The West Is Building a Parallel Tungsten Chain — Piece by Piece

While one Chinese tungsten producer is fighting its own joint-venture partner over a supply cutoff, the United States, the United Kingdom, and a handful of Western companies have spent the past ten days assembling a parallel tungsten supply chain outside China — piece by piece, through funding, offtake deals, and export controls that all point the same direction. None of these moves is large on its own. Together, they’re a coordinated build-out with a hard deadline attached.

Four Moves, Ten Days

Data and sources: based on publicly available data on the internet, compiled for general information only.

The Deadline Behind All of It: January 1, 2027

US defense procurement rules already restrict tungsten metal powder and tungsten heavy alloy melted or produced in China, Russia, North Korea, or Iran. From January 1, 2027, that restriction expands upstream — it will reach where the ore or feedstock was mined, including recycled scrap, and that origin can no longer be reset by reprocessing the material somewhere else. A Chinese-origin ore refined through a third-country smelter, which currently qualifies, stops qualifying.

That single date is why the last two months have moved so fast. Every deal above — the funding, the offtakes, the scrap lockdown — is a Western supply chain racing to be compliant, documented, and producing before that line is drawn.

Reading Each Piece

The scrap export lockdown (Aug 27, 2026)

This is the least visible move and arguably the most telling. The US didn’t just restrict imports from adversary countries — it restricted its own exports of tungsten scrap and battery black mass, for one year, requiring domestic sellers to direct their material to domestic buyers first. That’s a government treating its own scrap stream as a strategic reserve, not a tradeable commodity. It also tightens global scrap supply outside China at exactly the moment Western smelters need more feedstock, not less.

Hemerdon and the Elmet offtake

Tungsten West’s Hemerdon mine in Devon restarted production on September 15 after years of care and maintenance. Eight days later, it signed an eight-year supply and offtake agreement with Elmet, a US-based tungsten producer already backed by a $450M US government investment and a Defense Logistics Agency contract worth up to $2bn. The offtake locks in a buyer and a price structure for Hemerdon’s output well before the January 2027 deadline arrives — exactly the kind of documented, non-Chinese-origin supply chain the new rule rewards.

Redmoor and the US funding

Strategic Minerals’ Redmoor project in Cornwall — believed to be Europe’s highest-grade undeveloped tungsten resource — received a $9.25M non-dilutive investment from the US Department of War, structured as a cost-shared prototype agreement rather than equity. The money accelerates Redmoor past its earlier prefeasibility target straight into a full definitive feasibility study, aiming for a final investment decision within roughly 32 months. It’s a funding shape built for speed, not ownership.

Almonty and Los Santos

Almonty’s Los Santos mine in Spain has sat in care and maintenance since 2020. Its new deal with Wolfram Bergbau und Hütten (WBH), a Sandvik subsidiary and one of the only integrated tungsten smelters outside Asia and Russia, brings a take-or-pay commitment with index-linked, floor-protected pricing, plus shared capital to reactivate the plant. The restart is built around retreating tailings — material already mined once — rather than new primary extraction, echoing the same tailings-recovery model at the center of the Xiamen Tungsten – CMOC dispute in China, just running in the opposite direction: recovery being enabled in the West at the same moment it’s being contested in China.

What This Means for Indian Buyers and Sellers

None of this changes India’s position directly — India isn’t a named party to DFARS, and Indian scrap isn’t restricted by the August 2026 US export rule. But it changes the shape of global demand. As Western smelters lock in non-Chinese, documented supply chains ahead of January 2027, every tonne of tungsten scrap with a clean, traceable origin becomes more valuable to that specific buyer pool, regardless of where it was collected. Indian carbide scrap has always been priced off the China benchmark by default. The real question worth tracking through Q4 is whether any of that Western demand starts reaching Indian sellers directly, at a price closer to what Western recyclers actually pay — or whether it stays inside deals like the ones above, closed before Indian material is ever offered a seat at the table.

For current Indian scrap levels, see India Market Rates. For the China-side story running in parallel this week, see Xiamen Tungsten vs CMOC: A CNY 116 Million Fight Over What ‘Compliance’ Means.

Does the January 2027 US rule affect Indian tungsten scrap exporters?

Not directly — the rule governs US defense contractors and what they can deliver, not India’s export market. But it reshapes where Western demand goes, which is worth watching even for sellers who never touch the US defense supply chain directly.

Is this the same scrap export rule as the January 2027 defense sourcing rule?

No — they’re two separate US actions. The August 27, 2026 rule restricts US persons from exporting tungsten scrap out of the country. The January 1, 2027 rule restricts what origin of tungsten US defense contractors can use, wherever in the world they buy it. Together they tighten both ends of the same chain.

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Sources: Mining Weekly, Sep 28, 2026, Industrial Info Resources, Sep 28, 2026, Mining Digital, Sep 24, 2026, and the US eCFR text of DFARS 252.225-7052.