Elmet Signs $1.8 Billion Tungsten Offtake Deal for UK’s Hemerdon Mine

The Elmet Group has signed a binding eight-year offtake agreement with Tungsten West to buy the tungsten concentrate produced at the Hemerdon mine in Devon, England, the companies announced on September 22, 2026. Elmet expects to take more than 1,000 metric tonnes a year of concentrate from the site, an arrangement the companies value at more than £1.4 billion ($1.8 billion) over the life of the deal at prevailing tungsten prices, and worth more than $230 million a year at current market rates for ammonium paratungstate.

A mine with a long, interrupted history

Hemerdon holds one of the largest tungsten deposits outside China, and it has been worked in fits and starts for over a century: first opened after tungsten was discovered there in 1915 and needed for wartime industry, closed when the First World War ended, reopened during the Second World War for the same reason, and then redeveloped as a modern mine that produced tungsten and tin between 2015 and 2018 before its previous operator ran into financial trouble. Tungsten West took over the site and has spent recent years working to restart production on a more durable footing, a process that includes securing UK government backing: the National Wealth Fund has committed £71 million in equity and lending to help fund the restart, in exchange for the right to procure half of the mine’s annual tungsten output.

A US buyer built around a defense funding commitment

The Elmet Group is a vertically integrated US tungsten manufacturer that the companies say is backed by $450 million in capital from the US Department of War, part of a commitment announced September 14, 2026, alongside up to $2 billion in potential defense stockpile contracts tied to expanding domestic and allied tungsten supply. The Hemerdon deal extends that US funding relationship across the Atlantic, linking a UK mine restart directly to a US effort to reduce reliance on Chinese-controlled tungsten supply chains for a metal used in armor-piercing ammunition, cutting tools, drilling equipment and other applications where hardness and heat resistance matter. Under the agreement, Tungsten West and Elmet said they intend to increase production volumes over time as Hemerdon ramps toward full-scale output, which the companies are targeting by the end of the first quarter of 2027.

Part of a wider Western push on critical minerals

China’s dominance of global tungsten processing has made the metal a recurring flashpoint in trade and export-control disputes, echoing similar dynamics around rare earth elements, where Beijing’s export licensing has repeatedly disrupted supply chains that defense and energy industries depend on. The Hemerdon-Elmet agreement fits a pattern of Western governments backing specific mine-to-manufacturer supply chains for individual critical minerals rather than relying on broad-based trade policy alone; the parallel use of tariffs to support the same goal was visible earlier this year when Section 232 tariffs pushed US solar module prices up more than 40% in an effort to rebuild domestic manufacturing capacity in a different but related supply chain.

What the deal is worth, and to whom

The headline £1.4 billion figure represents the full contract value at current commodity prices and exchange rates over the agreement’s eight-year term, a figure that will move with tungsten markets rather than being fixed today; the more immediate number is the roughly $230 million in annual offtake value at today’s APT prices once Hemerdon reaches the delivery volumes specified in the contract. For Tungsten West, the deal provides a long-term buyer for output it has struggled to secure reliably in the past, while for Elmet and its Department of War backers, it locks in supply from one of the few large non-Chinese tungsten sources outside direct US or allied government control, a distinction that has become increasingly valuable as Western defense and energy supply chains look to diversify away from Chinese-processed critical minerals.

Sources

• GlobeNewswire, “The Elmet Group Secures Long-Term Tungsten Offtake Agreement with Tungsten West’s Hemerdon Mine,” September 22, 2026 — deal terms, volume commitment, contract value, Department of War funding context. globenewswire.com
• Mining.com, “Tungsten West, Elmet ink $1.8 billion offtake deal for Hemerdon mine,” September 2026 — independent confirmation of deal value and production targets. mining.com
• Industrial Info Resources, “U.K. Mining its Own Tungsten Critical Mineral” — UK National Wealth Fund financing terms and government offtake rights. industrialinfo.com
• Tungsten West plc, project overview — Hemerdon mine history and deposit scale. tungstenwest.com

Illustrative image. Photo: Tmy350, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons — source