re: thor will get this over 15c

Here's a snippet from a german site re info regarding tungsten supply and demand. Possibly favourable for Thor- long term if prices can remain at current levels. Throw in the u factor as an added bonus and BTV'S interests this creates an interesting scenario.

Apologies for the length of article.


Tungsten is a strategic metal for industrialized nations. There are few if any viable substitutes for tungsten in many critical applications. China today produces 80% of the world´s tungsten. The trouble with tungsten is that Chinese domestic demand is overtaking supply.
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.
Canada is a different story. It has a company, North American Tungsten Corporation, that by virtue of a single mine, the CanTung, in Canada´s (Federal) Yukon Territory, is the Western World´s largest tungsten producer. CanTung is currently producing at an annualized rate of 3,000 MT per year of tungsten from ore that is typically 1.6% of WO3. World production of tungsten is between 60,000 MT and 80,000 MT per year.
CanTung has had a checkered history, however. Discovered only in 1954 it has since opened and closed several times and had two or three different owners. It closed most recently in 2003 and reopened in 2005. Its continued operation depends on the market price of tungsten remaining high, and it looks like the expansion of heavy industry globally has finally created enough demand for tungsten to permanently keep the metal´s price high enough to insure the future of CanTung. The output of CanTung is not dedicated to the North American market. It is sold to the customer willing to pay the highest price. Lately, more and more these customers have been in Asia.
The United States industrial usage of tungsten is today around 20,000 MT per year. Around 15,000 MT, 75% of the total is now imported. The balance, 5,000 MT, or 25%, is recovered domestically by recycling from scra p. This is a very sharp drop even from as recently as 2000 in which year a USGS report, issued in late 2005, estimated that U.S. industry got 46% of its needs from the recycling of scra p containing tungsten.
America today produces no tungsten from domestic ore. Even in a situation where all of North American Tungsten Corporation´s output would go to American customers the U.S. would still be importing 60% of its needs from China.
The Chinese domestic economy, however, is absorbing more and more tungsten each year. China is rapidly eliminating the export subsidies it used to pay its tungsten producers, and it has closed almost half of the mines we know about. This has been said to be due to exhaustion of the ore deposits or of government regulations.
We can use molybdenum (Mo) for some of the applications instead of tungsten, but we are now already 100% dependent on imports for Mo metal and alloys due to U.S. environmental concerns about smelters. Mo concentrates that are produced in the U.S. are shipped to China for smelting and refining. Tungsten mining in the U.S. has ended completely due to predatory pricing and environmental issues.
The remaining light in the U.S. is that we still have long experienced companies that process tungsten containing scrAp to recover the tungsten values and further process that into new material for industrial use. Osram Sylvania in Towanda, Pennsylvania (today owned by Siemens of Germany) and Buffalo (New York) Tungsten Incorporated, a private venture, are two major companies still capable of processing tungsten ore as well as scra p in the U.S.
These companies and a few smaller ones maintain America´s ability to work tungsten (and other refractory metals as well). They have a bright future, because the demand for tungsten products is increasing much faster than the supply can be developed.