I really would like to see answers to the four questions at the end. Though I would hazard a guess that the answers to the first three can be summed up as "it's easier and cheaper to let China do the dirty work." The last question I cant answer as I don't understand boom-bust mining cycles.
Edit to add:
> After all, it turns out tungsten actually isn't hard to find! It's all over the United States. In fact, it's pretty much all over the world.
The Wikipedia Tungsten article states the largest reserves are in China followed by Canada, Russia, Vietnam and Bolivia. This contradicts the articles claim. Just because it's all over does not mean it is easy to dig up and refine. Some clarification is needed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tungsten#Production
> The Wikipedia Tungsten article states the largest reserves are in China followed by Canada, Russia, Vietnam and Bolivia. This contradicts the articles claim.
No, it does not, it's just a confusion of the term reserves. That's not on you, though, because everyone constantly gets it wrong.
Reserves are not estimates of the amount of a mineral underground. To be counted as proven reserve, you need to show that the mineral is economically extractable at market prices. Specifically, by starting to extract them. They are "working inventory" of mines that have been developed, they are not our understanding of how the minerals are distributed. They are also a function of commodity prices, not something that remains constant unless you dig them.
China has so much of the worldwide production and reserves because mining is an extremely capital-intensive industry, that is also sensitive to labor costs and environmental legislation. For a long time, China had the trifecta of lax legislation, cheap labor, and sufficient political stability to attract investment. US or Europe can't compete because mining there is more expensive, the third world can't compete because people are wary of investing billions into projects that might go to zero for political stability reasons.
Should the market prices of key minerals rise to the point where it makes sense to mine them outside of China, reserves will be developed and production will shift. This will probably require political will to either tariff Chinese production or subsidize production outside China, because so far China has wielded mineral exports as a weapon only for brief periods, being careful to release exports to crater prices often enough to kill competing projects.
> To be counted as proven reserve, you need to show that the mineral is economically extractable at market prices. Specifically, by starting to extract them.
You don't need to be actually mining the stuff for it to be considered a reserve, at least in the Canadian (CIM) definitions. You do need at least a pre-feasibility study, and details on market prices & contracts.
The general point is right though, "mineral resources" means there's metal in the ground, "mineral reserves" means there's metal in the ground that can be economically mined, with consideration of the mining methods, infrastructure, legal title, environmental impact, metallurgy, market contracts, etc.
The US has lots of tungsten and other minerals. The problem is mining them here--people really don't want to see huge holes in the ground, industrial run off, and ecological collapse.
If the fundamentals of international resource extraction changes (which because of the increase in wages and living standards and expectations in China is happening) then we might see wide spread and rapid mining happening in the US. My questions in that scenario are 1) who will work these mines? The US is running at very high employment right now, and mining is very hard work 2) where would our ore refinement equipment and skills come from? China has 50 years of ore refinement development behind them. They have infrastructure to BUILD the infrastructure for ore extraction and refinement. My understanding is that they're uninterested in selling that currently 3) then all the other local issues like where will they be able to sell locals on building giant mines, dealing with the heavy traffic, potential environmental concerns, etc.
> China has 50 years of ore refinement development behind them.
No it doesn't (at best its about 35 years) and it often (mostly) uses equipment made in the west. In fact, if you want to extract something from the earth, its very likely you need a US firm to help you do it (depends on how hard the material is to extract).
> and ecological collapse
You can do mining responsibly, it just costs more. US firms about 20 years ago tried to get the US government to subsidize their industries to compensate for the extra costs. The politicians said no and voiced environmental concerns. So those materials started coming from China and the 3rd world where they were extracted using even dirtier methods than the US was using at the time. It turns out that pollution doesn't obey international borders though.
Finally, most of the material China exports is raw and its refined somewhere else. The only things China refines for themselves are either a) is easy and they need them domestically or b) the refining process is very dirty. Additionally, mining almost always takes place far from population centers. The basic reason for this is that all the material near population centers was extracted far in the past. Your entire take has little to no resemblance with reality.
This bizarro take. PRC mining equipment has been decoupled from US for years, they don't require hardware from western producers anymore, from terrestrial to deep sea. The last dependency was mostly unconventional shale since US good at shale but that's mostly consultative, and PRC quickly found out US horizontal drilling doesn't translate well for their deeper reserves, so they had to localize tools there as well. The talent gap is also stupendously in favor of PRC, they produce like 15x more mining graduates per year, their university of mining tech enrolls more than all US mining programs combined. They lead in midstream refining, not just REE bottleneck, all that AU/BR ore gets shipped to PRC for refining for a reason.
>almost always takes place far from population centers
No in PRC case, they literally build population centers to service mining, part of third front strategy in 60s to move mining into rugged interior to protect against US/USSR. If you want to mine/process at PRC scale, you need to plop a few million people in large urban complexes i.e. boutou has 3 million people, they're not 5000 people mining towns.
> > China has 50 years of ore refinement development behind them.
It's amazing how many people think China bootstrapped its industry from first principals when all it did was lure western companies to move their production over and "learned" by copying.
> all it did was lure western companies to move their production over and "learned" by copying
Yeah, and they fell for it. Handed over all their intellectual "property" to the chinese on a silver platter. Moved all their production to China, thereby deindustrializing their own countries and impoverishing their fellow citizens to the point of nearly wiping out the middle class.
I wonder if it's even possible for the west to save itself at this point.
West had nothing to teach/copy in many cases - there's a reason PRC produced magnitude more mining engineers for decades. Leaching MREE/HREE from ionic clays is a geologic tech stack that PRC fully built out indigenously from 60s. Only reason M/HREE can be refined at _scale_ and _economically_ today was PRC innovating on geology west never bothered in (west ree stack concentrated on hard rock extraction), and now west has to try to replicate via first principles.
There's a reason western M/HREE (i.e. the strategic good stuff) strategy hedges on similar iconic clays finds like PRC, because that's the only working industrial chain that extracts M/HREEs at scale. It's why AU/Lynas focus on ionic clays and not US hardrock... which btw doesn't even pretend it will do anything meaningful for mineral security other than light REE.
US+co is trying to replicate PRC M/HREE industry, without the techstack that took PRC decades to build out, because US+co never developed these geologies in the first place. The relevant upstream extraction/mmidstream refining tech for kind of deposits was never pursued in the west.
Now west can move fast due to second mover advantage, but it's going to be slow going like PRC EUV. Until then it's going to require all sorts of parallel efforts like recycling, or materials engineering to reduce M/HREEs to mitigate gap.
>"when all it did was lure western companies to move their production over and "learned" by copying"
Would you fucking stop crying already. What did you expect them to do? Commit to being a slave and leave all the value to western corps? And who asked western companies to outsource everything? It seems that for an extra buck they would sell everything. So you basically reap what you sow
Yes, but it should be emphasized how dependent "Reserves" are on both exploration work, and current assumptions about future mining/refining/market conditions.
China's secret to having most of the world's Reserves may be that they bored a lot more test holes (to actually know "the rock in >THIS< spot is X% tungsten") than anyone else, then made some more-optimistic assumptions.
Ehhh, it could go both ways (as far as over-optimism)
On one hand, historically there's a lot of sparsely populated land; that makes it easier to both do exploration and partition off the land.
Also there is China's more central economy planning; i.e. if it's truly worth it they are more willing to do something about relocating people while 'selling it better' (which is again helped by the sparse populations where they are looking.)
That is, unless you are saying they fudged the sampling....
However, that's still other a weird reversal of the geopolitical playbook; that is, one could argue that the -smartest- thing the US/EU can do, is to import whatever natural materials they can, until the 'clock' runs out, then the native materials can be extracted (even at the 'ecologically correct' cost.)
>I really would like to see answers to the four questions at the end
The bottom line is that China has the biggest most economical tungsten reserves, they have been able to flood the market with predatory pricing for the last 40 years and they almost completely control the ore processing bottleneck as well.
For this to change the US govt would have to enter major agreements w US mines, offering relaxed permitting and a guaranteed price
> The Wikipedia Tungsten article states the largest reserves are in China followed by Canada, Russia, Vietnam and Bolivia. This contradicts the articles claim. Just because it's all over does not mean it is easy to dig up and refine.
It doesn't contradict the claim.
Just because it's all over does not mean it is easy to dig up and refine, but just because it's not the largest reserve doesn't mean it's not easy to dig up and refine.
It's often hard to beat bulk mining. When you're already mining a quarter billion tons of iron and 5B tons of coal, you get a decent amount of all other trace(rare-earth) metals as part of that stream.
