Government money, export bans, and a new firewall from China

Welcome back to Hard Work. When one government moves on tungsten, it’s policy. When three do it in a fortnight, it’s a pattern. Let’s get into it.

History repeating

The UK just invested £71m to restart a tungsten mine, with an option on half the output. Other governments will follow. I should be pleased – I’ve spent years arguing the West needs to fund its own supply.

The problem is I’ve seen what happens next. In 2008, Japan and South Korea poured billions into securing critical mineral supply chains. They funded projects across Australia and Canada. The result: no material produced. The money went to a generation of junior mining executives. I remember them on their boats in Monaco – very grateful, very happy. Governments have good ideas. The people they back to deliver on them are sometimes another matter.

​The challenge is that a government is a jack of all trades – it can’t tell a good mine from a bad one, so it hires engineers who write glowing feasibility reports with a waiver in the small print. And there is no shortage of people who call themselves management. Most of them are clowns who shouldn’t be left alone with a box of matches.

Japan and South Korea learned. They stopped trying to pick winners and pushed the risk onto their industrial base – the companies that buy the stuff. Those companies know how to protect a dollar. If the new money follows that model, the checks might land somewhere useful this time.

Tungsten markets

Michael Dornhofer, ISBP – assessment as of 11 September, 2026

Tungsten prices in USA and Europe stay unchanged for another week and are still around 3000 USD/mtu WO3. Reports from China show their domestic price trend moved to an upward tendency.

The reason is quite simple: There is not enough raw material! As the APT price in China is only about one third of the western price, Chinese APT producers are not willing to buy western concentrates on western price level. But without a significant amount of imported raw material, the industry is running short on raw material. Soon it will become clear whether the Chinese domestic prices will go up towards western levels, or China might reduce output of downstream products for export.

The coming weeks will show us. And there’s another interesting development that even some “experts” overlooked. On 5 August, China placed several foreign entities under sanctions and banned them from operating in China. One entity on this list is the non-profit organization RBA.

RBA (Responsible Business Alliance) is the world’s largest industry coalition dedicated to promoting responsible business conduct. RBA has more than 600 member companies including Apple, Tesla, Microsoft, Amazon etc. and runs the RMI (Responsible Minerals Initiative) program.

Nearly the entire western downstream industry insists on RMI certificates for their total supply chain. When, due to the ban of RBA, no RMI audits and certificates are possible in China, western downstream producers cannot accept any tungsten material or downstream products coming out of China.

China wants to replace the RMI audits by audits performed by CCCMC (Chinese Chamber of Commerce for Metals & Chemicals). But knowing that China imports thousands of tonnes of concentrate from countries like Myanmar and North Korea, and so material from these countries are in the tungsten supply chain in China, it’s questionable who would trust Chinese audit certificates.

So, this easy-to-overlook new regulation in China could lead to an additional “firewall” between China and RoW, which might have a very significant effect on the tungsten world market.

Michael Dornhofer is founder of ISBP (Independent Supply Business Partner) in Graz, Austria. He has spent more than 20 years in tungsten, including 13 years at Wolfram Bergbau und Hütten, Sandvik’s tungsten business, and has worked as an independent agent and consultant to the tungsten and hard metal industry since 2019.

From January, the door shuts

Since 2023, the Pentagon has barred Chinese, Russian, Iranian and North Korean tungsten from defense contracts. From 1 January 2027, that restriction moves upstream. It will no longer matter where the tungsten was melted or processed. What matters is where it was mined. Ore, feedstock, recycled material: if it started life in one of those four countries, it is out. The route that kept the loophole open – mine in China, process somewhere friendlier, sell it as non-Chinese – closes for good.

That’s the American side. On the other side, producer countries are shutting their own doors. Zimbabwe banned exports of tungsten ore and concentrates in July, confirmed by the Ministry of Mines and reported by Bloomberg last week. Vietnam’s industry ministry has drafted a proposal to pull tungsten off the permitted-export list entirely. Vietnam is the world’s second-largest producer, at around 3,400 tonnes a year. If that draft becomes law, the non-China supply pool gets a lot smaller.

Zimbabwe barely produces any tungsten. The volume is negligible. But the pattern is worth watching – one more producer country pulling raw material off the open market. The list of places you can actually buy tungsten outside China keeps getting shorter.

What I’m reading

Doom sells

Anthropic’s head of alignment research went on X last week and told the world there is a greater than 10 percent chance that AI kills everyone within a decade. He added that his own company has no plan to prevent it. Everyone saw that as brand-damaging for Anthropic. I’m not so sure.

Anthropic is potentially weeks away from an IPO that could value it at $2tn. A 10 percent chance of ending civilization, disclosed on that timeline, does a very specific job: it tells Wall Street that this company has built something so powerful only it can be trusted to keep the lights on. Terror as a moat. If regulators respond by licensing AI the way they license nuclear reactors, only the companies with that kind of backing survive the paperwork. I’m not worried though – all we need to do is find Sarah Connor.

Ten percent of people have been to space

Pew Research surveyed 11,000 Americans online and found that 10 percent claimed to have visited the International Space Station. Nine percent said they received government benefits from an agency that closed in 1920. Six percent used a social media platform that doesn’t exist.

These were trap questions, designed to catch people who tick yes to anything for a survey reward. Standard quality checks caught almost none of them.

I’ve never trusted surveys. A lot of the research that moves markets and shapes policy is built on online panels where, by Pew’s own numbers, one respondent in ten is fabricating answers. The only survey I would make an exception for is one that told me I was doing an excellent job – and even then I would want to check how many of the respondents had also been to space.

The trouble with strategic stockpiles

​The US Strategic Petroleum Reserve is now below 300 million barrels, and, in a new twist, it seems that repeated drawdowns have begun to compromise the caverns and infrastructure needed to release that oil in an emergency. The reserve was built for a very different pattern of use, yet it’s been tapped repeatedly over several decades. Engineers are now arguing about the point at which further drawdowns start to affect pumping rates, equipment and the integrity of the salt caverns themselves.

The lesson is that strategic resources are only useful if the systems around them have been maintained properly. Governments tend to focus on the size of the stockpile. In practice, storage, processing, transport and the ability to move material quickly matter just as much.

Opinion

People ask why we don’t branch out. Gold is on a run. Lithium gets headlines. Every commodity has someone telling you it’s the one to watch. We do tungsten and molybdenum. We don’t know anything else – and I would rather say that than pretend otherwise.

A vet treats everything that walks through the door. Dogs, cats, parrots. A doctor specializes. The guy who whips out your appendix does not do brain surgery, unless you’re on a budget.

Mining is the same. Every deposit has its own geology, its own metallurgy, its own set of problems you only discover once you are underground. The companies that chase whatever commodity is fashionable learn everything at surface level and nothing underneath. We have been at this long enough to know what we don’t know – and we don’t know gold or lithium or anything that’s not a refractory metal.

We are the doctor.

In the media

The analysts have arrived. Jefferies has initiated coverage of Almonty with a Buy rating, citing the tightening tungsten market and the growing need for supply outside China. With the shares up considerably over the past year, interest in both Almonty and tungsten has clearly moved on. What matters now is execution – bringing new supply into a market that badly needs it.