Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News.
Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Odd Lots podcast.
Speaker 3: I'm Jill Wisenthal and I'm Tracy Alloway.
Speaker 2: Tracy, I'm in a mood of a little bit of
Speaker 2: heartbreak this morning.
Speaker 4: Oh mood of a little bit of heartbreak. That sounds
Speaker 4: like a country single, doesn't it.
Speaker 2: That's right.
Speaker 4: No, you're singing. I don't know what you're sad about.
Speaker 4: You're singing the Tungsten Cube.
Speaker 2: The Tungsten Blues. I'm actually a little shook. In twenty
Speaker 2: twenty two, remember the tungsten cube hype.
Speaker 3: Unfortunately I bought.
Speaker 2: One and it was the only and it feels so good,
Speaker 2: like a nice big block of tungsten your hand. It
Speaker 2: feels so good. It's so unexpectedly heavy, probably like a
Speaker 2: little like wild autism, like I like related like sort
Speaker 2: of like heavy things like weighted blankives, some heavy objects.
Speaker 2: And I was going to bring it to this episode
Speaker 2: because I know you love props. Sometimes I do like
Speaker 2: a good and I was like, I'll bring a prop.
Speaker 2: I couldn't find it on my desk, so we did
Speaker 2: a desk move recently and either somehow, I hope I
Speaker 2: shall find it. Either it got misplaced in the move,
Speaker 2: or because the value of tungsten has gone up so much,
Speaker 2: maybe someone stolen.
Speaker 3: I think I know which one it is, Joe, I
Speaker 3: think I know.
Speaker 2: Let me just have a messy desk too.
Speaker 4: For listeners who were lucky enough to have missed out
Speaker 4: on the tungsten cube craze, there was a moment where,
Speaker 4: for some reason it was mostly crypto bros Onto it
Speaker 4: all seemed to go nuts for buying tungsten cubes and
Speaker 4: then showing pictures of them on social media and then promptly,
Speaker 4: like Joe, forgot about them. And actually, this is a
Speaker 4: really good analogy for what we're about to talk about,
Speaker 4: because we're going to.
Speaker 3: Talk about tungsten.
Speaker 4: The metal and tungsten, it turns out, has gone through
Speaker 4: these cycles where for a few years it's an absolutely
Speaker 4: a cent show strategic asset that you need in order
Speaker 4: to declare war, and then as soon as the war
Speaker 4: is over, you kind of forget about it. You still
Speaker 4: need it for some industrial applications or for novelty dusk, yes,
Speaker 4: but then you find out that you need it again.
Speaker 4: And so there's this like long running kind of boom.
Speaker 2: Bus cycle I'm really sad.
Speaker 4: There's a demonstrative example of how everyone seems to forget
Speaker 4: about tungsten except China.
Speaker 2: I'mctually I'm actually really said about this. This is by
Speaker 2: the way, when I say one thing, please please.
Speaker 3: I know where you can find some tungsten.
Speaker 2: In the West, in Western Australia, in the bahamash.
Speaker 3: Really FTX famous, that's right, that's right.
Speaker 2: Yes, this is.
Speaker 4: Gonna install a giant tungsten cube at their headquarters in
Speaker 4: the Bahamas. And everyone seems to have forgotten this bit
Speaker 4: of the Michael Lewis book. At the very very end
Speaker 4: of Michael Lewis's book on Sam Bateman Freed, he says
Speaker 4: he found the giant tungsten cube in a storage unit
Speaker 4: in the jungle, and it's probably still there because no
Speaker 4: one would wind of move.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so would be so heavy. I have this. It's
Speaker 2: actually depressed me.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 2: One of the reasons, like I didn't buy the cube
Speaker 2: is a quote investment unquote. But I think I've always said,
Speaker 2: you know, one of the things that people don't talk
Speaker 2: about with hard asset investing is that you actually pay
Speaker 2: a negative interest rate because a you have to either
Speaker 2: pay for storage constant storage like a safe or something
Speaker 2: like that, or if you haven't or eventually security guards. Right,
Speaker 2: if you really had a lot of gold or silver
Speaker 2: or whatever. But then if you don't have that, if
Speaker 2: you don't do that, then and every year there is
Speaker 2: like a non zero percent chance that you lose your
Speaker 2: asset you misplace it. Yeah, maybe you have like some
Speaker 2: keys to a crypto wallet that you lose or whatever.
Speaker 2: So that is a way of replicating except sort of
Speaker 2: stochastically a negative interest rate. I think I'm gonna find it.
