The Elements of Innovation Discovered
The Elements of Innovation Discovered
Critical Minerals Alliances - August 7, 2025
An M1 Abrams main battle tank fires its 120mm cannon during a live-fire training exercise. Both its armor-piercing rounds and composite armor incorporate tungsten alloys, showcasing the metal's critical role in modern battlefield dominance.
Heavy, dense, and highly durable, tungsten is valued for its industrial strength and high melting point, making it a critical material in aerospace, defense, and energy applications.
Tungsten carbide core bits like these have long served as essential tools in mineral exploration, valued for their hardness, heat resistance, and ability to cut through some of the toughest geological formations on Earth.
Located along the border between Yukon and Northwest Territories, the Mactung project hosts one of the world's richest known tungsten deposits – a resource long considered vital for both defense and industrial applications.
Long recognized as a critical input for defense systems and industrial tooling, tungsten is serving as a practical example of how the United States has begun to turn strategy into action – applying tariffs, procurement restrictions, and allied coordination to address its complete dependence on foreign supply.
Shaped by sweeping executive directives and targeted trade measures, the U.S.'s approach to mineral security in 2025 reflects a deliberate shift from policy design to deployment.
As supply chain risks tied to adversarial control become more immediate, federal efforts have moved toward securing more dependable sources of critical materials – relying less on multilateral consensus and more on strategic partnerships and domestic reindustrialization.
This shift was catalyzed by successive export restrictions imposed by China in the last few years, which exposed the real-world consequences of concentrated mineral supply and forced a reassessment of long-standing dependencies that had been tolerated for decades.
What has followed is a cascading series of measures aimed at reshaping the tungsten supply chain from the ground up. With no domestic mine production since 2015, and China supplying more than 80% of global tungsten output, U.S. agencies have moved beyond warnings into procurement bans, direct project investments, and active coordination with allies to secure alternative sources.
This urgency is shaped largely by tungsten's central role in defense readiness and industrial durability. Essential to armor-piercing munitions, high-temperature aerospace systems, and wear-resistant tooling, tungsten has become one of the highest-priority materials under accelerated review.
With procurement bans on Chinese and Russian supply set to take effect in 2027, agencies are under increasing pressure to identify, develop, and qualify reliable alternatives.
In response, federal and allied initiatives have begun targeting specific upstream projects capable of anchoring a secure tungsten supply chain. These include strategic funding for Fireweed Metals' Mactung project in Canada's Yukon; drilling, resource expansion, and prefeasibility work at Guardian Metal Resources' Pilot Mountain project in Nevada; and exclusive defense-oriented offtake agreements secured by Almonty Industries.
Heavy, dense, and highly durable, tungsten is valued for its industrial strength and high melting point, making it a critical material in aerospace, defense, and energy applications.
In a market often defined by quantity, tungsten stands out as one of the clearest examples of how a small-volume resource can hold immense strategic weight.
Although the global tungsten market remains modest, its relevance to national defense, high-performance manufacturing, and energy innovation keeps it among the most critical sources.
According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the U.S. imported an estimated 4,000 metric tons of tungsten in 2024.
These imported tungsten products are essential inputs for cemented tungsten carbide, a compound nearly twice as strong as steel, which accounts for the majority of domestic consumption. This superhard material is used in cutting tools, drill bits, and other high-strength products, meeting a substantial portion of the nation's annual demand in the absence of any primary mine production.
However, with no commercial domestic mining operations in a decade, the U.S. remains fully dependent on foreign supply – an increasingly unstable position given the concentration of global production in a single country.
In 2024, China produced more than 80% of the 81,000 metric tons of tungsten mined globally and maintained control over the vast majority of global refining capacity.
Roughly 85-90% of the world's downstream tungsten products are refined in Chinese facilities, giving Beijing command over not just raw supply but virtually every stage of industrial-grade processing.
That level of dominance became a point of exposure in early 2025 when Beijing formally added tungsten to its list of state-controlled exports – part of a growing list of restrictions that now include 16 minerals and metals – tightening overseas shipments and disrupting an already fragile market.
The impact was swift, tungsten prices headed higher and industrial consumers turned to the limited supplies of scrap to backfill supply gaps.
Guardian Metal Resources PLC, a Nevada-based mineral exploration company advancing the Pilot Mountain tungsten-copper-silver-zinc project, has been closely tracking the tightening supply dynamics.
"Since the Chinese export ban was announced there has been an over-reliance on scrap supplies, but now those are running thin, and there's growing panic over the inability to secure new primary tungsten material," said Guardian CEO Oliver Friesen.
In sectors where tungsten's properties are irreplaceable, the pressure is most acute – particularly in cemented tungsten carbide, which accounted for about 60% of U.S. consumption in 2024 and remains essential to wear-resistant tooling, mining and construction equipment, and advanced munitions.
The metal's ability to retain strength at extreme temperatures further extends its role into rocket propulsion, defense-grade electronics, and experimental fusion reactors.
That pressure is only set to intensify, as a federal mandate by the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) to eliminate the sourcing of tungsten from China or Russia goes into effect in 2027 – leaving only two years to procure alternate supplies.
