The Global Minerals Landscape and Strategic Concerns

China has controlled the extraction and production of rare earth elements and critical minerals for several decades. This dominance extends across materials fundamental to contemporary technology and defense applications, including components found in consumer electronics, specialized ammunition, and advanced military guidance systems. The concentration of supply chains within a single nation has created vulnerabilities for Western economies and security interests.

U.S. policymakers have intensified efforts to identify and develop alternative mineral sources in response to these geopolitical and economic concerns. Among these initiatives stands a notable focus on tungsten, a material increasingly recognized as essential to national defense and industrial capacity.

Tungsten’s Strategic Importance

Tungsten possesses unique physical properties that make it indispensable across multiple sectors. It has the highest melting point of any naturally occurring element—a quality that extends its utility far beyond simple industrial applications. The material finds use in electrical components, semiconductor manufacturing, and battery production. Its significance becomes particularly acute within defense-related manufacturing.

According to industry representatives, tungsten components appear throughout modern military systems—from armored vehicle construction to fighter aircraft development and rocket systems. Advanced artificial intelligence chips used in contemporary weapons systems also require tungsten in their production processes. The mineral’s presence is often concealed within complex assemblies, meaning its absence would render entire weapons systems unable to function.

The Sangdong Mine: Historical Context and Current Development

Located approximately 115 miles southeast of Seoul in South Korea, the Sangdong mining site has a documented history spanning more than a century. Japanese operations began around 1916, with extracted tungsten subsequently supporting Japan’s military production during World War II. Following Japan’s defeat and withdrawal from the Korean Peninsula, South Korean authorities assumed control of the facility.

Throughout much of the latter twentieth century, Sangdong served as a cornerstone of South Korea’s economic development, at certain periods contributing roughly 30 percent of the nation’s GDP. The mine’s strategic importance warranted visits from multiple South Korean presidents, reflecting its status as a symbol of national achievement and capability.

The 1990s brought significant challenges. China’s policies of aggressive price reduction and government-subsidized mineral production rendered many international mining operations economically unviable. The Sangdong facility subsequently ceased active operations and entered dormancy for approximately three decades.

During this extended period, Western nations, including the United States, maintained cost advantages by importing Chinese-produced materials. Over time, this economic advantage transformed into supply chain dependency—a vulnerability that became apparent as U.S.-China trade tensions escalated and Beijing implemented export restrictions on certain materials.

Current Operations and Supply Chain Restructuring

Almonty Industries, a Canadian mining company, acquired the Sangdong facility in 2015 and is now preparing to reactivate tungsten production. The company’s leadership has secured agreements with U.S. government entities to supply tungsten resources, with the company itself relocating its headquarters to New York. Current global tungsten supply concentrates significantly within China, which controls approximately 80 percent of worldwide production, while Russia and North Korea maintain smaller but notable reserves.

In addition to South Korean operations, Almonty operates facilities in Spain and Portugal and recently acquired mining rights in Montana, specifically motivated by considerations of American national security. The Montana facility, however, remains years away from operational status pending regulatory approvals and workforce development.

Challenges and Timeline for Implementation

Industry experts acknowledge that rebuilding Western mineral supply chains represents an extended and complex undertaking. Complete diversification of tungsten and other critical mineral sources is anticipated to require at least a decade. Significant obstacles include workforce development—skilled mining professionals remain scarce in Western nations—and the extensive time required to bring dormant or newly acquired facilities into productive operation.

Sangdong is projected to commence full-scale operations during the first quarter of 2026, with projected output reaching approximately 1.2 million tons of tungsten ore annually. The transition away from inexpensive Chinese materials is expected to create near-term industrial disruptions, including potential component shortages and elevated production costs for American manufacturers across multiple sectors.

U.S. Taps Historic South Korean Mine in Race to Loosen China’s Grip on Critical Minerals

When the first loads of freshly milled ore roll out of the century-old Sangdong mine in rural South Korea in early 2026, they will mark the United States’ most concrete step yet toward securing a non-Chinese supply of tungsten, a metal essential to modern weapons, electronics and emerging clean-energy technologies.

Once one of Asia’s most prolific sources of the ultra-hard element, Sangdong is being brought back to life by Canada-based Almonty Industries under contracts that will ship its production to U.S. defense and industrial customers. The move addresses a supply vulnerability that grew as China accumulated roughly 80 percent of global tungsten output and repeatedly signaled a willingness to leverage that dominance in trade disputes. According to a December 2025 analysis by Reuters, “the West’s pressing need to escape China’s chokehold on critical minerals” has pushed materials such as tungsten from obscurity to strategic priority Reuters.

Sangdong’s revival offers a revealing case study of how Washington, its allies and private operators are scrambling to answer six questions that define any supply-chain overhaul: who controls the resource, what makes it indispensable, when replacement supplies will arrive, where they will come from, why they are suddenly urgent, and how the transition will unfold.

Nested in forested mountains 115 miles southeast of Seoul, Sangdong has produced tungsten off and on since 1916. Japanese colonial authorities first developed the deposit to feed wartime factories; South Korea later expanded the mine, and by the 1970s its output accounted for roughly 30 percent of national GDP. A series of presidential visits cemented the site as a symbol of economic self-reliance. That stature crumbled in the 1990s, when Beijing flooded world markets with subsidized ores and concentrates, forcing higher-cost competitors—including Sangdong—to shutter for nearly three decades.

Almonty bought the dormant tunnels in 2015. At the time the purchase looked quixotic: Chinese suppliers still controlled prices, and Western manufacturers favored the cheapest source. Everything changed as U.S.-China trade tensions escalated, export controls tightened and lawmakers in Washington began racing to uncouple defense procurement from materials that could be withheld in a crisis. Tungsten quickly rose to the top tier of “critical minerals,” alongside lithium, rare earths and cobalt.