Speaker 2: I didn't totally forget about it. I had it on
Speaker 2: my desk even as recently as a few months ago,
Speaker 2: and I have some very messy drawers, so I think
Speaker 2: I actually I'm not a I haven't actually given up hope.
Speaker 4: I'll create a bet on a prediction mark right about
Speaker 4: whether you'll find your tonguesten cube.
Speaker 2: But anyway, setting as a desk toys, it turns out
Speaker 2: tungsten is actually, as you said, important sometimes. You know,
Speaker 2: it's not like copper or oil where it's important all
Speaker 2: the times. It seems to be a commodity that's important
Speaker 2: sometimes and that creates as you said, interesting diameters.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and it seems to be growing more important because
Speaker 4: going back to the military applications of tungsten, we've had
Speaker 4: a lot of wars recently, and tungsten apparently is in
Speaker 4: a lot of cruise missiles and drone shrapnel and.
Speaker 3: Things like that.
Speaker 4: And at the same time, like a lot of other
Speaker 4: I guess, rare earth metals, it's also becoming more important
Speaker 4: to our vision of the future, to the AI build
Speaker 4: out things like that, So it's getting more attention. And
Speaker 4: of course, again like a lot of rare earths, there's
Speaker 4: a limited supply and it seems to be dominated by
Speaker 4: one particular country.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's right, this is the thing. There's a lot
Speaker 2: of it, but it's expensive and low margin and typical
Speaker 2: times and so you're just like, yeah, it's like distributed.
Speaker 2: There's some countries that are friendly to the US that
Speaker 2: are like more seen as geostrategic rivals. But in normal times,
Speaker 2: it's just not worth the squeeze to actually spend to
Speaker 2: spend the time and environmental costs of minding it. So
Speaker 2: we should talk about the current state of tungsten in
Speaker 2: a state of heightened geopolitical tension. Let's yeah, anyway, I'm
Speaker 2: very excited to say, we really do have the perfect guest,
Speaker 2: someone who we probably should have had on odd lots
Speaker 2: a long time ago. One of our colleagues coming to
Speaker 2: us from Sydney. We're gonna be speaking, of course, to
Speaker 2: Bloomberg Opinion calumnist David Fickling, who's just done a big
Speaker 2: reported piece about a tungsten mine in Australia, and what
Speaker 2: this tells us about all the things that we're talking about. David,
Speaker 2: Thank you so much for joining us. How are you doing,
Speaker 2: great to see you. Thank you so much for staying
Speaker 2: up late to chat with us. Why would we talk
Speaker 2: about war, geo political uncertainty, all this stuff? What is
Speaker 2: it about tungsten that suddenly becomes important?
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean tungsten.
Speaker 6: You can look at it as a bit like a
Speaker 6: sort of century old missing prediction market for war basically,
Speaker 6: and I didn't realize this until I started looking at tungsten,
Speaker 6: but actually, if you go back right to the turn
Speaker 6: of the twentieth century, it has operated like a prediction
Speaker 6: market in the sense that people making real investments, once
Speaker 6: they get a sense that war is a real possibility,
Speaker 6: they put real money behind tungsten. And you can see
Speaker 6: the sort of process with that if you're operating a
Speaker 6: tungsten mine, then you're in touch with tungsten traders, and
Speaker 6: the tungsten traders are in touch with military materiel companies
Speaker 6: who get the first big orders when there's a real
Speaker 6: prospect of war. And this mine I visited has this
Speaker 6: extraordinary history where it first opened in nineteen seventeen during
Speaker 6: World War One. It closed at the end of the
Speaker 6: war because then the war ended, no one needed the
Speaker 6: tungsten anymore, and the European government sold it for all
Speaker 6: their tungsten stockpiles. Opens up again nineteen thirty eight before
Speaker 6: World War II starts. It goes through a bit of
Speaker 6: a struggle after World War Two, but then it's more
Speaker 6: or less rescued by the Korean War. It closes down
Speaker 6: almost altogether round about when Sputnick is launched and people
Speaker 6: start rethinking what wars are going to be like. But
Speaker 6: then it sort of keeps going through the Vietnam War
Speaker 6: and finally closes down the Cold War, and it's been closed.
Speaker 6: This mine it's on a beach in an island just
Speaker 6: off the coast of Tasmane. It's a pretty isolated wind
Speaker 6: sweat spot in the Roaring forties. In nineteen ninety it
Speaker 6: closed down, the mine flooded, and it was basically been
Speaker 6: ignored for most of the last three decades, and it's
Speaker 6: now finally starting up again at this very moment when
Speaker 6: war is looking more likely.
Speaker 2: So this is a story. But just to be clear,
Speaker 2: what is it about the properties of tungsten such that
Speaker 2: it is important for material.
Speaker 6: I mean, it's the same thing with the tungsten cube
Speaker 6: on your desk. It's incredibly dense. I think one of
Speaker 6: the things that attracts the crypto roose to tungsten is
Speaker 6: it's not just incredibly dense, it's about the same density
Speaker 6: as bold, but it also has this ridiculously high melting
Speaker 6: point but more than three thousand degrees celsius, so sort
Speaker 6: of three times hotter than lava, Tungsten will still be solid.
Speaker 6: And that means that if you're trying to make projectiles
Speaker 6: with it. For instance, if you're trying to make an
Speaker 6: armor piercing projectile to get through the armor plating of
Speaker 6: a tank, it's going to hold its shape. Most materials
Speaker 6: are going to sort of turn into a mushroom and
Speaker 6: dissipate their force. This is going to go straight through
Speaker 6: to the inside of the tank, so that'll be very effective.
Speaker 6: Or also a thing that's more current at the moment,
Speaker 6: say you're having a sort of cluster munition, a sort
Speaker 6: of a warhead that explodes into a sort of distributed
Speaker 6: charge so that you can take out a command post
Speaker 6: or a drone. With tungsten, you can have a bunch
Speaker 6: of very tiny tungsten pellets and they will make a
Speaker 6: sort of metal rain that will smash anything in the vicinity.
Speaker 6: And because it's so dense, it's going to be much
Speaker 6: more effective than steel. So for all these reasons, it's
Speaker 6: just very useful for military purposes.
Speaker 5: And of course if.
Speaker 6: War is pending, people pay any price for those sorts
Speaker 6: of physical properties.
Speaker 4: Getting hit in the head by a tungsten cube would
Speaker 4: certainly be painful and damaging. Talk to us about the
Speaker 4: non military applications, because it's possible, you know, you wrote
Speaker 4: about this new mind that's restarting. Maybe what we should
Speaker 4: get into what the investors actually say the reasons behind
Speaker 4: them opening up this mine. Maybe it's because they're predicting
Speaker 4: more tungsten demand because of additional military conflict. Maybe they
Speaker 4: just think there's going to be more demand for, like,
Speaker 4: I don't know, carbide tooling or something like that. What
Speaker 4: else is tungsten used for? And then also what does
Speaker 4: we should also talk about how colorful some of these
Speaker 4: characters are. What is your merry band of tungsten investors
Speaker 4: say about their reasons for opening it.
Speaker 6: You've done your research, Tracy, I mean this carbide tooling,
Speaker 6: I could tell that was the I mean, the key
Speaker 6: reason you will use tungsten is again because it's very hard.
Speaker 5: It's basically drill bits. If you're in an.
Speaker 6: Auto shop, then you'll use the drill bit for working metal.
Speaker 6: If you're in a mine, it will be on the
Speaker 6: end of a drill bit there, or in an oil well,
Speaker 6: anywhere where you need to drill something very hard. Tungsten
Speaker 6: carbide is a mixture of tungsten and carbon, as the
Speaker 6: name suggests, and it's the best value way to get
Speaker 6: incredibly incredibly sort of powerful sort of drilling power. And
Speaker 6: that's actually essentially in all sorts of ways. But I
Speaker 6: think we don't often anticipate. I was in the course
Speaker 6: of working on this article, I was reading something about
Speaker 6: during World War two when Nazi Germany, when we can
Speaker 6: talk about this later was very concerned about its supplies
Speaker 6: of tungsten, and they were running short of supplies of tungsten,
Speaker 6: and one of the things they did is to conserve.
Speaker 5: It for the weapons industry.
Speaker 6: They stopped using it in tooling, and you hear these
Speaker 6: reports of Allied soldiers capturing German tanks late in World
Speaker 6: War Two and just going this equipment's terrible because they
Speaker 6: didn't have the tungsten car vibe for the tooling.
Speaker 5: So the machinery wasn't working very well.
Speaker 6: The gears were all out of whack, and nothing was
Speaker 6: working very well. And so most tungsten, now eighty percent
Speaker 6: of it is just tungsten carvide its tools, and you
Speaker 6: can buy it in your local toolshop. You'll find it everywhere,
Speaker 6: and it's a fairly fairly boring hum drum element.
