Tungsten price climb will be slow: analysts

 

Critics in the Dehcho had long grumbled about NATCL’s properties, which despite geographically resting — at least somewhat, in the case of Mactung — in the Northwest Territories, really only contributed economically to the Yukon in terms of jobs, while leaving the NWT with all the risk.

 

For Cantung, that risk now lies with Canada. While NATCL has indicated it hopes to resume operations at the mine (which closed on Oct. 27 following 80 layoffs in the spring) by next summer, that’s going to depend on financing.

 

Tungsten prices are currently bottoming out at around $180 per MT, down significantly from their 2010 climb to around $450. Although current forecasts peg the price of tungsten as poised to rise over the next few years, the recovery from this 10-year low is likely to be slow.

 

“I think we will see the price begin to rise slowly as economic demand recovers, but it is going to be nothing dramatic,” analyst Chris Ecclestone of Hallgarten & Company said in a recent interview with Tungsten Investing News.

 

“If financing improves for the mining sector, it’s not going to be a case of everyone in the mining sector suddenly being able to get money. It will probably be gold projects and big base metals projects getting funding before specialty metals.”

 

An optimistic view places the price of tungsten closer to $200 by the end of the year and possibly $300 by the end of 2016, but the light at the end of the tunnel is conditional upon a lot of what-ifs, most notably what China — tungsten’s biggest exporter — decides to do about regulating its production.

 

So what if the price never rebounds?

During the work program conducted in August 2015, 490 soil samples were collected throughout the property. The samples were collected by means of hand-held augers. Sampling was conducted along east-west traverses and locally adjacent to the main paved road which transects the property from north to south. The soil samples were submitted to ALS Minerals for tungsten analysis by Lithium Metaborate Fusion and Inductively Coupled Plasma – Mass Spectrometry (ICP-MS). Soil samples from multiple regions of the property returned greater than 100 parts per million (ppm) tungsten, including a sample from the southern region of the property which returned 1380 ppm tungsten.

 

The program identified local tungsten soil anomalies in the northern half of the property. Tungsten mineralization was documented in this northern region as per publically available reports filed during the 1980s by Kidd Creek Mines Ltd. (assessment reports filed with the Newfoundland and Labrador Department of Natural Resources). Tungsten mineralization was confirmed in rubble and bedrock at two close-spaced quarries in this region during the August 2015 rock sampling program which was completed concurrently with the soil sampling program. Multiple grab samples of quarry rubble assayed greater than 5% WO3 (Great Atlantic Resources News Release of November 19, 2015). The soil sampling program confirmed tungsten soil anomalies (up to 116 ppm W) in the general area of these two quarries, interpreted by company management to be associated with the tungsten mineralization at the quarries. The program confirmed tungsten soil anomalies in three areas northwest, north and northeast of these quarries with up to 402 ppm W. Company management interpret these particular soil anomalies to possibly represent separate sources of tungsten mineralization as they are not in the documented down-ice glacial direction from the two quarries.

 

Dave Martin, vice president of exploration at Great Atlantic, commented:

 

The 2015 soil sampling identified tungsten anomalies in the area of known tungsten mineralization at the two northern quarries confirming that soil sampling is a useful exploration tool in this area. The program was successful in confirming tungsten anomalies elsewhere on the property, establishing targets for further work in addition to the two northern quarries.

Tailings Reprocessing

 

On another score the company has been considering the issue of tailings recovery as specific areas where tailings have been deposited still contain economic WO3 grades. The amount in the dumps is a not insubstantial amount at half the level of the current reserve in the ground.

 

Almonty tested reprocessing the tailings stockpile by blending tailings with fresh ore during Q1 2014. Bulk testing of 100% tailings ore was run through the plant at Los Santos without any additional modifications. Recovery rates achieve exceeded expectations and management believes that target recovery rates for tailings reprocessing will be achieved when the tailings stockpiles are eventually reprocessed.

Mining

 

The open pit operations are conventional drill and blast operations. The aerial view below shows the main pit with the green structure to the left being the processing plant and the Los Santos South (Main) pit being the bright white patch just right of centre. Towards the town at the top of the photo is a smaller Las Cortinas pit that has been developed over the last few years.

