Today kapitalerhoehungen.de had the opportunity to meet James Robertson, CEO of Blackheath Resources. Following the success of Primary Metals, Mr. Robertson and his team are back in Portugal with new tungsten projects including the past producing tungsten project at Covas in northern Portugal. Historical resources at Covas are 923,000 tons of 0.78% WO3 (tungsten trioxide). Mineralization is open in several directions and a drilling programme is underway.

Hello Mr. Robertson, to start, what is the focus of Blackheath Resources?

Blackheath Resources is a TSX Venture Exchange listed company that is entirely focused on tungsten exploration and development in Portugal. We currently hold rights to three tungsten projects, all of which are past-producing mines and we are also assessing additional tungsten acquisitions.

Can PIIGS fly again? No, that’s not a typographical error. I’m referring to Europe’s PIIGS – Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain - the continent’s sick men.

The aftermath of recession and financial crisis has left them struggling and their travails – particularly those of Greece – have hogged the economic headlines this year. Austerity and high unemployment have left their marks too. But they have also spawned a self-help mentality.

As part of this, our PIIGS are targeting what could be a huge and largely forgotten bounty of natural resources. And they are being helped in their endeavours by a handful of entrepreneurial junior explorers and miners.

China's Ministry of Commerce announced that it has granted 255 Chinese producers and trading companies licenses to export ferroalloys, including ferrosilicon, silicomanganese, ferrotungsten, ferrochrome, ferrovanadium, in 2013.

The ferroalloy exporters on the list are classified into two groups with Group A comprising 107 companies while Group B has 148. The two groups are categorized according to the types of ferroalloys they export.

In a statement on its website, the ministry did not reveal export volumes allocated to each company.

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Comment – Australia - So much for Australia catching the critical metals wave. Sure, we do have two tungsten producers but the main one is German-owned. Yes, we mine antimony -- well, actually a Canadian company does that for us. There is a tin producer, except that the operation is half Chinese-owned.

Graphite? Well, we're getting there, but slowly. Rare earths? It has been 17 years (at least) since work started on any of the current projects. Vanadium production has -- at last -- begun in Western Australia, but what a saga behind that; the deposit was found in 1982 and production was seemingly all set to go by 1999.