Speaker 5: The other things, there are a few other uses for it.
Speaker 6: Like almost every critical mineral, it gets used in some
Speaker 6: weird processes in oil refineries. If you're as integritical mineral design,
Speaker 6: there's always like five percent there's always used as some
Speaker 6: weird catalysts in oil refinery. And that's the case here.
Speaker 6: Another one that's actually quite interesting again because of these
Speaker 6: sort of high temperature, high strength properties. If you're making
Speaker 6: turbine blades, it's very important for turbine blades a lot
Speaker 6: of you know in a jet turbine, but also in
Speaker 6: a gas turbine which gets used a lot of powering
Speaker 6: data centers and things in LNG compressors. About up to
Speaker 6: ten percent of that ally might be tungsten as well,
Speaker 6: So there's a certain amount of demand for that, and
Speaker 6: there is even supposedly a use in some AI chips
Speaker 6: for tungsten as well, but the quantities there will be
Speaker 6: absolutely tiny, because of course anything involved in chip making
Speaker 6: the raw materials is just infinitesimal because the chips themselves
Speaker 6: are so small.
Speaker 4: So the investors in this mind that's reopening the Dolphin mine,
Speaker 4: you know, I call them a colorful bunch earlier, and
Speaker 4: it really does. I think you make this point in
Speaker 4: your piece, but it really does sound like a cast
Speaker 4: characters from like a heist movie. It's like a red
Speaker 4: Bull air and like some distressed debt guys and then
Speaker 4: some retired miners doing last one, last job. But when
Speaker 4: they talk to you about their reasons for reopening this mine, what.
Speaker 3: Did they say?
Speaker 6: Well, the main one I was speaking to is actually
Speaker 6: the chief executive or the executive chairman of the mine himself.
Speaker 6: He was actually he was brought in by one of
Speaker 6: these investors. As I said that, if you look at
Speaker 6: the shareholder reds of this company, it's like nothing I've
Speaker 6: ever seen of a shelled regis certainly of a company
Speaker 6: of sort of global importance. Like you say that, I
Speaker 6: think the reason Red Bull are involved is that there's
Speaker 6: a sort of long central European Germanic interest in tungsten,
Speaker 6: and Red Bull are based in Austria, a couple of them.
Speaker 2: Are they urged.
Speaker 3: To acquire tungsten? I'm well aware, yes, absolutely.
Speaker 6: The Peabody Energy that the American coal mining company bought
Speaker 6: a coal mine off a couple of Australian investors about
Speaker 6: twenty years ago and they used the payout from that
Speaker 6: to invest in this mind they were some of the
Speaker 6: first people who were involved. There's a Caterpillar dealer who
Speaker 6: actually worked at the mine in the nineteen sixties.
Speaker 5: He's one of the shareholders.
Speaker 6: That the state government of Tasmania is one of the
Speaker 6: shareholders because they were bailing it out. And even that
Speaker 6: some of the companies that were leasing cranes and mining equipment.
Speaker 6: They basically took equity in lieu of unpaid bills. There's
Speaker 6: really hardly anything in the way of bank finance in
Speaker 6: this company at all. It's equity is about seven million
Speaker 6: Australian dollars and the total CASHTUN invested since it started
Speaker 6: up has really tried to get back into operations twenty
Speaker 6: years ago. There's been a lot of reports and environmental
Speaker 6: studies and things over that period. Total is about seventy
Speaker 6: seven million dollars. You know what Amazon spends in about
Speaker 6: four hours, so it's really very little money. I would
Speaker 6: say their ambition, they weren't betting for twenty years on war,
Speaker 6: but their ambition was that China produces eighty percent of
Speaker 6: the world's tungsten, and by twenty you were seeing China
Speaker 6: threatening Japan for instance, over its rare earth supplies, and
Speaker 6: you could see this was a potential risk even back
Speaker 6: then and people around the world. There was one tiny
Speaker 6: tungsten mine that the US is last tungsten mine was
Speaker 6: actually just east of Los Angeles. It was a sort
Speaker 6: of retired Vietnam veterman who would go up to the
Speaker 6: mountains and dig out a few tons of tungsten every summer,
Speaker 6: and that went on until he went on mining until
Speaker 6: about twenty thirteen. I think he was talking back then.
Speaker 6: In the process of writing this article, I dug out
Speaker 6: at a letter that he'd sent to Congress complaining about
Speaker 6: reducing tariffs on Chinese tungsten because he was concerned back
Speaker 6: in twenty twelve that China controlled too much of this
Speaker 6: and was a strategic competitor.