With Russia, the world's third-largest producer, soon to be ruled out as well, the timeline for developing secure alternatives now comes with a hard due date – and a solution must be ready before it arrives.
Located along the border between Yukon and Northwest Territories, the Mactung project hosts one of the world's richest known tungsten deposits – a resource long considered vital for both defense and industrial applications.
While strategic urgency mounts, action is already underway to develop alternatives to foreign supply.
In late 2024, DOD and the Canadian government jointly committed up to $27.3 million (C$35.4 million) to support Fireweed Metals' advancement of the Mactung tungsten project in eastern Yukon, including supporting infrastructure.
The investment includes $15.8 million (C$22.5 million) in Defense Production Act Title III funding from the Pentagon and $9.9 million (C$12.9 million) from Canada's Critical Minerals Infrastructure Fund.
This funding supports the completion of technical studies for developing a mine at Mactung, while laying groundwork for road and power upgrades throughout the broader Macmillan Pass district – a region also rich in zinc, lead, silver, gallium, and germanium.
"The United States is overly reliant on overseas sources of tungsten, and a secure North American supply for this commodity will mitigate one of our most critical material risks," said Laura Taylor-Kale, former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Industrial Base Policy.
She emphasized that tungsten is used in a "diverse set of DOD systems" and remains essential to national security.
Lying along the Yukon-Northwest Territories border, Mactung hosts an estimated 41.5 million metric tons of indicated resource averaging 0.73% (30.2 million metric tons) tungsten; plus 12,25 million metric tons of inferred resource averaging 0.59% (7.2 million metric tons) tungsten.
Based on these grades and volumes, Mactung ranks as the largest known high-grade tungsten deposit in the world.
The coordinated support from both governments underscored the strategic value of the Macmillan Pass district, according to Peter Hemstead, a director of Fireweed.
"This joint announcement is a testament to the determination of both governments to unlock this new critical minerals district in Canada," he said.
Beyond Mactung, Fireweed's neighboring Macpass project further enhances the district's relevance, with significant resources in zinc, lead, silver, and critical byproducts like gallium and germanium.
As both U.S. and Canadian policymakers push to fortify domestic critical minerals supply chains, projects like Mactung illustrate how binational collaboration can shift theoretical resilience strategies into concrete action.
With technical and infrastructure studies already funded, Fireweed's timeline toward a final investment decision now holds immediate consequence. Should it proceed, Mactung would become the first new North American tungsten mine in more than two decades – marking a concrete shift from strategic aspiration to operational readiness.
Tungsten carbide core bits like these have long served as essential tools in mineral exploration, valued for their hardness, heat resistance, and ability to cut through some of the toughest geological formations on Earth.
While development of Mactung advances as a potential anchor to North America's future tungsten supply, nearer-term efforts are emerging in both domestic exploration and allied offtake agreements – each critical to stabilizing supply ahead of the 2027 procurement deadline.
In Nevada, Guardian is positioning its Pilot Mountain project as the most advanced U.S.-based tungsten development in decades. Though polymetallic in composition – containing copper, silver, and zinc – the project's core value lies in its tungsten-bearing skarn systems.
Focused primarily on the Desert Scheelite and Garnet zones, recent drilling has returned promising mineralization, prompting a shift toward resource expansion and engineering work to support a prefeasibility study expected later this year.
What makes Pilot Mountain noteworthy is not just the metal – it is the timing. With tungsten prices spiking and China's export restrictions tightening, a viable U.S. supply source offers a strategic counterbalance.
The project also benefits from Nevada's established permitting framework, access to power and road infrastructure, and proximity to domestic end-use markets – all elements that lower barriers to production.
Yet, even as Pilot Mountain inches closer to a construction decision, domestic output remains years away. In the interim, Almonty Industries Inc. is stepping into the breach.
Headquartered in Canada, Almonty operates tungsten mines in Spain, Portugal, and South Korea, and in 2025 signed an exclusive offtake agreement to supply tungsten oxide for U.S. defense applications.
CEO Lewis Black has stated that the company "can easily cover all of the defense sector's needs," its total output remains insufficient to support combined civilian and military demand across the U.S., Europe, and South Korea.
Still, for the Pentagon and its contractors, Almonty provides an immediate, traceable alternative that meets the criteria laid out in the upcoming procurement ban.
Material produced in allied jurisdictions with clear chain-of-custody protocols helps ensure compliance with federal acquisition rules – and offers insurance against sudden geopolitical disruption.
Together, Guardian and Almonty represent two pillars of a reconfigured tungsten strategy: one focused on establishing sovereign production capacity in the U.S., and the other securing dependable allied sources during the transition.
While neither alone can fully resolve America's tungsten supply vulnerability, in tandem they provide both runway and roadmap – buying time where needed and building capacity where possible.
As these efforts converge, tungsten stands apart as more than a critical material – but as a sort of proving ground. Fireweed, Guardian, and Almonty each mark a distinct phase in what has become a live demonstration of how federal policy, allied cooperation, and market timing can be brought into alignment. If the aim was to shift from vulnerability to viable supply, this is what the first steps look like.
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