Rwanda, old mine waste and the phone call China stopped answering

I always say it’s better to be lucky than smart. We happened to be ready for a market that changed faster than anyone expected, and the answers are turning up in some unlikely places.

Who do you call now?

For years, buying tungsten was easy. You needed some, you called a broker in China. If you didn’t like the price, you haggled a little and two days later it was on a boat. Then you went back out to the golf course and told everyone your job was done.

That call doesn’t work anymore. China is turning from a supplier of raw material into a maker of finished products, and every buyer in the West is caught in the middle of it. Now you work the phones asking who has tungsten, and too often the answer is, “How do you spell that?” Meanwhile China is standing right behind you, making exactly what you make. It has what you need. It just isn’t ready to let it go until the West shows a little more humility.

China knows exactly who to call. In the first seven months of the year, Chinese tungsten ore imports from Myanmar rose about 97 percent, to more than 6,000 tonnes. By August, Myanmar accounted for close to half of everything China brought in.

Most of that ore comes from mines in territory held by the military junta since it overthrew the elected government in 2021. Tungsten is one of the four minerals the conflict-mineral rules were written for. Yet here it is, moving freely, because when material is short, “conflict material” starts to look like “misunderstood material.” The supply-chain auditors who charge a fortune to police this seem comfortable in the gray.

I’d enjoy the irony more if it were going to last. Military juntas are not known for running mines well. They’re drawing down stockpiles built before the fighting, and when those are gone, so is the supply. We know who is buying this material. Let’s see if the auditors work it out too.

Tungsten markets

Michael Dornhofer, ISBP – assessment as of 25 September, 2026

In my assessment, western APT prices eased slightly this fortnight, to around or slightly below 3000 USD/mtu WO3, although some western and Chinese sources still report prices around and above 3000. China has not changed its export license policy, so still (nearly) no APT and only very small volumes of oxide are exported.

​China stands for about 80% of worldwide tungsten production. Its export restrictions have brought an extreme shortage of tungsten intermediates (APT/oxide) in the west. But one must understand that the west does not only depend on tungsten ore mined out of Chinese soil and processed there to intermediates, but also on China’s capacity to convert concentrates to APT. The capacity outside of China to produce APT/oxide from concentrates and scrap is far too low to satisfy western demand.

This means it is not only necessary to increase western mining output, but also to increase APT/oxide volumes. This is now even more urgent. It might be faster to get permits and build a chemical plant producing APT/oxide than a new mine, but we must count on at least two to three years to have a new APT plant in operation.

This is certainly not good news for the downstream industry, which is desperately waiting for new feed, but this is what we are facing now.

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.

Buying from the home team

We’ve formed a partnership with the Government of Rwanda, introduced by the US State Department. You can’t call up a sovereign government and say, “Hey buddy, I’m a US company, let’s do some business.” You need your own government’s cover first.

Rwanda is the only African country among the world’s ten largest tungsten producers, at about 1,200 metric tons a year. The near-term plan is to buy what the country’s small-scale miners already produce. It won’t be cheap. Chinese buyers and Western traders are chasing the same material and we pay the same as everyone else. The difference is our partner. When the terms are equal and a seller has to choose, we’re betting they back the home team.

Last edition I said governments are terrible at execution. This one isn’t executing anything. The government holds 25 percent and takes its share, while we do all the work. Just like the relationship every citizen in every democracy already has with theirs.

Mining without a mine

Nobody is getting a new metal mine permitted in Europe. The authorities won’t say no. They just won’t say yes. But European customers still want tungsten produced closer to home.

So four years ago, our team in Portugal started working on what old mines leave behind. Earlier this month we signed a take-or-pay deal with Wolfram Bergbau und Hütten, part of Sandvik, to supply at least 1,720 metric tons of contained tungsten trioxide from the tailings at Los Santos in Spain, idle since 2020. To our knowledge, it’s the first commercial tailings deal in the West.

Gold can be spun out of tailings – but tungsten shatters. We have some tech to address that though, so we’ll see if it works. Either way, I have to reclaim the site. If our methods fail, I reclaim the site. If they work, I reclaim the site and make some tungsten. Sandvik’s $3m upfront payment for the offtake rights limits our exposure further. And if the technology does its job, we’ll do the same with 130 years of tailings at Panasqueira and then look at other abandoned sites too – effectively reinvigorating mining in Europe by not mining.

Nobody remembers the ramp-up

Sangdong’s processing plant is now commercially operational. No more permits, no more studies, just the old-fashioned grind of mining tungsten, which is what we’ve done for generations. We’ve built the stadium – now let the Premier League champions play. Still a few seats left.