Speaker 5: Back then, people weren't worried.
Speaker 6: About it very much, and now it's everything everyone worries about.
Speaker 2: So I definitely want to talk more about the sort
Speaker 2: of economics and significance of this, mind, but can you
Speaker 2: just talk a little bit more. You mentioned China producing
Speaker 2: eighty percent of the world's tungsten. Can you just give
Speaker 2: us a little bit more color on what the peace
Speaker 2: time tungsten market looks like in terms of how big
Speaker 2: we're talking about, the sort of the I guess I
Speaker 2: would say, why there hasn't been so much investment, Like,
Speaker 2: what are the economics such that generally during peacetime it
Speaker 2: does not make sense to do a new project given
Speaker 2: either the size of the market and maybe assuming presumably
Speaker 2: the cost, competitiveness and the efficiency of the Chinese miners.
Speaker 6: I mean, I think the biggest thing, and I think
Speaker 6: this gets underestimated a bit because China does try to
Speaker 6: lock down a lot of a supply chain and a
Speaker 6: lot of critical resources. But in the case of tungst,
Speaker 6: and I think is actually similar in the case of
Speaker 6: rare earth. It has just happened to get the best
Speaker 6: geological resource of this by far. And that's a thing
Speaker 6: that happens in mining. South Africa and Botswana have the
Speaker 6: best geological resources of diamonds, and Russia and South Africa
Speaker 6: have the best resources for platinum group metals, and Australian
Speaker 6: and Brazil have the best iron.
Speaker 5: Or that just happens.
Speaker 6: These resources are unevenly distributed around the world, and it's
Speaker 6: hard if you don't have resources as good as that
Speaker 6: to get a look in China, going back to the
Speaker 6: turn of the twentieth century, dominated global tungsten supply, and
Speaker 6: the only time that that's really changed was during a
Speaker 6: period in the Cold War when Tungstan was basically closed
Speaker 6: off from the rest of the world. As soon as
Speaker 6: Chinese tungsten was able to get into the world market.
Speaker 6: Their minds are the highest grade minds and there is
Speaker 6: justly more of it. There now some investors outside China
Speaker 6: and tungsten. Alongside the geofelisical argument, they would probably say, look,
Speaker 6: these mines have been mined for a century. One of
Speaker 6: the reasons China at this moment has export controls on tungsten.
Speaker 6: I think it's probably mostly geopolitics. But the defense of
Speaker 6: that that the Chinese government might have is that these
Speaker 6: mines are very old and we need to reorganize the
Speaker 6: industry because it's an underperforming industry.
Speaker 5: So there is a fairly scarce resource of this.
Speaker 6: It's about eighty five thousand metric tons a year is
Speaker 6: all the tungsten that's used. It's not a super exciting
Speaker 6: market because it's very expensive, and because it's mainly used
Speaker 6: in places like tool shops and mines. Most of that
Speaker 6: stuff gets recycled. If you're in an auto tooling shop,
Speaker 6: once your drill bit gets worn out, it might get reground,
Speaker 6: or you might just send it and it'll be recycled.
Speaker 6: So there's not a sort of huge ongoing demand surge
Speaker 6: for tungsten. It really sort of grows at the pace
Speaker 6: of tooling capacity worldwide.
Speaker 3: Can you talk to us.
Speaker 4: About the market structure of tungsten as well, because I
Speaker 4: know Joe said he didn't buy the tungsten cube as
Speaker 4: an investment, but if you had, I mean, you would
Speaker 4: have a hard time actually looking up the price of
Speaker 4: tungsten right now because it doesn't seem to have a
Speaker 4: forward curve in the way of a traditional commodity like
Speaker 4: oil or something like that. So if you're an investor
Speaker 4: trying to make a bet on a tungsten mine, it
Speaker 4: seems really hard to predict what your current returns are
Speaker 4: going to be, much less your future returns.