It's far easier to just collect tungsten as it rolls down your conveyor belt.
This doesn't even seem that far fetched at this point. The economic influence of the USA is being eroded at every turn. Their military capabilities could very well turn out to be their last hope one day. South America stands virtually no chance against even a decadent USA. It's actually embarrassing how weak South America is.
This website has no author attribution and this is the only article on it. I would be very suspicious of its claims (not that I disagree with them, just that unattributed works on brand new websites are not ALWAYS the most trustworthy).
The United States has exported the dirtiest businesses internationally for quite a few years (raw mineral extraction is a dirty, nasty business, with slim margins). Now that China has become more adversarial and also more established (you mean people want to actually get PAID to slave away in a mine, or even worse, refuse to even work in a dangerous and dirty pit mine?!) the US is facing some hard decisions. We need many of these materials, and we have them, but we haven't had the will to mine them. Lots of people want to open US government lands to these resource extraction outfits, but there's right worry about the potential for ecological destruction.
The formatting of the website on iOS safari moves the left margin off screen so I could not read all of your essay.
But you may enjoy reading Material World by Conroy based on what I could read, he does not cover Tungsten.
I found reading mode worked perfectly. It usually does for me, and for a while I actually set it to enable by default for all websites with manual exceptions. The cases where it doesn’t work well are usually very long articles which load in parts, which I try not to read on my phone anyway (and of course websites that aren’t primarily one large block of text).
My guess is that while it is running it will dump spare neutrons into the tungsten, converting the tungsten into exotic materials that are not fit for task for various reasons.
If you whack enough neutrons into it, you'll eventually get Rhenium and Osmium. Both are actually pretty useful and while not actually dangerous you might not want to get any on you, especially if it's still hot from the reactor.
Osmium in powder form will oxidise to osmium tetroxide, and you want to avoid that because it stains just about any kind of plant or animal tissue including the surface of your eyes, and is spectacularly poisonous.
Nice work but no offense, but it comes off as you describe. I think you are overall right about needing to switch W sources. You are wrong that it will be used for fusion reactors. That won't happen in the lifetime of anyone alive today. It will get used for armor for weapons and possibly some fission reactors. We are nowhere near an actual breakeven fusion reactor. We are only close to theoretical break-evens which are themselves more than an order of magnitude from actual working powerplants. Ask yourself this, how do you efficiently harness 1,000,000C heat? Even at 900C we can only get about 55% and we have materials which can withstand that temperature for decades. We have nothing physical that can take anywhere near 1,000,000C.
The traditional answer to that question is vacuum and magnetic confinement (usual toroidal). Whether that will turn out to be the practical answer is yet to be seen.
Literally 100% of that heat travels from the 1000000C stuff to the environment throught that vacuum. Vacuum doesn't just remove energy.
If you use a steam engines it doesn't matter if your source of heat is 900C or 1000000C, all heat will be captured, and 40-60% will be turned into electricity.
> We are nowhere near an actual breakeven fusion reactor.
This isn't true.
I understand why you said it. Always 5 years away from being 5 years away. Years and years and years of nothing and hopecasting. Post-COVID market and startup antics. Data center power antics. Well-educated people pointing out BS and that even the best shots we had were example systems that were designed to be briefly net-positive in the 2030s.
But it's just not true.
Commonwealth Fusion Systems. Book it. 2027. They've hit every milestone, on time, since I started tracking in...2018?
> Now that China has become more adversarial and also more established (you mean people want to actually get PAID to slave away in a mine, or even worse, refuse to even work in a dangerous and dirty pit mine?!) the US is facing some hard decisions.
There is an implication here that the United States is immune or afraid of doing “hard” or “dirty” work and so we outsourced refining and mining to China.
This doesn’t seem to be correct.
China has a national strategy to dominate refining of rare earth minerals and critical components and our entire society wants cheap products and China was the cheapest place for this stuff and environmental rules are more lax, and with an authoritarian regime supporting and fast tracking the business for strategic reasons, well there you have it.
Part of the strategy involves decoupling China from a weak link in the energy supply chain infrastructure: oil and refining rare earths, manufacturing products that use them, and more is how they are pursuing some level of energy independence from the USA which controls oil flows globally, for the most part.
With respect to avoidance of “dirty” jobs. The EU is far, far worse in this respect than the United States is or was.
People in the US will do dirty jobs if thats what there are, but like people everywhere (in aggregate), would rather not.
We outsourced refining and mining to China because 1) it was cheap 2) it meant poisoning the ground and air and ripping up vast tracts of land somewhere else.
China's rare earth metals stratagem I believe grew out of this--it didn't happen immediately, but rather some bright bulb saw the growing reliance on access to the minerals and encouraged internal growth and acquisition competing resources. Absolutely, very clever.
But let's be very clear here. the US might have outsourced those jobs, which I think is an oversimplification, but the EU also outsourced those jobs and the Chinese welcomed and encouraged that outsourcing. Americans, Europeans, and Chinese workers were all onboard at a national level for this arrangement.
I want to be very clear here to avoid any misunderstanding of an application of moral judgement against the United States for "outsourcing dirty jobs".
> China's rare earth metals stratagem I believe grew out of this--it didn't happen immediately, but rather some bright bulb saw the growing reliance on access to the minerals and encouraged internal growth and acquisition competing resources. Absolutely, very clever.
This could be true. The truth is likely somewhere in the middle, in that China never intended to join a US and European led world order because doing so would compromise the power of the authoritarian CCP (free speech, free markets are incompatible with communism) and this became the eventual strategy to work toward energy independence. Of course "independence" isn't a real thing here, just less reliance. You can't run fighter jets or tanks on batteries or solar panels.
> With respect to avoidance of “dirty” jobs. The EU is far, far worse in this respect than the United States is or was.
Well yeah. Because we care about the environment and people like to enjoy their retirement instead of sitting in a wheelchair with COPD due to inhaling a lifetime of toxic dust.
China is getting better at it too, but only a few years ago I remember a story of all the toxic lakes where all the byproducts of neodymium mining were dumped.
You don’t care about the environment. You care about the environment in your backyard. Otherwise you would not import rare earths and minerals from China (which Europe does).
Pretty sure consumers would still buy all the nice downstream products even if they damaged their own backyards.
Evidence: Long history of us doing exactly that.
Valuing convenience, modern products etc does not mean one "doesn't care" about the negative externalities, just like going out to eat at a nice restaurant doesn't mean someone "doesn't care" about saving money.
Individual EUers might care about the environment. It’s pretty hard to personally avoid any dirty imported stuff as you just don’t know where it all ends up. Though I guess overall voting patterns might back up your argument
... you know when you put it that way, it would not surprise me if lobbyists dovetailed the 'cant do stuff in US/EU because of env regs' with the various types of Union busting the US likes to do and for some in the EU it would be the perfect scapegoat for...
Sorry but while that was once true, the current administration has reversed that pretty dramatically. You personally might care about the environment, but when you use “we” in the context of US/China it no longer holds true.
No I mean "we" as in the EU, definitely not the US. The US is sliding back fast, being the only country to pull out of the paris accord (which itself was only the bare minimum needed to halt climate change)
West fine with migrant labours doing hard and dirty work hidden from prying eyes (agriculture fields, meat packing plants). Mining just as strategic, but hard to hide big holes in the earth from constituents. I'm sure push comes to shove, US can import a bunch of central Americans to do hard and dirty work in mining.
Yep and the workers from those countries prefer that arrangement since it pays better. The alternative is they don’t do the work, we just pay higher prices, and then they don’t get paid and stay home.
> I'm sure push comes to shove, US can import a bunch of central Americans to do hard and dirty work in mining.
Yea let’s ban migrant labor and the entrance of migrants now so we don’t have this moral failure. :)
By the way, the east (as opposed to the west) is fine with migrant labor too. That’s why remittances are a thing. Well, when they’re not being xenophobic or whatever.
TBH papering over xenophobia is easy because it's just foreigners. Problem with mining is extractors are scarring mother earth, that's the unfortunate optics problem for nimby's, not people, but landscape/backyard, even if it's in the middle of nowhere. I suppose that's why fracking gets an easier pass, because the hole is smol.
The worst part is that most of number 3 is self imposed by the ridiculous amount of environmental review and litigation delays surrounding that process. Sure, cost of labor is some of it, but really it's not very much in comparison.
Having seen some former open pit mines I'm not entirely sure the environmental review is "ridiculous." One of them was basically a huge open pit full of acid.
The environmental review WILL help if it is used to adjust the mining techniques so they don't destroy everything nearby to do the work, or even if it jist creates a reclamation / restoration plan (and yes, factor that into the price, it's trivial). Taking too long is a problem.
