UK Backs Tungsten West With 71 Million Pounds to Restart Devon Tungsten Mine

The UK government has moved to secure a domestic source of tungsten, taking a direct stake in the company preparing to restart the Hemerdon mine in Devon. On 25 August 2026 the National Wealth Fund, a body wholly owned by HM Treasury, confirmed an investment of up to 71 million pounds in Tungsten West, the AIM-listed owner of the mine on the outskirts of Plymouth. The package completes the funding needed to bring the site back to full production after eight years of idleness.

The financing is split between a 36 million pound equity subscription, which gives the state a stake of around 7 percent in the company, and up to 35 million pounds of lending covering construction, commissioning and processing costs. Part of the proceeds will repay the 25 million dollar bridging facility that Tungsten West secured on 21 May 2026 to fund the first phase of the restart. New shares issued under the subscription agreement are due to be admitted to trading on AIM on or around 27 August 2026. The National Wealth Fund has also entered a shareholder relationship agreement giving it the right to nominate one non-executive director to the board, with a board observer in place until that appointment is made.

The most strategically significant element is not the cash but the offtake. The deal opens an exclusive negotiation period in which the government can secure the right to buy up to half of the tungsten output set out in the mine's 2025 feasibility study. That agreement is being negotiated separately and has not yet been signed. If concluded, it would give British defence, aerospace and energy manufacturers first call on a metal that is currently almost impossible to buy outside Chinese supply channels at predictable prices.

That scarcity is the reason the investment happened. China accounts for more than 75 percent of world tungsten production and over half of known reserves. On 4 February 2025 its Ministry of Commerce placed several tungsten products, including ammonium paratungstate, under export licensing with immediate effect, part of the retaliation against United States tariffs. Mining quotas have been trimmed for three consecutive years, with a further reduction of around 8 percent applied for 2026, and January 2026 brought a new dual-use items catalogue alongside the designation of a short list of companies authorised to handle tungsten exports. By early 2026 Chinese tungsten exports were running roughly 40 percent below the previous year.

Prices have reset accordingly. The European benchmark for ammonium paratungstate stood in the range of 900 to 940 dollars per metric tonne unit in January 2026, climbed to between 1,650 and 1,900 dollars by mid-February, and passed 3,000 dollars per metric tonne unit by late April, a rise of more than 550 percent since the Chinese controls were introduced. Buyers report exhausted stockpiles rather than speculative buying behind the move, and military demand tied to conflict in the Middle East has tightened the market further. Japanese semiconductor firms have been told that delivery times for tungsten have stretched from three months to nine, and European defence groups have run strategic inventory checks. In May 2026 the European Union shortlisted tungsten, rare earths and gallium for its first coordinated stockpile.

Hemerdon holds one of the largest tungsten resources in the world and was last worked by Wolf Minerals, which ceased production in 2018. Tungsten West acquired the site in 2019 and has spent the years since redesigning the process flow sheet, adding ore sorting and crushing capacity and refurbishing the existing plant, building on roughly 300 million dollars of capital already sunk into the pit and infrastructure. The company has kept a phased restart plan: fines gravity processing in the third quarter of 2026, the coarse gravity circuit in the fourth quarter, and full commissioning in the first quarter of 2027. Tungsten and tin concentrates were produced during test work in July 2026 and completion testing is under way. At full rate the project is expected to support around 350 direct jobs and to deliver close to a fifth of primary tungsten supply outside China.

The price surge has transformed the project's economics. The August 2025 feasibility study assumed ammonium paratungstate at 400 dollars per metric tonne unit and tin at 32,500 dollars per tonne. By late January 2026 those prices were 1,313 dollars and 55,953 dollars respectively, lifting the modelled net present value from 190 million dollars to 1.7 billion dollars on the company's own figures.

For buyers, the practical relief is still some way off. Nothing in this announcement adds tungsten units to the Western market before the fourth quarter of 2026 at the earliest, and volumes will only become meaningful once the full plant is running in 2027. Analysts have warned that even mines starting construction now would not add significant global supply before 2030. A government offtake covering half of Hemerdon's output would also reduce the tonnage reaching the open European market, so merchant buyers should not assume the restart will loosen spot availability. Procurement teams exposed to tungsten carbide tooling, armour-piercing components, turbine parts and semiconductor films should continue to treat long lead times and elevated pricing as the base case through 2027.