Almonty chief executive Lewis Black relocated the company’s headquarters to New York and signed long-term offtake agreements with U.S. government entities. Construction crews have since reinforced shafts, installed modern ventilation and rebuilt the concentrator that will churn through an estimated 1.2 million tons of ore each year. Full production is slated for the first quarter of 2026.

The single most compelling reason U.S. officials want Sangdong’s ore is tungsten’s unrivaled physical profile. With the highest melting point of any element and exceptional density, the metal appears in armor-piercing ammunition, aircraft counterweights, rocket nozzles and high-speed cutting tools. It is also embedded—often invisibly—in semiconductor fabrication and advanced battery chemistries. Engineers warn that without tungsten filaments, contacts or heat sinks, entire missile guidance systems and artificial-intelligence chips would fail.

Today, roughly four-fifths of that strategic feedstock originates in China’s Jiangxi and Hunan provinces. Russia and North Korea hold smaller but still significant reserves, a geopolitical wrinkle that further narrows reliable options for NATO buyers. U.S. dependence crystallized in 2020, when Beijing debated adding tungsten and other minerals to a list of retaliatory export bans. While the threat never materialized, the episode convinced Pentagon planners that supply lines needed a back-up.

Washington’s chosen fix—diversification—has proved easier to preach than to execute. The United States possesses tungsten resources in Nevada and Montana, but bringing those deposits online requires federal permitting, skilled labor and sizeable capital. In 2022 Almonty acquired rights to the long-dormant Brown’s Gulch property outside Butte, Montana, yet executives acknowledge that domestic output remains “years away” pending environmental reviews and training programs.

Against that backdrop, Sangdong offers a near-term bridge. South Korea already maintains a robust mining workforce, streamlined licensing and deep security ties with the United States. Under a bilateral defense agreement, export approvals for strategic materials can be fast-tracked, shortening timelines that would stretch far longer at home. Shipping concentrates across the Pacific is still slower than trucking them from Montana, but with tungsten prices hovering well above the break-even threshold set by Chinese costs, the economics support the voyage.

Even so, logistical headaches loom. Industry analysts caution that rewiring a supply chain is not as simple as replacing one ore source with another. American smelters and fabricators optimized their furnaces for Chinese-grade concentrates; switching feedstock can require recalibration and temporary shutdowns. Black estimates that U.S. manufacturers could face intermittent shortages and higher component costs over the next two years as they adjust to Sangdong’s material specifications.

Another obstacle is workforce depth. After decades of outsourcing, the West lacks experienced geologists, miners and metallurgists. Almonty has drafted veterans from its operations in Spain and Portugal to train Korean crews, but similar talent pools remain thin in the United States. The company hopes that a successful Sangdong ramp-up will draw new entrants into mining schools and apprenticeship programs, yet educators say it could take a decade to close the skills gap.

None of those hurdles lessen the urgency. Congress has expanded funding under the Defense Production Act to subsidize processing plants for critical minerals; the Pentagon has added tungsten alloys to its stockpile shopping list; and the Department of Energy now includes the element in grant programs aimed at battery innovation. Taken together, the measures reflect a strategic shift first articulated in the Reuters report: every mineral is now critical when adversaries control its tap.

For South Korea, the mine’s resurrection also revives a piece of industrial heritage. Local officials in Jeongseon County predict that once steady employment returns, ancillary businesses—from machine-part suppliers to logistics firms—will follow, lifting a region that lost thousands of jobs when Sangdong closed. Community leaders, mindful of past booms and busts, are already debating how to parlay the renewed activity into longer-term economic diversity.

What comes next hinges on execution. If Sangdong meets its production target, the United States will secure about 10 percent of global tungsten supply from an allied nation, moderating but not eliminating Chinese leverage. Should Montana and other Western projects clear regulatory and financial obstacles, Beijing’s share could fall below a majority by the early 2030s, loosening what one congressional aide recently called “the tightest valve in the defense supply chain.”

Analysts warn, however, that China is unlikely to concede market share quietly. Its producers can still depress world prices, and its government can adopt fresh export quotas that spike volatility. For that reason, security planners see Sangdong as both proof of concept and cautionary tale: diversification must be broad, not singular, lest a new bottleneck emerge.

Perspective and Implications

In strategic terms, the tungsten scramble illustrates the broader stakes of the energy transition and digitized warfare. As batteries, sensors and AI processors proliferate, materials once confined to specialty industries become omnipresent. The risk is not merely price shocks but the potential for geopolitical coercion—choking supply to bend an adversary’s policy. Sangdong’s restart shows how allied coordination can mitigate that risk, but it also underscores the cost and complexity. Re-establishing a full ore-to-alloy ecosystem requires sustained investment, political will and public acceptance of mining in places long removed from the industry.

Comparisons with rare earth efforts suggest that capturing first-mover advantage matters. When Australia’s Lynas Corp. secured early Pentagon support, it quickly became the only significant non-Chinese supplier of rare earth oxides, positioning Canberra as a linchpin partner. Sangdong could play a similar role for tungsten. Yet precedent also cautions that without downstream capacity—processing plants, powder metallurgists, component fabricators—raw ore may still end up dependent on foreign conversion, muting strategic gains. U.S. agencies therefore face a dual imperative: underwrite extraction abroad and rebuild domestic refining at home.

Ultimately, the Sangdong project is less a solitary success than a bellwether. If allied governments can synchronize policy and capital flows across multiple minerals—not only tungsten but also gallium, graphite and niobium—the stranglehold Reuters described may loosen. If they cannot, Washington could find itself repeating today’s scramble with the next obscure element to enter the strategic spotlight.

Sources

• https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/every-mineral-is-critical-new-metals-age-2025-12-29/