside the ICE House with @NYSE to talk Guardian Metal's push to bring mined tungsten production back to U.S. soil for the first time in over a decade. #GMTL #GMET targeting commercial production before the end of 2028. ⬇️ youtube.com/watch?v=LVLbrCZm…