Then make laws and punish the people who break them. It doesn't do any good to litigate before the project has even started. DUI is a problem and you solve it by arresting drunk drivers, not making them fill out paperwork before they go to the bar.
> The worst part is that most of number 3 is self imposed by the ridiculous amount of environmental review and litigation delays surrounding that process.
Because, surprise, we do not want more Superfund sites. Like, the Silicon Valley is the US' biggest cluster of Superfund sites by far.
At the same time, it is very convenient that there are lots of piss poor countries that have very difficult/dirty to mine resources... be it China, Congo or whatever. These countries didn't have the luxury to think decades into the future, and capitalism doesn't have built-in ethics, and this is how we ended up here.
The EU tried to introduce supply chain laws aiming at cutting back at this kind of exploitation, but the pressure from industry was immense.
Tungsten demand is real and bulk sources are quite scarce, today. It would be helpful if the historical charts went back farther than 2016. Where did the US get Tungsten in the 80s and 90s? South Korea, China, and Russia. The US and Canada had Tungsten mines, but the value wasn't there due to international pricing undercutting the industry. America's dogged federal agenda to break free of all Chinese influence or Capitalism, which will go first? We know the answer.
I think it's the other way around here. I say that as China's policy has primarily focused on self-reliance to the degree that it's overshadowed the west in several sectors with the exception of a few (Tech/AI, Finance, Bio) and given their persistence to close the gap I'd say we aren't too far from being eclipsed entirely.
One just has to look at the economics of it all and come to the conclusion that many have already arrived at...
They've both become more adversarial. China has been using economic blackmail to advance political goals for a long time (e.g. wrt Japan and Taiwan and SEA). They also continue to expand military based in the SCS that don't belong there, hold exercises to simulate blockades outside of China. Etc.
This is plainly false. China bought the refining companies doing the extraction for rare earth in the US, extracted knowledge, then shipped the tooling to China and closed the US factories. Having no environmental regulation probably helped as well cost-wise, but that's not the fault of the USA.
That article doesn't say anything about selling a mine, it says the only mine was already in China. China bought an American magnet manufacturer which had been using Chinese neodymium to make magnets. It doesn't say anything at all about extraction.
Also, nobody forced US companies to sell those assets.
Originally there was the Mountain Pass mine, and China setup their own mines while also building out the refining and processing capacity. Until recently MP Materials was shipping all it's output to Chinese refiners.
The history and asset ownership is also quite convoluted. Try this Wikipedia article:
The article explicitly says that the magnet manufacturer was bought by a shell company owned by chinese interests, which lied when they pledged to develop the activity.
Not that it's very surprising (US companies routinely do this as well, especially in Europe), but in this case it had clearly an ulterior motive.
Caught my eye due to family events. One of my uncles was killed in the Pine Creek mine in California. He was repairing an ore crusher when somebody switched it on. Pre-OSHA and tagout days.
I doubt we'll be pinched by tungsten shortages. The fusion application isn't going to come on for at least two decades. Smaller apps will be met by known reserves.
That said, it is a cool material. Looking for aluminum bars at Alan Steel (CA) years back, I was stunned when I tried (and failed) to pick up a 12" long by 6"diameter piece of what turned out to be tungsten misfiled in the aluminum section. Density, thy name is tungsten.
As a side note, Tungsten is a Swedish word ("heavy stone"). It was first "discovered" by a Swede, and they called it Tungsten. Its atomic symbol is W, for wolfram, the German word for it, which even the Swede's use. I find it mildly amusing. (it is to do with tungsten rich ores and the name of the ores that had been known about for a while)
Counterpoint: Tungsten is about $1100/ton, so if demand averages 10k tons/year the annual US spend is about $10-12 million. That's peanuts in economic terms. If relations with China deteriorate the US could just set up a front company in some third country, buy tungsten, and re-export it.
FYI, Tungsten prices are quoted in metric ton units (MTUs) [1], which surprisingly aren't metric tons. They're actually 1% of a metric ton -- or 10kg. [2] So the price of Tungsten is actually 100x that.
There are at least three US tungsten mining startups.[1][2][3] It looks like the product is the stock, not the mineral. They're all in the money-acquisition stage. Two have animated American flags on their sites. The third is Canadian-owned.
It's worse than the wannabe rare earth mining companies.
My fireplace has 1" cubes of tungsten, aluminum, and magnesium, plus a cube of selenite and quartzy-style synthetic prism, all arranged on little stands really close to the floor, so reachable by children. Neighbor 2.5 year old last year was very put out when he couldn't lift the W cube. It is really a lot of fun to hold. Dropping it on one's foot is ill-advised, particularly if you are 2.5 years old.
tl;dr there's currently no overarching plan to help the US catch up to China, and we're going to let "the market" fix that problem. Being that "the market" in the US is about quarterly earnings reports and strategic bonuses for the C-suite, I'm keeping my expectations in check.
PRC tungsten reserves are also depleting, mines are processing more rocks for same output and sooner or later PRC going to quota tungsten exports even more for domestic stockpile and prevent over extraction.
Also related tangent, remember that anecdote about PRC finally making ball point pen tips? That was basically central gov slapping PRC metallurgists to speedrun tungsten carbide precision manufacturing for advanced munitions (penetrators), not ball point pen tips which was rounding error consideration.
Very small, high precision spheres are hard to make. Ball bearings also fall into this category. Many modern machines depend on this. I never see it "recreate society manuals," but they should be.
The balls aren’t that hard to make [1], but doing so at scale economically isn’t something you can build with some plug and play off the shelf machinery. It takes years to assemble a functioning factory like that and tune the process before it’s profitable. All the Western companies that make them are decades old with established and largely paid off manufacturing lines but once the Chinese government decided it was a critical industrial product downstream from their five year plans, it was just a matter of time and capital. Few other governments are willing to subsidized specialized manufacturing like that so investors don’t want to risk entering an established market.
The hard part is really quality control when making hundreds of thousand or millions of balls a day, at which point all metrology equipment is basically useless except for random sampling, which means your process has to be pretty much perfect before anyone will even buy from you, but you cant slow down the process because then you’re just losing money.
>Very small, high precision spheres are hard to make
I remember this was on a list of zero-g manufacturing techniques that NASA was investigating at one point. I wonder what became of that? Normally, I'd think the cost would be prohibitive, but you can probably fit a lot of 0.1mm ball bearings in a ton of cargo.
Switzerland + japan and now PRC, i.e. US also can't build ballpoint pen tips (not that US couldn't). The TLDR is it's like a 20m per year market, TISCO china has revenue of 15B, it wasn't worth rounding error effort until politics compelled them to. And even then it wasn't really about metallurgy but submicro tungsten manufacturing to close precision gap for other strategic industries. The meme/rumor is TISCO made one batch of ball point tip metal to prove a point and that chunk is enough to last PRC ballpoint tip industry for decades.
Invested in an Australian tungsten miner late last year. Has an operating profitable mine in Spain and active Government support to restart the large Mt Carbine mine in Queensland.
Antimony is another critical mineral. A number of smallcap Antimony/Tungsten miners are exploring potential deposits in Idaho and Tennessee and Australia, but timelines are long.
That's cool - I'd imagine 'invested in a mining concern' is rare on the spectrum of HNers' resumes. May I ask how did you come to be confident enough to risk capital on something that's not typically within the average tech person's familiarity space? Asking b/c I would like to be able to develop such confidence if I could credibly (even just to myself) do so.
A key aspect is being able to read the geology of the ore body. That is still more of an art than a science. If you are a nerd, it is actually super-interesting. Not too hard to pick up if you have the interest. It isn’t for the casual investor though. In the US there is a regulatory thicket you have to get through to develop it, and it often isn’t cheap, which factors into the value of the minerals.
I built a small catalog of ore deposits primarily by hiking deep into areas of the US mountain west that no one has gone into, albeit not for the purposes of prospecting. There is still quite a bit out there. Mostly gold-copper ores in my case.
My foray into rare earths, critical minerals and some defense stocks was initially as a hedge against Trump starting a trade war with China, the increasing risk of military confrontation and the rearming of Europe. All three concerns have occurred to some degree, but it's a long game and actually took a lot longer to play out than I had expected in some cases.
And I get your lack of confidence, I did miss some quick opportunities that I felt were there but I wasn't confident at the time.
The only way to really gain confidence is do your research; read the presentations of each company, particularly their JORC-compliant estimates, time frames to production, how far along the funding path they are, etc.
