11/20/09 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania – It’s pretty clear that without tungsten, a lot of things in this world will — literally — grind to a halt.
Now let’s ask, where’s the world’s tungsten? Here’s a recent pie chart of world tungsten reserves.
In addition to its large reserve base (57%), China presently controls about 75% of the world’s output of tungsten. Characteristically, China’s national resource policy is to ensure that the long-term needs of its own industrial base are satisfied. In the past three years, the Chinese have begun to reduce export volumes, while at the same time diverting more and more tungsten output to domestic industry or to foreign companies that locate plants in China.
Does that sound familiar? It’s the same thing that the Chinese are doing with rare earths and other elements, like indium.
Here’s where things stand. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, China dominates world tungsten mining and primary processing. Tungsten availability to non-Chinese markets is tightening, and will doubtless continue to decline. Equally important, China is now becoming a major importer of tungsten concentrates and scrap materials.
Ongoing rapid growth in demand within China will ensure that competition for raw materials between Chinese and non-Chinese processors will continue and intensify. So it’s clear that there’s now an urgent need for increased tungsten output outside China.
Byron King
Byron King is the managing editor of Outstanding Investments and Energy & Scarcity Investor. He is a Harvard-trained geologist who has traveled to every U.S. state and territory and six of the seven continents. He has conducted site visits to mineral deposits in 26 countries and deep-water oil fields in five oceans. This provides him with a unique perspective on the myriad of investment opportunities in energy and mineral exploration. He has been interviewed by dozens of major print and broadcast media outlets including The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Washington Post, MSN Money, MarketWatch, Fox Business News, and PBS Newshour.
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Yeah, you need to get the cores of those “gold” bars from somewhere!