World is running out of tungsten?

Municipal waste dumps should have significant tungsten from all the discarded lightbulbs. Would that be competitive with natural tungsten ore? Concentration may be low, but OTOH it's pure metal.

I've read several articles over the last 5-or-so years indicating that numerous metals are becoming relatively scarce, and that China likely has the largest yet untapped supplies of quite a few of the very rare materials needed for future technological advances.

The future of mining/extracting of needed metals may be new methods in landfill recovery technology. The waste companies will end up holding the futures' supply of scarce metals.

A friend photographed his aerial view flying over a long ago closed copper mining operation in NM.. the vast scale of those mines can't be appreciated by looking at pictures in textbooks. When copper supplies get low in the not too distant future, manufacturers will have to shift to other alternative materials for conductors.

Even if metals can be recovered from landfills, it would probably have to be done by an electrolysis-type process since much of the landfill metals have likely been reduced to a slurry.

Time to start hoarding TIG tips?

Uranium has some similar properties- it's tough enough that some ballistic warheads use it as the outer re-entry material, and it also plays a role in the nuke going off (part of the secondary, I think).

Dave

China seems to be playing games with rare-earth commodities, too.

I wonder if it's an intentional attempt to screw up world markets, for economic or military reasons, or if it's just a sea change in attitude at the top. This could all be because someone's drunken brother-in-law got appointed Minister of Mining & Metals (to replace someone else's drunken brother-in-law), suddenly realized that they were going to run out, and panicked.

I wonder how many Tungsten deposits there are in the continental US that might be exploited if the price goes up enough.

Hundreds. The US has quite a bit of tungsten. Canada does, too, in the Yukon, and theirs is high-quality ore.

We don't mine it for the same reason we don't mine molybdenum: environmental issues. And they're heavy issues, involving questions like, "How soon do you want to die to get some more tungsten?"

Rising prices *should* encourage solutions to the environmental problems. Then markets will prevail.

Meantime, let's suck up all we can from China. I'd rather they turn out thousands of crippled mutants than us. d8-)

Whoop! I got tungsten mixed up with molybdenum mining, and toxicity. Actually, I mentally got them reversed.

Moly is highly toxic. Tungsten and its compounds are not. Most of the environmentl problems with tungsten involve leeching of soluble compounds from tailing ponds and the like.

There is more to i that just that, though.

China drove the price down to the point of putting competitors out of business.

If the price rises to the point where it is economically viable to start mining again, they could dump the market and run everybody off again.

I doubt it. They would run smack into WTO regulations, which Europe and Japan now seem willing to charge and enforce, along with us.

As long as China is supplying tungsten (and rare earths) without prejudice against foreign buyers, it doesn't hurt us that they dominate the market. But now it is charged that they are squeezing the foreign market in order to gain an advantage with the products manufactured from those metals.

That has put them in the sights of all of their customers. We'll see action from the WTO soon, and we'll find out whether enforcement of their regulations has any effect -- or any teeth.

In any case, we aren't going to have to beg them for tungsten. We have quite a bit of it, and we will have it when we need it.

Forbes thinks you have your head buried somewhere, Ed...

Page 2

_Prior to 2001, Tungsten miners looked for new sources even as they harvested existing ore in order to guarantee a continuous supply. But in the early 2000s, China flooded the market with inexpensive tungsten. That, coupled with the recession in 2008-2009, drove the price of tungsten down to the point where many mines went out of business and others found it too expensive to continue exploration. Consequently, from 2009-2011 the search for new sources of tungsten dried up._

With China recently deciding to restrict exports and buy up as much tungsten as it can, demand has exploded and the search is on again. Unfortunately, the timetable ? from exploration to building a new mine or reopening an existing one to the actual production of tungsten concentrate ? is typically a two-to-three year process for those mines currently extracting tungsten for export. In the case of companies that are drilling for (and find) new supplies of tungsten ?from scratch,? the cycle to production is at least three to five years. Bottom line: there is no new significant supply of tungsten expected on the market before 2013.

That may explain Berkshire?s move, and why, when the price of most commodities plunged during the second half of 2011 ? some by as much as

60 percent ? tungsten prices remained stable at $430-$445 per MTU (metric ton unit) ? nearly double what they were in 2009. Some analysts predict the price could reach even higher levels in 2012, which is not unrealistic when you consider that some producers state that demand is so high they could ship tungsten at a rate of one container per day ? versus the current rate of one per week ? if they had the capacity.