Speaker 6: I think that's absolutely right, and I think it's one
Speaker 6: of the biggest problems with critical minerals generally, because there's
Speaker 6: not a futures market. Because there's no way of hedging
Speaker 6: your cost with any mine, you are making capital investments
Speaker 6: right now for something that might only pay off in
Speaker 6: years five to ten. Now, if I'm doing that with copper,
Speaker 6: I can go to the London Metal Exchange or Comics
Speaker 6: and I can have as many contricts as I want
Speaker 6: setting the price of copper five years hence, and then
Speaker 6: I can take that to the bank and say, look,
Speaker 6: here's my operating costs, here's the value of cover, here's
Speaker 6: how much I'm going to produce. This is a bankable project,
Speaker 6: very simple, totally different with tungsten, they're just there. Simply
Speaker 6: is no futures market in this because it's such a
Speaker 6: tiny market most of time. One investor I spoke to,
Speaker 6: I think he's been on the podcast before, actually Alex Turnbull,
Speaker 6: you know. He said, sometimes it could be three he said,
Speaker 6: like tungsten, it could be three hundred dollars adrimetric ton unit,
Speaker 6: which is the unit the is, It could be three thousand,
Speaker 6: three hundred, three thousand each is a reasonable price for it.
Speaker 6: Because depending on the state of supply and demand of
Speaker 6: the market, the fact that China may suddenly close off
Speaker 6: supply and China has eighty percent of supply and then
Speaker 6: you have most of the world fighting over the remaining
Speaker 6: twenty percent, any of these prices is viable. And that
Speaker 6: means that if you're stuck in the middle, and most
Speaker 6: tunkster minds outside China are above that a ton level,
Speaker 6: then you find it very hard to finance your mind. No,
Speaker 6: no banker will really lend money to you on that
Speaker 6: basis because they don't know what your revenues are going
Speaker 6: to be next year, let alone five years from there.
Speaker 2: There's no forward curve at tunction, but we do have
Speaker 2: one ticker on the terminal, which is tungsten held in
Speaker 2: warehouses in Rotterdam. And I saw, Oh my god, this
Speaker 2: charge just makes me want to cry. It was literally
Speaker 2: it was three It's probably about three hundred dollars for
Speaker 2: a ton when I bought it sometime in twenty twenty two,
Speaker 2: and it is over three thousand dollars right now. So
Speaker 2: if I wanted to.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I should say that's three thousand dollars for this thing,
Speaker 6: this weird thing, which is a dry metric tonunit, it's
Speaker 6: actually about four hundred thousand dollars for a ton of tunkstont.
Speaker 2: Wait wait, wait, actually this is helpful.
Speaker 5: Great.
Speaker 2: So when I actually so, when I see that three thousand,
Speaker 2: what are what is this? I like learning stuff like this,
Speaker 2: What are these prices even? Men?
Speaker 6: So I had to spend like half a day trying
Speaker 6: to work out what this even means. So the price
Speaker 6: you're seeing is I think called ammonium para tunks date,
Speaker 6: which is a compound of tungsten, and it's a it's
Speaker 6: a nice, easily tradable form of tungsten. You can just
Speaker 6: put it in sacks and ship it around the world.
Speaker 6: And then I think you heat it and the ammonia
Speaker 6: comes off and you've got tunksknotside, and then you can
Speaker 6: quite easily turn it into a lot of other things.
Speaker 6: And that is priced quoted in dry metric ton units. Yeah,
Speaker 6: which a few critical mineral quest in these these these units,
Speaker 6: A dry metric ton unit contains about I think seven
Speaker 6: point nine to three kilograms of tungsten. Okay, so if
Speaker 6: it's three thousand dollars a griometric ton unit, it's about
Speaker 6: four hundred thousand dollars for a ton of tungsten.
Speaker 5: So so that's why someone still your cube. It's good money.
Speaker 2: I really, I'm really depressed about this. I gotta find it.
Speaker 5: I gotta find it.
Speaker 2: So this is this is really bothering me. All right,
Speaker 2: talk to us about okay, this particular mind, walk us
Speaker 2: through a little bit more of the sort of the
Speaker 2: economics or the best case economics. Let's say it works out.
Speaker 2: What are we talking about in terms of how much investment,
Speaker 2: what a sort of flow, how much it could shift
Speaker 2: in terms of Australia's ability to exp Where would it
Speaker 2: change in terms of market share and so forth, and
Speaker 2: like what would it represent if it were successful.
Speaker 6: The thing that fascinates me about critical minerals is that
Speaker 6: the numbers involved are often absolutely tiny. Like I said,
Speaker 6: the total cash some invested in this in twenty years
Speaker 6: is seventy seven million dollars.
Speaker 5: It's nothing.
Speaker 6: I mean, I wrote a piece about critical minerals a
Speaker 6: few months ago. So you know, think of the price
Speaker 6: of a white house ballroom, which I think are we
Speaker 6: talking like eight hundred million a billion dollars?
Speaker 5: Now?
