Nasdaq-listed tungsten miner Almonty Industries has entered into a long-term tungsten concentrate supply agreement with Wolfram Bergbau und Hütten (WBH), a subsidiary of the Sandvik Group, covering retreatment of the company’s existing tailings stockpile at the Los Santos mine in western Spain.

The agreement is intended to create an expedited tungsten supply solution with the ability to deliver concentrate in notably less time than the development of a traditional mine.

The agreement, which includes a conditional pay to play upfront $3-million one-time payment for the offtake rights, is structured on a take-or-pay basis and is entered into in anticipation of the restart of production at the Los Santos mine, an openpit scheelite skarn operation located about 50 km south of Salamanca that has been in planned care and maintenance since February 2020.

Material supplied under the agreement will be drawn from the retreatment of the mine’s existing tailings inventory.

For Almonty, the agreement establishes a committed route to market for a restarted EU asset before production resumes, together with customer capital to support reinstatement of the processing plant.

For WBH, the agreement adds a documented non-Chinese, EU-origin feed source to a smelter that supplies the Western hard-metal and powder-metallurgy industries.

The agreement pairs two operations built on recovering tungsten from material that has already been mined once.

At Los Santos, Almonty’s restart plan is centred on retreating the tailings inventory left behind by earlier processing rather than on new primary extraction. Through continuing tests and trials, the company has materially improved tungsten trioxide recovery from tailings retreatment.

WBH, which has been part of Sweden’s Sandvik Group since 2009, operates its refining and powder manufacturing complex at Sankt Martin im Sulmtal, Austria, where scheelite concentrate from its own Mittersill mine and concentrate purchased from around the world are processed alongside recycled secondary tungsten materials.

The facility is the only integrated tungsten smelting plant outside of Asia and Russia, and the Sandvik Group’s business unit to which it belongs also operates a dedicated tungsten recycling capacity.

The agreement comes ahead of a significant change in US defence procurement rules.

Effective January 1, 2027, restrictions on specified tungsten materials originating in China, Russia, North Korea and Iran extend back through the supply chain to the mining or production of tungsten ore or feedstock, making documented non-Chinese origin increasingly important for tungsten entering covered US defence supply chains.

Almonty CEO, chairperson and president Lewis Black says WBH is the only integrated tungsten smelter outside Asia and Russia, and recycling is central to how they operate which makes them a natural fit for what Almonty is doing at Los Santos, where the restart is built around recovering tungsten from material that has already been mined and processed once.

“What this agreement gives us is a take-or-pay commitment from a Sandvik Group company, index-linked pricing with a floor beneath it and a sharing of the financial requirements to reactivate the property. That combination is what allows us to bring an EU asset back into production with a defined route to market from the first shipment."

Black adds this is likely the first time tailings have been commercially passed in the West and is a culmination of technology that it has developed since the Los Santos mine was shuttered in 2020 owing to a depleted resource.

"If successful it will mean we have another tool to generate supply far quicker than opening of a mine and will continue to alleviate the supply squeeze. We would then also apply the same technology to our Panasqueira mines tailings and onwards to other abandoned European sites where we reclaim the site and at the same time recover material from the discarded tailings," Black explains. 

Using mobile tailings plants will expedite permit times significantly. "This is now the second supply programme we have been working on for the industrial base to sit alongside our recent announcement of small-scale miner collections in Rwanda. We have further programmes that we are currently working on, and this will be announced shortly,” Black concludes.