Use your preferred LLM for deep dives. Whatever you're question, just ask and you'll be surprised at what you learn. For example asking for a cost/effort comparison of the metallurgic processes required for each type of rare earth host material really helped me understand what they were doing, and how each company differed in their approach.
If you like learning random things on Hacker News, deep diving into any technology or industry will not be an issue.
Now try copper, aluminum and more. I saw a clip from a conference that said for copper, at 3% GDP growth, the global demand in the next 18 years will exceed the last 10,000 years, but 80% of known reserves have already been mined.
It seems to me that development in the future is going to be constrained. Not to be dramatic but are we in the sort of happy pre-pandemic days not knowing the changes heading our way? Or am I being too dramatic?
Good news, that’s a tiny drop in the bucket compared to mining operations. Rocket payloads are measured in the metric tons; copper mining is measured in tens of millions of metric tons per year. It’s not even a rounding error, you’d have to launch hundreds of solid copper rockets a day to even make a dent.
Between stable and contract honoring entities it's also possible to trade for things that not everyone produces, or do large long term investments in things like mines or refineries outside your own territory.
With most resources, it’s usually not that they literally can’t be found, but that the cheap sources are gone. If tungsten costs 20x as much to extract, it doesn’t matter that it technically exists, a lot of users are just not going to be able to afford it.
The article says the US currently imports about 10,000 tons of tungsten per year, and has no active production, so that's also its current usage.
Tungsten costs about $200/kg [0]
So the total US tungsten usage is $2 billion/year.
If the price goes up 20x overnight, and nobody changes their purchasing behaviours, that costs US businesses, consumers and
government $38 billion.
That's a lot of money for most people, but it's being spread over a wide base.
For a comparison, the US uses about 20 million barrels of oil per day [1] or 7 billion per year. So a 20x shock in tungsten would be roughly equivalent to oil prices going up $5/barrel. In fact oil fluctuates by that much most quarters [2], if not most months. People complain a little when it goes up, but it takes more than that to really have a noticeable effect on the economy.
A 2x or 5x price increase - a huge shock in any context - would be problematic for a few companies, but really business as usual for the US as a whole.
Yeah, the US let China do the dirty work because it was cheaper. And it was cheaper because China doesn’t care about dumping waste wherever they’d like and building suicide nets for their employees because of how they’re treated.
America depended on China to not care about the environment or people. China is pretty good at that.
If you think there are actually conservatives and liberals at the billionaire level I have a bridge to sell you. The joke is on you, boss.
Ignoring your ignorance for a moment, the logic you could have realized is, the US did it to save money and line their pockets. Political affiliations have nothing to do with it.
Tungsten is the least of their problem.
When a population cannot afford health care system, and have to walk with their passport so they are not sent to jail, you have a broken country.
Not to mention the financial problems.
> walk with their passport so they are not sent to jail
No, it's broken because we've allowed millions of foreigners to come in and raise said healthcare and housing costs. Checking that people here actually belong here else they're deported is part of the "cost of living" solution, in addition to crime.
> No, it's broken because we've allowed millions of foreigners to come in and raise said healthcare and housing costs.
The idea that deporting every undocumented person will reduce the bloat and profit extraction in our health care system is making me giggle.
And do you really think checking every person is a strategy that scales? Why not just indiscriminately jail the people who hire them and thereby create a strong incentive to come?
Maybe those workers actually belong here more than you'd like to admit, but the powers that be enjoy keeping their status uncertain to use as a piñata they can beat whenever they need political candy.
Between the critical strategic/military need, the by-far largest producer being an unfriendly rival power, and commercial production looking like a very poor fit for the use case - the Old School solution would be for the gov't to own & probably operate the needed mines, refining facilities, and stockpiles.
But between our low-functioning gov't and our lower-functioning Capitalist-Ideological Complex, I'd be surprised if such a solution was even mentioned.
I really would like to see answers to the four questions at the end. Though I would hazard a guess that the answers to the first three can be summed up as "it's easier and cheaper to let China do the dirty work." The last question I cant answer as I don't understand boom-bust mining cycles.
Edit to add:
> After all, it turns out tungsten actually isn't hard to find! It's all over the United States. In fact, it's pretty much all over the world.
The Wikipedia Tungsten article states the largest reserves are in China followed by Canada, Russia, Vietnam and Bolivia. This contradicts the articles claim. Just because it's all over does not mean it is easy to dig up and refine. Some clarification is needed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tungsten#Production
> The Wikipedia Tungsten article states the largest reserves are in China followed by Canada, Russia, Vietnam and Bolivia. This contradicts the articles claim.
No, it does not, it's just a confusion of the term reserves. That's not on you, though, because everyone constantly gets it wrong.
Reserves are not estimates of the amount of a mineral underground. To be counted as proven reserve, you need to show that the mineral is economically extractable at market prices. Specifically, by starting to extract them. They are "working inventory" of mines that have been developed, they are not our understanding of how the minerals are distributed. They are also a function of commodity prices, not something that remains constant unless you dig them.
China has so much of the worldwide production and reserves because mining is an extremely capital-intensive industry, that is also sensitive to labor costs and environmental legislation. For a long time, China had the trifecta of lax legislation, cheap labor, and sufficient political stability to attract investment. US or Europe can't compete because mining there is more expensive, the third world can't compete because people are wary of investing billions into projects that might go to zero for political stability reasons.
Should the market prices of key minerals rise to the point where it makes sense to mine them outside of China, reserves will be developed and production will shift. This will probably require political will to either tariff Chinese production or subsidize production outside China, because so far China has wielded mineral exports as a weapon only for brief periods, being careful to release exports to crater prices often enough to kill competing projects.
> To be counted as proven reserve, you need to show that the mineral is economically extractable at market prices. Specifically, by starting to extract them.
You don't need to be actually mining the stuff for it to be considered a reserve, at least in the Canadian (CIM) definitions. You do need at least a pre-feasibility study, and details on market prices & contracts.
The general point is right though, "mineral resources" means there's metal in the ground, "mineral reserves" means there's metal in the ground that can be economically mined, with consideration of the mining methods, infrastructure, legal title, environmental impact, metallurgy, market contracts, etc.
The US has lots of tungsten and other minerals. The problem is mining them here--people really don't want to see huge holes in the ground, industrial run off, and ecological collapse.
If the fundamentals of international resource extraction changes (which because of the increase in wages and living standards and expectations in China is happening) then we might see wide spread and rapid mining happening in the US. My questions in that scenario are 1) who will work these mines? The US is running at very high employment right now, and mining is very hard work 2) where would our ore refinement equipment and skills come from? China has 50 years of ore refinement development behind them. They have infrastructure to BUILD the infrastructure for ore extraction and refinement. My understanding is that they're uninterested in selling that currently 3) then all the other local issues like where will they be able to sell locals on building giant mines, dealing with the heavy traffic, potential environmental concerns, etc.
This isn't a pretty unhinged take.
> China has 50 years of ore refinement development behind them.
No it doesn't (at best its about 35 years) and it often (mostly) uses equipment made in the west. In fact, if you want to extract something from the earth, its very likely you need a US firm to help you do it (depends on how hard the material is to extract).
> and ecological collapse
You can do mining responsibly, it just costs more. US firms about 20 years ago tried to get the US government to subsidize their industries to compensate for the extra costs. The politicians said no and voiced environmental concerns. So those materials started coming from China and the 3rd world where they were extracted using even dirtier methods than the US was using at the time. It turns out that pollution doesn't obey international borders though.
Finally, most of the material China exports is raw and its refined somewhere else. The only things China refines for themselves are either a) is easy and they need them domestically or b) the refining process is very dirty. Additionally, mining almost always takes place far from population centers. The basic reason for this is that all the material near population centers was extracted far in the past. Your entire take has little to no resemblance with reality.
This bizarro take. PRC mining equipment has been decoupled from US for years, they don't require hardware from western producers anymore, from terrestrial to deep sea. The last dependency was mostly unconventional shale since US good at shale but that's mostly consultative, and PRC quickly found out US horizontal drilling doesn't translate well for their deeper reserves, so they had to localize tools there as well. The talent gap is also stupendously in favor of PRC, they produce like 15x more mining graduates per year, their university of mining tech enrolls more than all US mining programs combined. They lead in midstream refining, not just REE bottleneck, all that AU/BR ore gets shipped to PRC for refining for a reason.
>almost always takes place far from population centers
No in PRC case, they literally build population centers to service mining, part of third front strategy in 60s to move mining into rugged interior to protect against US/USSR. If you want to mine/process at PRC scale, you need to plop a few million people in large urban complexes i.e. boutou has 3 million people, they're not 5000 people mining towns.