Speaker 6: I can't remember what the latest, but I mean you
Speaker 6: could solve the entire rare earth problem for the price
Speaker 6: of that. And actually some of the investors who've been
Speaker 6: putting serious money into solving the rare Earth's problem with
Speaker 6: China though that's the order of money that they're spending.
Speaker 6: It's in the sort of hundreds of millions of dollars.
Speaker 6: And this is a time when we're spending brillions of
Speaker 6: dollars on AI or a single FAD missile, one of
Speaker 6: these missiles that uses a bit of tungsten, a single
Speaker 6: SAD missile use it costs about ten million dollars. So
Speaker 6: the sums that we're talking about are absolutely infinitesnal and
Speaker 6: the amount that it can move the market. Of course,
Speaker 6: it's a very small market this mine. I visited them
Speaker 6: in Tasmania. If it gets up and running, it should
Speaker 6: be able to supply about two and a half percent
Speaker 6: of the global market. Now it doesn't stand a lot,
Speaker 6: but remember China supplies eighty percent of the global market,
Speaker 6: so you're actually talking two and a half percent of
Speaker 6: the remaining twenty percent, and actually North Korean Russia supply
Speaker 6: another five percent, so it's two and a half percent
Speaker 6: of many fifteen percent. It's it's quite a significant percentage.
Speaker 6: If you go back to sort of old commodities reports
Speaker 6: from the Cold War, people would talk about the free
Speaker 6: world market. So that two and a half percent is
Speaker 6: that's roughly one six of the three of the free
Speaker 6: world market. So for a very small sum, that's the
Speaker 6: sort of thing that you can acquire in critical minerals,
Speaker 6: and yet no one is prepared to invest in it most.
Speaker 5: Of the time.
Speaker 2: It's very similar to the selling down of the helium reserve. Yeah,
Speaker 2: which is just like which is like the numbers are
Speaker 2: it's so pennywise or whatever, you know, it's so like,
Speaker 2: here's this thing that Okay, could be strue to in
Speaker 2: the future and we're going to sell it for like
Speaker 2: half a billion or whatever.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I was thinking the same thing.
Speaker 5: Well.
Speaker 4: Also, just going back to China, so I take the
Speaker 4: point that, I mean, China geographically does have an advantage
Speaker 4: when it comes to a lot of rare earths and
Speaker 4: including tungsten. But it also feels like China is more
Speaker 4: willing to tolerate lower returns for some of these industries.
Speaker 4: And I guess treat the market like a little bit
Speaker 4: more like a chessboard rather than just a sort of
Speaker 4: short term spreadsheet. Does that mean if anyone in the
Speaker 4: West tries to start up a new tungsten mind, can
Speaker 4: China just come in and flood the market very easily
Speaker 4: and suppressed prices given that they're still the dominant producer
Speaker 4: and literally anyone else is as you just outlined a
Speaker 4: fraction of total production.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I mean that's and that is one of the
Speaker 6: main reasons that investors stay well away from this. It's
Speaker 6: one of the main investors they've the reasons that they've
Speaker 6: stayed well away from rare earth.
Speaker 5: At the moment.
Speaker 6: One of the reasons tungsten price is a high is
Speaker 6: precisely because China imposed export controls just ran about the
Speaker 6: time President Trump came to office last year. That doesn't
Speaker 6: mean that exports stop altogether, but it means that if
Speaker 6: you're dependent on Chinese tungksen exports, which every tungsten consumer
Speaker 6: is dependent on, you want to get your supplies early
Speaker 6: before those export controls result in the Chinese government saying no,
Speaker 6: you can't sell it to them. So as soon as
Speaker 6: those export controls are taken off, then that sort of
Speaker 6: speculative action that's going on in the market, that's one
Speaker 6: of the main things that's driving up prices at the
Speaker 6: moment that speculative action goes away, and so that would
Speaker 6: certainly bring down prices and then in turn bankrupt a
Speaker 6: lot of miners who were dependent on those higher prices.
Speaker 6: So that's absolutely something that has happened in the past,
Speaker 6: and not just the Chinese government. As I said the
Speaker 6: first time this mind that I went to shut down
Speaker 6: in nineteen twenty after World War One, it was because
Speaker 6: the Allies in World War One sold off all their
Speaker 6: toungs supplies and flood at the market a bit like
Speaker 6: you know, the Bank of England with gold in the
Speaker 6: nineteen nineties or any other mistake in sort of government
Speaker 6: sale of the commodity.
