Tungsten West Steps Up Renovation of Plymouth Tungsten Mine

Tungsten West has ramped up the transformation of its Plymouth tungsten mine, a £45 million processing plant redevelopment that will bring hundreds of jobs to the local community. Over the next few months, new equipment will arrive and another building will be completed to complete the processing line at the Hemerdon mine in Plymouth.

This means that the mine, the third-largest tungsten resource in the world, is expected to be in full production by 2023. The current 70 workers will then be joined by more than 200 other permanent employees and potentially support 2,400 jobs through the supply chain. AIM-listed Tungsten West, which bought the mine for £2.8 million in 2019, will also produce tin from the open pit and sell the waste granite as an aggregate for the construction industry.

"We're very excited about this," said Max Denning, CEO of the company. "In terms of boosting employment, there will be hundreds of people involved in the redevelopment phase and then 300 people working on site for the duration of their operations. For the supply chain, we have an 8x multiplier for every job on the mining project. And there's a 20-year mine life."

Tungsten West completed a feasibility study in 2021 and has been working in-house on the processing plant left behind by former operator Wolf Minerals Ltd at the mine.

Wolf invested more than £170 million in the project, but the plant experienced major problems and went into administration at the end of 2018 after only three years of production. As part of a £45 million capital expenditure program, the company has been carrying out repairs to areas of the production plant where ore is concentrated and upgraded.

Mr. Denning said that only minor adjustments to these parts of the plant are now needed, which will be addressed within the next three months. In the meantime, the crushing and screening machinery from the Wolf era is no longer fit for purpose and will be dismantled and replaced with top-of-the-line equipment made in South Africa that will also be less noisy.

Work will also soon begin on the construction of Plymouth tungsten mine at a low-rise building that will not be visible from outside the mine site and will not require the construction of a mine waste facility within the site. This building will contain German-made X-ray and ore sorting technology that has been manufactured and imported into the UK.

"We hope to complete construction by the end of this year or early 2023," Mr. Denning said. "It's not just about fixing the old line, but optimizing it with X-ray transmission ore sorting." The Hemerdon mine contains a massive ore body, about 300 meters by 200 meters. The granite is covered with tungsten-bearing quartz veins.

Instead of just crushing the rock into 8-millimeter pieces and separating out the tungsten, as Wolf does, Tungsten West has a more efficient method. It would take "fist-sized" 80-millimeter chunks and scan them with an X-ray laser. The air jets would then separate the tungsten-containing rocks of Plymouth tungsten mine from the barren ones.