> > China has 50 years of ore refinement development behind them.
It's amazing how many people think China bootstrapped its industry from first principals when all it did was lure western companies to move their production over and "learned" by copying.
> all it did was lure western companies to move their production over and "learned" by copying
Yeah, and they fell for it. Handed over all their intellectual "property" to the chinese on a silver platter. Moved all their production to China, thereby deindustrializing their own countries and impoverishing their fellow citizens to the point of nearly wiping out the middle class.
I wonder if it's even possible for the west to save itself at this point.
West had nothing to teach/copy in many cases - there's a reason PRC produced magnitude more mining engineers for decades. Leaching MREE/HREE from ionic clays is a geologic tech stack that PRC fully built out indigenously from 60s. Only reason M/HREE can be refined at _scale_ and _economically_ today was PRC innovating on geology west never bothered in (west ree stack concentrated on hard rock extraction), and now west has to try to replicate via first principles.
No, we don't.
Yes, you/"we" do.
There's a reason western M/HREE (i.e. the strategic good stuff) strategy hedges on similar iconic clays finds like PRC, because that's the only working industrial chain that extracts M/HREEs at scale. It's why AU/Lynas focus on ionic clays and not US hardrock... which btw doesn't even pretend it will do anything meaningful for mineral security other than light REE.
US+co is trying to replicate PRC M/HREE industry, without the techstack that took PRC decades to build out, because US+co never developed these geologies in the first place. The relevant upstream extraction/mmidstream refining tech for kind of deposits was never pursued in the west.
Now west can move fast due to second mover advantage, but it's going to be slow going like PRC EUV. Until then it's going to require all sorts of parallel efforts like recycling, or materials engineering to reduce M/HREEs to mitigate gap.
That's exactly what the US did in the 1800's, so clearly they're copying a winning strategy.
One rule for me another one for thee.
>"when all it did was lure western companies to move their production over and "learned" by copying"
Would you fucking stop crying already. What did you expect them to do? Commit to being a slave and leave all the value to western corps? And who asked western companies to outsource everything? It seems that for an extra buck they would sell everything. So you basically reap what you sow
Reserves means something specific in the context of minerals! Reserves measure 'economically viable' deposits. [1]
There used to be tons of tungsten mines in the USA, e.g. in Colorado linked below.
[1] https://resourcecapitalfunds.com/insights/rcf-partners-blog/...
[2] https://coloradogeologicalsurvey.org/publications/tungsten-m...
Yes, but it should be emphasized how dependent "Reserves" are on both exploration work, and current assumptions about future mining/refining/market conditions.
China's secret to having most of the world's Reserves may be that they bored a lot more test holes (to actually know "the rock in >THIS< spot is X% tungsten") than anyone else, then made some more-optimistic assumptions.
Ehhh, it could go both ways (as far as over-optimism)
On one hand, historically there's a lot of sparsely populated land; that makes it easier to both do exploration and partition off the land.
Also there is China's more central economy planning; i.e. if it's truly worth it they are more willing to do something about relocating people while 'selling it better' (which is again helped by the sparse populations where they are looking.)
That is, unless you are saying they fudged the sampling....
However, that's still other a weird reversal of the geopolitical playbook; that is, one could argue that the -smartest- thing the US/EU can do, is to import whatever natural materials they can, until the 'clock' runs out, then the native materials can be extracted (even at the 'ecologically correct' cost.)
>I really would like to see answers to the four questions at the end
The bottom line is that China has the biggest most economical tungsten reserves, they have been able to flood the market with predatory pricing for the last 40 years and they almost completely control the ore processing bottleneck as well.
For this to change the US govt would have to enter major agreements w US mines, offering relaxed permitting and a guaranteed price
Wait until you find out the US is flooding the software market with "predatory" SaaS products. Point being, it's only "predatory" if others do it.
> The Wikipedia Tungsten article states the largest reserves are in China followed by Canada, Russia, Vietnam and Bolivia. This contradicts the articles claim. Just because it's all over does not mean it is easy to dig up and refine.
It doesn't contradict the claim.
Just because it's all over does not mean it is easy to dig up and refine, but just because it's not the largest reserve doesn't mean it's not easy to dig up and refine.
It's often hard to beat bulk mining. When you're already mining a quarter billion tons of iron and 5B tons of coal, you get a decent amount of all other trace(rare-earth) metals as part of that stream.
It's far easier to just collect tungsten as it rolls down your conveyor belt.
The Minecraft paradigm.
> The Wikipedia Tungsten article states the largest reserves are in China followed by Canada, Russia, Vietnam and Bolivia
Easy one, then. The administration will kidnap the president of Bolivia, install a replacement and strike a minerals deal.
This doesn't even seem that far fetched at this point. The economic influence of the USA is being eroded at every turn. Their military capabilities could very well turn out to be their last hope one day. South America stands virtually no chance against even a decadent USA. It's actually embarrassing how weak South America is.
This website has no author attribution and this is the only article on it. I would be very suspicious of its claims (not that I disagree with them, just that unattributed works on brand new websites are not ALWAYS the most trustworthy).
The United States has exported the dirtiest businesses internationally for quite a few years (raw mineral extraction is a dirty, nasty business, with slim margins). Now that China has become more adversarial and also more established (you mean people want to actually get PAID to slave away in a mine, or even worse, refuse to even work in a dangerous and dirty pit mine?!) the US is facing some hard decisions. We need many of these materials, and we have them, but we haven't had the will to mine them. Lots of people want to open US government lands to these resource extraction outfits, but there's right worry about the potential for ecological destruction.
Hey, I wrote the article. This is my personal website that I wrote mostly over the weekend.
I went down a rabbit hole reading about metals and mining and just thought it was interesting. Not an expert or a nefarious actor, unfortunately.
> Not an expert or a nefarious actor
If it helps, I know @noleary and can confirm this is a true statement!
isn't that what a second non-expert or nefarious actor would say, though? :p
I mean.. nefarious actor probably would, but non-expert? Non-expert would likely find some petty way to invalidate the argument.
we'll let it slip, this one time.
I for one am not leery of noleary.
The formatting of the website on iOS safari moves the left margin off screen so I could not read all of your essay. But you may enjoy reading Material World by Conroy based on what I could read, he does not cover Tungsten.
I also can recommend material world. Its a great look at how mining and material production works worldwide, I also do not think it covers Tungsten.
Landscape mode helps.
I found reading mode worked perfectly. It usually does for me, and for a while I actually set it to enable by default for all websites with manual exceptions. The cases where it doesn’t work well are usually very long articles which load in parts, which I try not to read on my phone anyway (and of course websites that aren’t primarily one large block of text).
I'm not sure about some of the numbers. PCD is pretty dominant in gas and oil drilling.
To what extent is tungsten recyclable? i.e. What does it mean for a fusion reactor to consume tungsten?
My guess is that while it is running it will dump spare neutrons into the tungsten, converting the tungsten into exotic materials that are not fit for task for various reasons.
If you whack enough neutrons into it, you'll eventually get Rhenium and Osmium. Both are actually pretty useful and while not actually dangerous you might not want to get any on you, especially if it's still hot from the reactor.
Osmium in powder form will oxidise to osmium tetroxide, and you want to avoid that because it stains just about any kind of plant or animal tissue including the surface of your eyes, and is spectacularly poisonous.
You may want to attribute the site/article to yourself.
It's a website about metals.
Lady, why are you so interested in what I read or what I do ?
Nice work but no offense, but it comes off as you describe. I think you are overall right about needing to switch W sources. You are wrong that it will be used for fusion reactors. That won't happen in the lifetime of anyone alive today. It will get used for armor for weapons and possibly some fission reactors. We are nowhere near an actual breakeven fusion reactor. We are only close to theoretical break-evens which are themselves more than an order of magnitude from actual working powerplants. Ask yourself this, how do you efficiently harness 1,000,000C heat? Even at 900C we can only get about 55% and we have materials which can withstand that temperature for decades. We have nothing physical that can take anywhere near 1,000,000C.
I said efficiently, you would be lucky to get 1% efficiency there. Vacuums don't conduct heat very well do they.
Literally 100% of that heat travels from the 1000000C stuff to the environment throught that vacuum. Vacuum doesn't just remove energy.
If you use a steam engines it doesn't matter if your source of heat is 900C or 1000000C, all heat will be captured, and 40-60% will be turned into electricity.
While true in isolation, that is the wrong reason to care.