We’re running 12 hours a day, seven days a week, and will step up to 14 and then 16 hours. We see if anything breaks, and we fix it. Last week it was a gearbox leaking oil on the SAG mill, which meant a new gasket. For some reason, old equipment seems more reliable than new. They say you shouldn’t fly on a brand-new aircraft for its first two years, because anything that can go wrong will. After that, it’s bulletproof.

People ask how long the ramp-up will take. If you want a guide, look at a modern copper mine – we run the same technology, a classic automated flotation cell circuit, and it reaches full rate far faster than an old gravity plant. Not that it matters much. Once a mine is producing and earning, nobody remembers how long it took to get there.

What I’m reading

Does optimization make life more boring?

“Bohemian Rhapsody” runs to almost six minutes and ignores the usual structure of a hit single. A team of psychologists argues it would struggle to top the charts today. Their paper calls this hyperselection: when competition is intense and we get good at spotting what succeeds, everything converges on the same few traits. Cities fill with identical chain stores. Academics chase the papers most likely to get published. AI, they warn, will speed it all up.

Football, my favorite sport (soccer to our US subscribers), gets a mention. The authors cite Arsenal, who won last season’s title with a record haul of goals from corners. Any fan would take a title however it came. The report authors’ suggested fix is to protect variety deliberately – fund risky research, keep the odd local shop open even when it loses money. Fine idea, I’m all for making life interesting, although I’d like to know who’s paying.

Britain gets a boost

A quarter of a century ago, UK pension funds held more than half their assets in British shares. By 2024 the figure had fallen to 4.4 percent, one of the lowest allocations to domestic equities of any developed pension system. Foreign buyers have been less shy. Overseas companies spent £25.4bn acquiring UK businesses between April and June, up from £15.7bn in the first three months of the year. According to a Deutsche Bank survey, optimism has risen in the Square Mile.​

I grew up in Britain and I want London to succeed. Years of listing reforms have tried to bring companies back to the market. But if the country’s own pension funds won’t own British companies, it’s hard to complain when someone else does.

What a failed company leaves behind

When a biotech company goes bust, its regulatory filings and safety data are usually treated as trade secrets. The OpenAI Foundation wants to put them to use. It is paying $500,000 for a project, run by the clinical-trial volunteer group 1Day Sooner, to bid for those records in bankruptcy proceedings so they can be used for medical AI. Even failed projects can hold information that someone else needs to train, test or de-risk a model. The group estimates each dataset could be bought for a few tens of thousands of dollars. The grant is one of several under a new program, Public Data for Health.

That price is what caught my eye. Years of back-and-forth with regulators, and detailed medical measurements, going that cheap. In a bankruptcy sale, it may be the best bargain on the list.

Opinion

AI needs better mining knowledge

​PwC’s annual review of the industry found that mining had the lowest score of any sector on its AI fitness index. I’m not surprised. AI needs good inputs of knowledge and data before it can work anything out for itself, and in the West we’ve closed many more mines than we’ve opened over the last 30 years. There’s only a limited amount of knowledge left to feed it.

We use AI at Sangdong – predictive software already anticipates mechanical problems before they happen. Getting it to anticipate processing problems is slower, because that takes people who understand the process to teach it.

Those people are getting harder to find. The same report says the workforce is aging and that 39 percent of mining employers expect an inability to attract talent to hold them back. As an industry, we’re short of the human capital needed to teach the machine.

AI is good at making robots that run faster than us and win fights. Processing the materials those machines are built from is proving harder. Feeding an AI the phrase “Aussie junior miner legend” has not, so far, helped with anything. Mining may end up the least automated industry in the world, which would also make it the safest place to be standing.

And if Sarah Connor is reading this, send me an email. The job is ready sooner than I expected. The pay is good. The working conditions are not.

In the media

Bloomberg ran two pieces in the same week: the Rwanda partnership framed as a move to build Western-aligned tungsten supply, and the Sandvik tailings deal as a novel route to non-Chinese material through recycling mine waste.

​ZeroHedge covered Sangdong’s final operational certification and connected it to the Rwanda and Los Santos announcements, framing all three as a single supply strategy.

​Mining.com reported on the Sangdong approval in the context of the broader push to reduce reliance on Chinese tungsten.

Drop me a line

Some of my so-called competitors like to tell people there’s nothing inside Sangdong’s buildings. So I’ve taken them at their word and put in a mini golf course. You try putting a ball through a grinding mill. It takes real skill. If you’re ever in South Korea, get in touch and I’ll book you a tee time.

See you in two weeks.