 

The production mining & drilling operations currently employ 65 people and this task is undertaken by a contractor. All of the other 68 employees on site work directly for Daytal (Almonty’s Spanish subsidiary).

 

For the moment plans for going underground have been discounted (while the price for APT remains where it is). In some ways the need for that strategy has been reduced by making the pits deeper and via the mini “super-pit” implementation.

 

This added production will come at no increase in staff costs.

In the first week of November, we went to visit the Los Santos mine, one of the largest tungsten reserves in Spain, with a view to seeing current operations and discussing the other activities of the company in Spain, Australia and South Korea. The CEO of Almonty Industries (TSXV:AII), Lewis Black was on site at the time, as were staff that had worked at or visited the company’s other operations around the globe. Interestingly the staff are composed of a strong component of Portuguese mine staff, many of whom are known to the company management since the days when the Almonty team ran Primary Mining, which owned the Panasquiera Tungsten mine in Portugal.

 

The Los Santos scheelite deposit is in the province of Salamanca in western Spain. It is 180 km west of Madrid, 50 km south of the city of Salamanca. The drive to the mine from Salamanca is an easy one over a double carriageway most of the way through flat to lightly rolling landscape. The area around the actual mine is low hills with a mix of small holdings. The cultivation of pigs is the major industry in the region as the “capital of Jamon Iberico” is a small town nearby where the pigs fed on acorns produce this famous and costly product. 

 

Los Santos is a large village of around 2,000 people. The mine has become quite an important feature of the local economy over the nine years it has been operating. With around 65 contract staff and tens of direct employees, the mine has a significant trickledown effect in such a small community. It is also worth remembering that unemployment in Spain is 25% at this time and has been even higher since 2008 and that in isolated rural areas it can be significantly higher. The company has strong relations with local mayors and councils. It has even established its company “canteen” in the town, rather than out at the minesite. This has effectively doubled the number of eating places in the town!

 

The mine is one kilometre east of the town of Los Santos and there is a newly paved road to the mine gate.

German scientists hunting dark matter are set to produce half a tonne of high-purity calcium tungstate for their detectors, one 1kg crystal at a time. The CRESST-II experiment based in Gran Sasso, Italy is currently seeking this enigmatic substance, thought to explain the universe’s structure, with 10kg of calcium tungstate (CaWO4). Now Andreas Erb and Jean-Côme Lanfranchi are preparing crystals for its larger successor EURECA, which will begin operation in the French Alps in 5–10 years.

Gravitational effects suggest as-yet-unobserved dark matter in the universe outnumbers more familiar atomic matter four to one. Erb, Lanfranchi and their colleagues are hunting leading theoretical candidates, Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs). That name reflects their size – up to a lead atom’s mass – and the limited interaction with atomic matter that makes them hard to find, or ‘dark’. ‘They have to interact weakly to agree with the matter needed,’ says Richard Gaitskell from Brown University in the US, who isn’t involved in the calcium tungstate experiments.

 

Erb explains that the detectors should be able to pick up dark matter particles when they hit atomic nuclei in the crystals. ‘A higher sample mass gives a higher probability of such events.’ But distinguishing the miniscule amount of heat WIMP–nucleus collisions would produce requires detectors cooled to 10mK and shielded from ambient radioactivity.

 

CRESST/EURECA is the only team hunting dark matter with calcium tungstate, which has two advantages. Firstly, its different atoms cover a range of possible WIMP masses. ‘No matter the mass, you always have a nucleus with a high probability of interacting,’ Erb says. Second, it would also emit light when a WIMP hits it and monitoring the different signals will help the scientists eliminate background noise. 

 

Having initially purchased crystals, this need for extreme sensitivity drove Erb and Lanfranchi to produce their own. ‘They weren’t pure enough for the background we want,’ Erb recalls. To avoid oxidation at calcium tungstate’s 1600°C melting temperature, the crucibles are made from rhodium, with their 12cm diameter vessel costing €120,000 (£97,300). Erb says that if they can grow two or three 1kg crystals per week then they will have the required amount for EURECA in about five years.

Aizenberg stated that electrochemical deposition was an established technique used in manufacture of steel.

“I don’t want to create another line that would cost millions and millions of dollars and that no one would adopt,” Aizenberg said. She wanted to create a scalable process that would not affect the standard practices followed by the steel industry.