We get power from the sun very effectively over 150 billion meters of vacuum.
Biggest problem with fusion is doing the fusion for a low enough input power (or for pulsed, energy) cost.
Okay, now I'm thinking you're trolling :) (if not: how warm is it where you are, i.e. how much above 0 kelvin? How?)
I'm not smart enough to stake an opinion on the viability of fusion. I pretty much only have high school mechanics and Wikipedia in my toolkit.
I can only ever make material conditional claims about things like this :)
Commonwealth fusion is theoretically pretty close with their high temp superconductors.
Far from a slam dunk, but I don’t think we’re as far from net gain as we were 10 years ago.
> how do you efficiently harness 1,000,000C heat
Very carefully.
> We are nowhere near an actual breakeven fusion reactor.
This isn't true.
I understand why you said it. Always 5 years away from being 5 years away. Years and years and years of nothing and hopecasting. Post-COVID market and startup antics. Data center power antics. Well-educated people pointing out BS and that even the best shots we had were example systems that were designed to be briefly net-positive in the 2030s.
But it's just not true.
Commonwealth Fusion Systems. Book it. 2027. They've hit every milestone, on time, since I started tracking in...2018?
> Now that China has become more adversarial and also more established (you mean people want to actually get PAID to slave away in a mine, or even worse, refuse to even work in a dangerous and dirty pit mine?!) the US is facing some hard decisions.
There is an implication here that the United States is immune or afraid of doing “hard” or “dirty” work and so we outsourced refining and mining to China.
This doesn’t seem to be correct.
China has a national strategy to dominate refining of rare earth minerals and critical components and our entire society wants cheap products and China was the cheapest place for this stuff and environmental rules are more lax, and with an authoritarian regime supporting and fast tracking the business for strategic reasons, well there you have it.
Part of the strategy involves decoupling China from a weak link in the energy supply chain infrastructure: oil and refining rare earths, manufacturing products that use them, and more is how they are pursuing some level of energy independence from the USA which controls oil flows globally, for the most part.
With respect to avoidance of “dirty” jobs. The EU is far, far worse in this respect than the United States is or was.
People in the US will do dirty jobs if thats what there are, but like people everywhere (in aggregate), would rather not.
We outsourced refining and mining to China because 1) it was cheap 2) it meant poisoning the ground and air and ripping up vast tracts of land somewhere else.
China's rare earth metals stratagem I believe grew out of this--it didn't happen immediately, but rather some bright bulb saw the growing reliance on access to the minerals and encouraged internal growth and acquisition competing resources. Absolutely, very clever.
But let's be very clear here. the US might have outsourced those jobs, which I think is an oversimplification, but the EU also outsourced those jobs and the Chinese welcomed and encouraged that outsourcing. Americans, Europeans, and Chinese workers were all onboard at a national level for this arrangement.
I want to be very clear here to avoid any misunderstanding of an application of moral judgement against the United States for "outsourcing dirty jobs".
> China's rare earth metals stratagem I believe grew out of this--it didn't happen immediately, but rather some bright bulb saw the growing reliance on access to the minerals and encouraged internal growth and acquisition competing resources. Absolutely, very clever.
This could be true. The truth is likely somewhere in the middle, in that China never intended to join a US and European led world order because doing so would compromise the power of the authoritarian CCP (free speech, free markets are incompatible with communism) and this became the eventual strategy to work toward energy independence. Of course "independence" isn't a real thing here, just less reliance. You can't run fighter jets or tanks on batteries or solar panels.
Might be able to run a tank on battery one day. Fighter jet seems harder though
> With respect to avoidance of “dirty” jobs. The EU is far, far worse in this respect than the United States is or was.
Well yeah. Because we care about the environment and people like to enjoy their retirement instead of sitting in a wheelchair with COPD due to inhaling a lifetime of toxic dust.
China is getting better at it too, but only a few years ago I remember a story of all the toxic lakes where all the byproducts of neodymium mining were dumped.
> a few years ago I remember a story of all the toxic lakes where all the byproducts of neodymium mining were dumped.
You might be thinking of Baotou, Inner Mongolia, China.
You don’t care about the environment. You care about the environment in your backyard. Otherwise you would not import rare earths and minerals from China (which Europe does).
Pretty sure consumers would still buy all the nice downstream products even if they damaged their own backyards.
Evidence: Long history of us doing exactly that.
Valuing convenience, modern products etc does not mean one "doesn't care" about the negative externalities, just like going out to eat at a nice restaurant doesn't mean someone "doesn't care" about saving money.
Individual EUers might care about the environment. It’s pretty hard to personally avoid any dirty imported stuff as you just don’t know where it all ends up. Though I guess overall voting patterns might back up your argument
What are you talking about its trivial to avoid purchasing product's produced in environmentally unfriendly ways.
All products from China are manufactured with electricity that is largely coal.
You just mean it's not economical.
Are you trying to say that it's trivial to avoid buying Chinese manufactured products? Where is the keyboard you are typing on made, by the way?
Sure it's trivial, but it's inconvenient and expensive.
I don't do it because I accept that my keyboard was made with coal.
But I would prefer my keyboard was made in America burning American coal.
... you know when you put it that way, it would not surprise me if lobbyists dovetailed the 'cant do stuff in US/EU because of env regs' with the various types of Union busting the US likes to do and for some in the EU it would be the perfect scapegoat for...
Sorry but while that was once true, the current administration has reversed that pretty dramatically. You personally might care about the environment, but when you use “we” in the context of US/China it no longer holds true.
No I mean "we" as in the EU, definitely not the US. The US is sliding back fast, being the only country to pull out of the paris accord (which itself was only the bare minimum needed to halt climate change)
A good way to put it as "China was very willing to subsidize the cost of mining these elements as environmental damage".
West fine with migrant labours doing hard and dirty work hidden from prying eyes (agriculture fields, meat packing plants). Mining just as strategic, but hard to hide big holes in the earth from constituents. I'm sure push comes to shove, US can import a bunch of central Americans to do hard and dirty work in mining.
Yep and the workers from those countries prefer that arrangement since it pays better. The alternative is they don’t do the work, we just pay higher prices, and then they don’t get paid and stay home.
> I'm sure push comes to shove, US can import a bunch of central Americans to do hard and dirty work in mining.
Yea let’s ban migrant labor and the entrance of migrants now so we don’t have this moral failure. :)
By the way, the east (as opposed to the west) is fine with migrant labor too. That’s why remittances are a thing. Well, when they’re not being xenophobic or whatever.
TBH papering over xenophobia is easy because it's just foreigners. Problem with mining is extractors are scarring mother earth, that's the unfortunate optics problem for nimby's, not people, but landscape/backyard, even if it's in the middle of nowhere. I suppose that's why fracking gets an easier pass, because the hole is smol.
Don't make China the boogey man here, when it was America's rich that exported all those things (jobs, manufacturing, solid supply chains) to China.
It's a frequent pattern of:
1: "We need to be more self-sufficient with minerals!"
2: "Let's try to kick-start more of our own industry digging it up!"
3: "Wow, that's expensive and can't compete with international prices."
4: "Better shut it down!"
5: Goto 1
Without ever getting that the point was never to be as profitable as overseas sources. Or getting the point and ignoring it.
The worst part is that most of number 3 is self imposed by the ridiculous amount of environmental review and litigation delays surrounding that process. Sure, cost of labor is some of it, but really it's not very much in comparison.
Having seen some former open pit mines I'm not entirely sure the environmental review is "ridiculous." One of them was basically a huge open pit full of acid.
Mine the metal or do without the tech that uses it. You have to choose. Years of environmental review do not help.
The environmental review WILL help if it is used to adjust the mining techniques so they don't destroy everything nearby to do the work, or even if it jist creates a reclamation / restoration plan (and yes, factor that into the price, it's trivial). Taking too long is a problem.
Then make laws and punish the people who break them. It doesn't do any good to litigate before the project has even started. DUI is a problem and you solve it by arresting drunk drivers, not making them fill out paperwork before they go to the bar.
That pit also happens to be a great place to do rare earths extraction since there is zero chance of it ever being cleaned up.
The acid is natural btw just from things leeching out of the rock walls.
> The worst part is that most of number 3 is self imposed by the ridiculous amount of environmental review and litigation delays surrounding that process.
Because, surprise, we do not want more Superfund sites. Like, the Silicon Valley is the US' biggest cluster of Superfund sites by far.
At the same time, it is very convenient that there are lots of piss poor countries that have very difficult/dirty to mine resources... be it China, Congo or whatever. These countries didn't have the luxury to think decades into the future, and capitalism doesn't have built-in ethics, and this is how we ended up here.