Given the short supply of available tungsten on the world market, industries that are depending on it more and more (such as technology) appear to have limited options. In fact, if you view a Warren Buffet type of move ? where a company acquires a tungsten operation/mine for its own private use ?as unrealistic for most businesses, then there?s really only one other viable possibility: working with and encouraging those companies (outside of China) that are currently supplying tungsten to increase supply and meet demand.

_The risk of not doing so could result in China choosing to repeat its earlier policy of flooding the market, which would not only drive some suppliers out of business ? but potentially create a virtual, worldwide monopoly with prices and supply dictated by China._ Recent rises in the price of oil ? again ? and the effect it has had on the worldwide economy should tell us that?s not the way to go.

There aqre something like 500 mineable sites in the US, Richard. And there are a number of mines that are shut down, ready to go if the economics swing in their favor.

I'd have to go searching for the numbers and I'm not that interested, frankly.

Make of this what you want, but I worked alongside of Forbes reporters, years ago, on steel industry press jaunts. Most of what they knew about the steel industry they learned from me, and they still got a lot of it wrong. d8-) I don't have very high regard for their industrial reporting. They're mostly good writers, though.

Ed, your ego is down right amazing...

"A man sees what he want's to see and disregards the rest"

As I said, make of it what you will. A young female reporter from _Metalworking News/American Metal Market_ tailed me around on another press junket. They were supposed to be the industry experts on the metals-producing industries. I thought she was hitting on me. No such luck...she just wanted to be sure she heard the questions I asked of the industry people. And I didn't learn that until I'd bought her a couple of drinks. d8-)

If you knew the reporters who get stuck on the industry beat at news and business magazines, none of this would surprise you. We had a really vile nickname for the top industry reporter for _The New York Times_. He was hopeless.

Forbes is expert at finance and at corporate soap operas. End of that story.

BTW, if you remember back around 33 or 34 years, you'll recall we went through this exact situation with cobalt. The USSR produced most of the world's supply, and they were squeezing us hard. It all blew over, as this situation probably will. We may have to rattle China's windows with some WTO action.

Page 2

has some similar comments: "The United States has hundreds, if not thousands, of sites on which commercial quantities of tungsten have been identified. The website TheWeekendMiner.com lists hundreds of such sites just in California. Some are former operating mines closed due to the activity of environmentalists or, before that occurred, closed due to low tungsten prices, but now unable to reopen due mainly to environmental issues. ... there are three ways to stop the production of a natural resource in America: Raise environmental issues; Lower the price of imports, i.e., exercise predatory pricing; or Find a cheaper substitute for the material. A combination of factors 1 and 2 above completely stopped the mining of tungsten in the United States by the 1990s. And, as the Chinese have learned and practice to their advantage, once environmental issues are raised in the U.S. they never go away. Predatory pricing doesn't always work, because it reduces revenue for everyone not just the targeted industry, but once you add environmental issues you can then raise back the price to your heart's content, because in America environment trumps economic value in mining every time."

Anyone who has spent any time with reporters knows that it doesn't take much ego to recognize that they don't understand most of what they're reporting.

Clever folks will take filaments to the recycling center, and sell them to the recycle guys.

Christopher A. Young Learn more about Jesus

.

Municipal waste dumps should have significant tungsten from all the discarded lightbulbs. Would that be competitive with natural tungsten ore? Concentration may be low, but OTOH it's pure metal.

Yes. Been there, done that.

Ed, are you still a reporter?

Yup.

And suspicious old cynics will wonder if this is what the light bulb laws were all about in the first place??

Sure. That's most of what I do. Tonight, though, I'm writing a 6-page brochure about a new machine tool. That's "advertising collateral copywriting." It pays about 2 -3 times as much as freelance reporting, so I mix some of it in.

The "Free world reserve" - excluding China, North Korea and the USSR (age of book and what is going on today ??) - is estimated at about 295,

000 tons of metal content Tungsten. The other three countries have about 4 times as much as the ROW.

At this same time, the us was producing 4,000 tons from domestic mines.

This is from my "Mineral Facts and Problems" 1965 Edition. US Dept of the Interior. Bureau of Mines Bulletin 630. (I have not found a newer version. I bout this new when it was printed.)

Mart> >