The material was tested in different ways - by scratching with diamond-tipped scribers, screwdrivers and stainless steel tweezers, and by repeatedly being hit with huge number of heavy, hard beads.
 

Following this, the material’s anti-wetting properties were tested using various types of liquids, including highly corrosive media, oil, water and biological fluids that contained blood and bacteria. The material demonstrated anti-biofouling behavior and repelled all of the liquid. Additionally, the tungsten oxide coating also enhanced the strength of steel.
 

Philseok Kim, co-author of the paper and co-founder and vice president of technology at SEAS spin-off SLIPS Technologies Inc., stated that the material holds significant promise for medical steel devices. “Because we show that this material successfully repels bacteria and blood, small medical implants, tools and surgical instruments like scalpels and needles that require both significant mechanical strength and anti-fouling property are high value-added products we are exploring for application and commercialization,” said Kim.
 

The material also holds considerable promise for functional 3D printing and microarray device applications. It could be very useful for printing highly sticky and viscous polymeric and biological materials, where contamination and friction are significant hindrances.

Every year, the effects of biofouling on hulls have cost the U.S. Navy tens of millions of dollars. Barnacles, algae and other such organisms create drag and increase the amount of energy required. Additionally, significant cost is involved in cleaning the hulls and reapplying anti-fouling paints. If this super-slick material could be scaled up, then it would hold promise as a cost-efficient, clean material.
 

“This research is an example of hard core, classic material science,” said Aizenberg. “We took a material that changed the world and asked, how can we make it better?”

The study paper on the new SLIPS-enhanced steel has been published in Nature Communications.

“Our slippery steel is orders of magnitude more durable than any anti-fouling material that has been developed before,” said Aizenberg. “So far, these two concepts – mechanical durability and anti-fouling – were at odds with each other. We need surfaces to be textured and porous to impart fouling resistance but rough nanostructured coatings are intrinsically weaker than their bulk analogs. This research shows that careful surface engineering allows the design of a material capable of performing multiple, even conflicting, functions, without performance degradation.”
 

This material holds promise for a wide range of applications, such as non-fouling medical devices and tools including scalpels and implants, 3D printing nozzles, and marine and building applications.
 

The team had to find out ways to ensure that the structure of the steel maintained its anti-fouling capability without undergoing any mechanical degradation due to the new surface. The team grew an ultrathin film that was made up of hundreds of thousands of nanoscale rough, tungsten-oxide islands on a steel surface using an electrochemical technique.
 

“If one part of an island is destroyed, the damage doesn’t propagate to other parts of the surface because of the lack of interconnectivity between neighboring islands,” said Alexander B. Tesler, former postdoctoral fellow at SEAS, current research fellow at Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and the paper’s first author.
 

“This island-like morphology combined with the inherent durability and roughness of the tungsten oxide allows the surface to keep its repellent properties in highly abrasive applications, which was impossible until now.”

 

Researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have developed a new nanoporous surface coating that increases the safety, strength, and durability of ubiquitous steel.

 

Accelerated corrosion test, in which unmodified stainless steel (300 grade) (right sample)and the lower part of the TO-SLIPS sample with a 600-nm-thick porous TO film on steel (left sample)were exposed to very corrosive Glyceregia stainless steel etchant. (a-h) Images show corrosion evolution as a function of contact time.

 

Over the years, the industry has developed different grades of steel. However, no significant change or improvement has been carried out on steel surfaces. The steel currently being used continues to be affected by abrasive materials and corrosion due to salt and water. Steel surgical tools are still not totally immune to infectious microorganisms.

 

The research team developed the new surface coating using rough nanoporous tungsten oxide. According to the researchers, this coating is considered to be the most durable anti-corrosive and anti-fouling material able to repel any type of liquid, even after being subjected to severe structural abuse.

 

Joanna Aizenberg’s lab at Harvard has developed numerous other anti-fouling, non-stick materials. Aizenberg is the Amy Smith Berylson Professor of Materials Science and core faculty member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University.

 

In 2011, Aizenberg’s team developed Slippery Liquid-Infused Porous Surfaces (SLIPS), a coating that has since been used for a wide range of applications. In the present study, the team has used SLIPS to enhance the properties of steel.