The EU tried to introduce supply chain laws aiming at cutting back at this kind of exploitation, but the pressure from industry was immense.
If SV is full of superfund sites then I guess they aren't as bad as I thought because millions of people live there and are doing just fine.
> Like, the Silicon Valley is the US' biggest cluster of Superfund sites by far
Source? My understanding was that NJ was the worse.
Wikipedia shows 94 SF sites in CA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Superfund_sites_in_Cal...
And 115 in NJ: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Superfund_sites_in_New...
And of course, CA is _much much_ larger. If we look at the entire bos/wash corridor, it's huuugely than CA.
Tungsten demand is real and bulk sources are quite scarce, today. It would be helpful if the historical charts went back farther than 2016. Where did the US get Tungsten in the 80s and 90s? South Korea, China, and Russia. The US and Canada had Tungsten mines, but the value wasn't there due to international pricing undercutting the industry. America's dogged federal agenda to break free of all Chinese influence or Capitalism, which will go first? We know the answer.
>Now that China has become more adversarial
I think it's the other way around here. I say that as China's policy has primarily focused on self-reliance to the degree that it's overshadowed the west in several sectors with the exception of a few (Tech/AI, Finance, Bio) and given their persistence to close the gap I'd say we aren't too far from being eclipsed entirely.
One just has to look at the economics of it all and come to the conclusion that many have already arrived at...
cough Wolf warrior diplomacy cough
> Now that China has become more adversarial
Just a nitpick, but it is the reverse, the United States has become more adversarial. China isn't kidnapping heads of state.
They've both become more adversarial. China has been using economic blackmail to advance political goals for a long time (e.g. wrt Japan and Taiwan and SEA). They also continue to expand military based in the SCS that don't belong there, hold exercises to simulate blockades outside of China. Etc.
Probably just Big W trying to run the markets.
Same as it ever was.
This is plainly false. China bought the refining companies doing the extraction for rare earth in the US, extracted knowledge, then shipped the tooling to China and closed the US factories. Having no environmental regulation probably helped as well cost-wise, but that's not the fault of the USA.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2006/04/07/the-saga-of-magneque...
That article doesn't say anything about selling a mine, it says the only mine was already in China. China bought an American magnet manufacturer which had been using Chinese neodymium to make magnets. It doesn't say anything at all about extraction.
Also, nobody forced US companies to sell those assets.
Originally there was the Mountain Pass mine, and China setup their own mines while also building out the refining and processing capacity. Until recently MP Materials was shipping all it's output to Chinese refiners.
The history and asset ownership is also quite convoluted. Try this Wikipedia article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo_Performance_Materials
This article is quite good at explaining how China cornered the market:
https://thehustle.co/originals/what-the-hell-are-rare-earth-...
The article explicitly says that the magnet manufacturer was bought by a shell company owned by chinese interests, which lied when they pledged to develop the activity.
Not that it's very surprising (US companies routinely do this as well, especially in Europe), but in this case it had clearly an ulterior motive.
Caught my eye due to family events. One of my uncles was killed in the Pine Creek mine in California. He was repairing an ore crusher when somebody switched it on. Pre-OSHA and tagout days.
I doubt we'll be pinched by tungsten shortages. The fusion application isn't going to come on for at least two decades. Smaller apps will be met by known reserves.
That said, it is a cool material. Looking for aluminum bars at Alan Steel (CA) years back, I was stunned when I tried (and failed) to pick up a 12" long by 6"diameter piece of what turned out to be tungsten misfiled in the aluminum section. Density, thy name is tungsten.
This is not the first time that this has been a problem.
In WW2 all sides needed more tungsten, hence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfram_Crisis
As a side note, Tungsten is a Swedish word ("heavy stone"). It was first "discovered" by a Swede, and they called it Tungsten. Its atomic symbol is W, for wolfram, the German word for it, which even the Swede's use. I find it mildly amusing. (it is to do with tungsten rich ores and the name of the ores that had been known about for a while)
Counterpoint: Tungsten is about $1100/ton, so if demand averages 10k tons/year the annual US spend is about $10-12 million. That's peanuts in economic terms. If relations with China deteriorate the US could just set up a front company in some third country, buy tungsten, and re-export it.
FYI, Tungsten prices are quoted in metric ton units (MTUs) [1], which surprisingly aren't metric tons. They're actually 1% of a metric ton -- or 10kg. [2] So the price of Tungsten is actually 100x that.
[1] https://www.fastmarkets.com/metals-and-mining/minor-metals/t...
[2] https://quoteddata.com/glossary/mtu/
There are at least three US tungsten mining startups.[1][2][3] It looks like the product is the stock, not the mineral. They're all in the money-acquisition stage. Two have animated American flags on their sites. The third is Canadian-owned.
It's worse than the wannabe rare earth mining companies.
[1] https://www.unitedstatestungsten.com/
[2] https://investornews.com/critical-minerals-rare-earths/ameri...
[3] https://www.patriotcritical.com/
There are some Australia startups with the American flags everywhere.
Resolution Minerals (which has some dodgy connection to the Trump boys) might have been the first to go with the heavy US patriotic tilt.
Trigg Minerals was more normal, but have recently rebranded as American Tungsten and Antimony and has gone full patriot as well to attract US buy-in.
Btw, the paper referenced for tungsten production is co-funded by a US tungsten exploration/mining company: https://www.innovationnewsnetwork.com/harnessing-tungsten-fo...
I can only read the free part of the paper (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09203...). I wish it would elaborate more on the challenges with recycling.
My fireplace has 1" cubes of tungsten, aluminum, and magnesium, plus a cube of selenite and quartzy-style synthetic prism, all arranged on little stands really close to the floor, so reachable by children. Neighbor 2.5 year old last year was very put out when he couldn't lift the W cube. It is really a lot of fun to hold. Dropping it on one's foot is ill-advised, particularly if you are 2.5 years old.
This reminds me of another article I read today about Gallium.
https://archive.ph/YgRUv
Original Link: https://www.wsj.com/business/the-defense-department-is-infat...
What about cobalt? For the largest part of the market, tungsten carbide cutting tools, it's usually a composite of tungsten carbide and cobalt.
Thankfully, in most industries that use tungsten carbide, there is a lot of recycling of the material (though probably not enough.)
Like anything, it's a complex problem, with no easy answers.
FYI: https://www.npr.org/2023/12/14/1219246964/cobalt-is-importan...
tl;dr there's currently no overarching plan to help the US catch up to China, and we're going to let "the market" fix that problem. Being that "the market" in the US is about quarterly earnings reports and strategic bonuses for the C-suite, I'm keeping my expectations in check.
The US govt already tracks the geopolitical status of "Critical Minerals" at the USGS:
https://www.usgs.gov/tools/critical-minerals-atlas
PRC tungsten reserves are also depleting, mines are processing more rocks for same output and sooner or later PRC going to quota tungsten exports even more for domestic stockpile and prevent over extraction.
Also related tangent, remember that anecdote about PRC finally making ball point pen tips? That was basically central gov slapping PRC metallurgists to speedrun tungsten carbide precision manufacturing for advanced munitions (penetrators), not ball point pen tips which was rounding error consideration.
Looking up details on this because I had never heard of the situation, and I was unaware that the ballpoint pen was only produced by so few countries.
I didn’t realize the tips were tungsten carbide either.
Very small, high precision spheres are hard to make. Ball bearings also fall into this category. Many modern machines depend on this. I never see it "recreate society manuals," but they should be.
The balls aren’t that hard to make [1], but doing so at scale economically isn’t something you can build with some plug and play off the shelf machinery. It takes years to assemble a functioning factory like that and tune the process before it’s profitable. All the Western companies that make them are decades old with established and largely paid off manufacturing lines but once the Chinese government decided it was a critical industrial product downstream from their five year plans, it was just a matter of time and capital. Few other governments are willing to subsidized specialized manufacturing like that so investors don’t want to risk entering an established market.
The hard part is really quality control when making hundreds of thousand or millions of balls a day, at which point all metrology equipment is basically useless except for random sampling, which means your process has to be pretty much perfect before anyone will even buy from you, but you cant slow down the process because then you’re just losing money.
[1] https://youtu.be/41Z5v4NybWA?si=xzFw2xD93D9TfW6F (process for the balls starts around 1:50)
>Very small, high precision spheres are hard to make
I remember this was on a list of zero-g manufacturing techniques that NASA was investigating at one point. I wonder what became of that? Normally, I'd think the cost would be prohibitive, but you can probably fit a lot of 0.1mm ball bearings in a ton of cargo.
