Canada’s Almonty Industries to Produce Top Tungsten Production Outside China

Canada’s tungsten operator Almonty Industries Inc. (AII) plans to produce top tungsten production outside of China, and the company is now steadily advancing production and is expected to become major tungsten producer within the next few years.

The Canada-based company is rebuilding the Sangdong Tungsten Mine, a world-class Tier 1 deposit in South Korea acquired in 2015, and developing a tungsten project in the Iberian Peninsula. Tungsten is one of the lists of minerals and metals that the U.S. and the European Union have deemed critical in the past few years. More than 80% of its production is controlled by China.

Over the past few months, Almonty has raised significant capital to fund its various tungsten projects, including assets in South Korea, Portugal, and Spain. The company announced on June 7 that it had closed a private placement of up to 2.5 million depositary interests (CDIs) at A$0.85 per CDI to Deutsche Rohstoff AG, its third largest shareholder, raising A$2.12 million ($1.52 million). The funds will be used in part to "accelerate ongoing growth strategies now being pursued".

Almonty's focus is on developing the Sangdong tungsten mine in South Korea, which is expected to be one of the largest tungsten mines in the world. The company, through its wholly-owned subsidiary Woulfe Mining Corp., owns a 100% interest in Almonty's Korea Tungsten Project (AKT).

The deposit, located 2.5 hours from Seoul, has one of the world's largest tungsten resources, according to the company. It has 3.5 times the average tungsten grade and is estimated to have more than 90 years of resources so far, according to historical data provided by the Korean government and Korea Tungsten Corporation.

Sangdong used to produce from 1912 to 1992 and accounted for 30% of the gross domestic product after the Korean War in the 1950s. However, the mine was closed in 1992.

Almonty spent 4.5 years redesigning the project, which the company began construction on in 2021 and expects to begin production by the end of the second quarter of 2023, "with the hope of becoming carbon neutral because all the energy will come from renewable sources on site," Lewis Black, Almonty Industries' CEO said. "Initially, 45 percent of production is covered by an offtake of about 640,000 tons of hard flooring per year and will be shipped to a plant in the United States. Over the next 12 months, we will develop a plan to ensure that we can expand this to 1.2 million tons per year of operation."

Another 55 percent of tungsten is planned to remain in the country, downstream for local consumption. As Lewis points out, South Korea remains the world's largest per capita consumer of tungsten through the semiconductor and battery sectors as well as the hard metals sector. These are the three main end markets for Sangdong Tungsten, as the government is keen to see what Almonty is doing in this area.

"It was the Korean government that encouraged us to supply the local market downstream because they are totally dependent on China, where 94.7% of their tungsten oxide comes from," Lewis explained. “In March, Almonty announced that it was investigating the construction of a vertically integrated downstream processing plant for tungsten oxide nanoparticles to supply the battery anode manufacturing industry in South Korea.”

Almonty Industries also focuses on tungsten recycling. Currently, all recycled tungsten is exported to Taiwan, China, where it is then processed and shipped to the mainland. "We intend, through our downstream plants, to be able to consume these scrap products. So, 25 percent of our production in Korea will come from scrap, which is important for our customers' carbon credit," Lewis explained.

The Sangdong tungsten mine also hosts a massive high-grade molybdenum deposit located 150 meters below existing infrastructure. South Korea is the world's fourth-largest importer of tungsten production, Lewis said, adding, "We are already in discussions with the government because they will be looking for downstream products that they can use domestically."

(Source: MiningNews.net)

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