Switzerland + japan and now PRC, i.e. US also can't build ballpoint pen tips (not that US couldn't). The TLDR is it's like a 20m per year market, TISCO china has revenue of 15B, it wasn't worth rounding error effort until politics compelled them to. And even then it wasn't really about metallurgy but submicro tungsten manufacturing to close precision gap for other strategic industries. The meme/rumor is TISCO made one batch of ball point tip metal to prove a point and that chunk is enough to last PRC ballpoint tip industry for decades.
They're working on it.
Invested in an Australian tungsten miner late last year. Has an operating profitable mine in Spain and active Government support to restart the large Mt Carbine mine in Queensland.
Antimony is another critical mineral. A number of smallcap Antimony/Tungsten miners are exploring potential deposits in Idaho and Tennessee and Australia, but timelines are long.
That's cool - I'd imagine 'invested in a mining concern' is rare on the spectrum of HNers' resumes. May I ask how did you come to be confident enough to risk capital on something that's not typically within the average tech person's familiarity space? Asking b/c I would like to be able to develop such confidence if I could credibly (even just to myself) do so.
A key aspect is being able to read the geology of the ore body. That is still more of an art than a science. If you are a nerd, it is actually super-interesting. Not too hard to pick up if you have the interest. It isn’t for the casual investor though. In the US there is a regulatory thicket you have to get through to develop it, and it often isn’t cheap, which factors into the value of the minerals.
I built a small catalog of ore deposits primarily by hiking deep into areas of the US mountain west that no one has gone into, albeit not for the purposes of prospecting. There is still quite a bit out there. Mostly gold-copper ores in my case.
Actually, if you follow stock tip accounts on X, investing in Australian commodity miners is like the current hot trend, for a few weeks already.
This is not to assume that the parent commenter invested for this reason.
My foray into rare earths, critical minerals and some defense stocks was initially as a hedge against Trump starting a trade war with China, the increasing risk of military confrontation and the rearming of Europe. All three concerns have occurred to some degree, but it's a long game and actually took a lot longer to play out than I had expected in some cases.
And I get your lack of confidence, I did miss some quick opportunities that I felt were there but I wasn't confident at the time.
The only way to really gain confidence is do your research; read the presentations of each company, particularly their JORC-compliant estimates, time frames to production, how far along the funding path they are, etc.
Use your preferred LLM for deep dives. Whatever you're question, just ask and you'll be surprised at what you learn. For example asking for a cost/effort comparison of the metallurgic processes required for each type of rare earth host material really helped me understand what they were doing, and how each company differed in their approach.
If you like learning random things on Hacker News, deep diving into any technology or industry will not be an issue.
"I'd imagine 'invested in a mining concern' is rare on the spectrum of HNers' resumes."
You'd be surprised how many of us actually have a mining claim or two ;)
Now try copper, aluminum and more. I saw a clip from a conference that said for copper, at 3% GDP growth, the global demand in the next 18 years will exceed the last 10,000 years, but 80% of known reserves have already been mined.
It seems to me that development in the future is going to be constrained. Not to be dramatic but are we in the sort of happy pre-pandemic days not knowing the changes heading our way? Or am I being too dramatic?
Good news, we have big plans to send significant quantities of copper and aluminum into orbit with zero possibility of recovery.
Good news, that’s a tiny drop in the bucket compared to mining operations. Rocket payloads are measured in the metric tons; copper mining is measured in tens of millions of metric tons per year. It’s not even a rounding error, you’d have to launch hundreds of solid copper rockets a day to even make a dent.
Elon is talking about a million satellite constellation and launching a rocket capable of putting 100 tons into orbit every hour.
1. Fusion is not going to be a reality any time in the next 50 years.
2. Why does the US import tungsten? Is it that we don't have any, or it's cheaper to just buy it from China?
Just want to say respect for making the blog and leading with a self-taught post about tungsten. Very cool dude stuff. Add an RSS feed.
The UK has a big tungsten deposit; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemerdon_Mine
Come buy our tungsten! (We'll throw in a choice of Eccles cake or Tunnocks tea cakes as a special offer)
Are they secretly building the "Rods from God"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment
So we are finally building the Rods from God
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment
Between stable and contract honoring entities it's also possible to trade for things that not everyone produces, or do large long term investments in things like mines or refineries outside your own territory.
There is likely a good amount of tungsten, along with other useful elements, sitting buried in US landfills.
It may take a while, but one day our old landfills will turn into mines.
With most resources, it’s usually not that they literally can’t be found, but that the cheap sources are gone. If tungsten costs 20x as much to extract, it doesn’t matter that it technically exists, a lot of users are just not going to be able to afford it.
The article says the US currently imports about 10,000 tons of tungsten per year, and has no active production, so that's also its current usage.
Tungsten costs about $200/kg [0]
So the total US tungsten usage is $2 billion/year.
If the price goes up 20x overnight, and nobody changes their purchasing behaviours, that costs US businesses, consumers and government $38 billion.
That's a lot of money for most people, but it's being spread over a wide base.
For a comparison, the US uses about 20 million barrels of oil per day [1] or 7 billion per year. So a 20x shock in tungsten would be roughly equivalent to oil prices going up $5/barrel. In fact oil fluctuates by that much most quarters [2], if not most months. People complain a little when it goes up, but it takes more than that to really have a noticeable effect on the economy.
A 2x or 5x price increase - a huge shock in any context - would be problematic for a few companies, but really business as usual for the US as a whole.
[0] https://www.metal.com/tungsten
[1] https://ycharts.com/indicators/us_oil_consumption
[2] https://www.macrotrends.net/1369/crude-oil-price-history-cha...
Not surprising. In addition to Tungsten or rare earth materials, I am sure there are many more "problems" that America is dependent on China.
Yeah, the US let China do the dirty work because it was cheaper. And it was cheaper because China doesn’t care about dumping waste wherever they’d like and building suicide nets for their employees because of how they’re treated.
America depended on China to not care about the environment or people. China is pretty good at that.
Fear not, we will Make America Great Again. Back to the "gilded age".
China sounds a lot like a conservative wet dream. Are they just jealous?
If you think there are actually conservatives and liberals at the billionaire level I have a bridge to sell you. The joke is on you, boss.
Ignoring your ignorance for a moment, the logic you could have realized is, the US did it to save money and line their pockets. Political affiliations have nothing to do with it.
It's worth mentioning that the US has tungsten mines, but they are not operating currently. https://www.usgs.gov/data/tungsten-deposits-united-states
Tungsten is the least of their problem. When a population cannot afford health care system, and have to walk with their passport so they are not sent to jail, you have a broken country. Not to mention the financial problems.
Tungsten won't matter when there is no country.
> walk with their passport so they are not sent to jail
No, it's broken because we've allowed millions of foreigners to come in and raise said healthcare and housing costs. Checking that people here actually belong here else they're deported is part of the "cost of living" solution, in addition to crime.
I think overall immigration is a net benefit: https://www.cato.org/white-paper/immigrants-recent-effects-g...
You beat me to it. Here's another report by that woke Cato Institute: https://www.cato.org/blog/why-legal-immigration-system-broke...
> No, it's broken because we've allowed millions of foreigners to come in and raise said healthcare and housing costs.
The idea that deporting every undocumented person will reduce the bloat and profit extraction in our health care system is making me giggle.
And do you really think checking every person is a strategy that scales? Why not just indiscriminately jail the people who hire them and thereby create a strong incentive to come?
Maybe those workers actually belong here more than you'd like to admit, but the powers that be enjoy keeping their status uncertain to use as a piñata they can beat whenever they need political candy.
>Why not just indiscriminately jail the people who hire them and thereby create a strong incentive to come?
We definitely should do this, yes.
Get a load a this guy, he thinks immigrants invented private health insurance
obligatory simpsons reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTLYris4kJU
Fort Knox is full of tungsten
> One wonders: Why does China produce >80% of the world's tungsten? Why has there been zero domestic tungsten mining in the United States?
Mining and refining rare earth is a dirty process. NIMBYs pushed it farther and farther away until it was on the other side of the world.
Am I the only one who finds this material rather dense?
Between the critical strategic/military need, the by-far largest producer being an unfriendly rival power, and commercial production looking like a very poor fit for the use case - the Old School solution would be for the gov't to own & probably operate the needed mines, refining facilities, and stockpiles.
But between our low-functioning gov't and our lower-functioning Capitalist-Ideological Complex, I'd be surprised if such a solution was even mentioned.
Don't worry, it wasn't