Speaker 2: You know, obviously anything that is geostrategic or used in
Speaker 2: warfare will have a spike in investment in spending during
Speaker 2: a war, and then it will come down, obviously, But
Speaker 2: you know, we have the defense industrial complex, and there
Speaker 2: is an extraordinary amount of spending on munitions and so forth.
Speaker 2: It goes on in peace and wartime, et cetera, producing
Speaker 2: new missiles, and there's a fortune to be made in that.
Speaker 2: At any point during again what we would call relatively
Speaker 2: peaceful periods, maybe the nineteen nineties or maybe like early
Speaker 2: twenty tens or something like that, were there any voices
Speaker 2: that said, look, as part of this strategic expenditure in
Speaker 2: the West, in Allied countries, we should just maintain constant
Speaker 2: loss making production and investment into some of these resources.
Speaker 2: Because again, the numbers compared to other defense or strategic
Speaker 2: spending just do not seem very high.
Speaker 6: I think there was a real lack of that, and
Speaker 6: I think one of the interesting things that I sort
Speaker 6: of realized as I was working on this piece is
Speaker 6: that part of Tungsten's time in the wilderness was about
Speaker 6: a rethinking of the nature what wars would be because.
Speaker 5: In nineteen ninety you have two things.
Speaker 6: You have the end of the Cold War, but then
Speaker 6: the also crucial military thing that happens is the First
Speaker 6: Gulf War, and the First Gulf War causes a lot
Speaker 6: of people in the West, particularly in the US, to
Speaker 6: really rethink what wars are going to be like in future.
Speaker 6: Back then, people thought it would be a Vietnam type
Speaker 6: situation potentially before the war actually started, that this was
Speaker 6: a million strong Saddam's Army. We're going to be something
Speaker 6: that looks a little bit like Ukraine essentially. And then
Speaker 6: of course it was this incredibly quick technological war. Art
Speaker 6: was very quickly devastated. You saw the sort of technological
Speaker 6: superiority of the US military, and that made people go, okay,
Speaker 6: hang on, the Cold Wars finished, so we don't need
Speaker 6: to be building up these huge anti Soviet military arsenals.
Speaker 5: But also we are going to be vastly.
Speaker 6: Technological superior to every foe that we're going to fight
Speaker 6: in war, so we need to have different types of weapons.
Speaker 5: And did you have Chris Miller on the War author? Yeah,
Speaker 5: I mean, I think he describes that really well.
Speaker 6: That dynamic how basically chips won the Cold War, and
Speaker 6: that caused a complete rethinking of military strategy, and so
Speaker 6: at that point tungsten doesn't matter so much because if
Speaker 6: you are so technologically sophisticated that you can take our
Speaker 6: enemy command posts very quickly, you can paralyze their electronic
Speaker 6: infrastructure and their entire sort of military command, and then
Speaker 6: you don't really need to be.
Speaker 5: Fighting this sort of war of attrition, which is where
Speaker 5: tungsten really comes into its own.
Speaker 6: Now we've of course had another revolution and military affairs,
Speaker 6: we've had another sort of rethinking of what wars are
Speaker 6: going to be like, because we're four years now into
Speaker 6: the war in Ukraine and we've seen in Ukraine a
Speaker 6: battlefield that looks like the big battlefield of the twentieth
Speaker 6: century and it's still grinding on, and so that makes
Speaker 6: you rethink our future.
Speaker 5: War is going to look like that or not.
Speaker 6: And of course the other thing that's looming in the
Speaker 6: future is Taiwan, a conflict with Taiwan where you're going
Speaker 6: to be up against the.
Speaker 5: Biggest manufacturing power on the planet.
Speaker 6: Are you going to be able to technologically over master
Speaker 6: China in the way that the US in nineteen ninety
Speaker 6: over master. I don't think people expect that to be
Speaker 6: nearly so easy. So tungsten again comes into its own.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So I'm looking at a headline right now saying the
Speaker 4: US is inviting proposals to boost supply of tungsten and
Speaker 4: twelve other critical minerals. So if you were going to
Speaker 4: encourage or make suggestions for encouraging tungsten production in the
Speaker 4: US or elsewhere, what would you be suggesting at the moment,
Speaker 4: Because there does seem to be this real tension between
Speaker 4: a potentially strategically critical resource and then I guess the
Speaker 4: limits of private capital and people actually wanting to fund
Speaker 4: something that will pay off with a real return.
Speaker 5: I mean, ultimately you need to have some sort of
Speaker 5: a flow price.
Speaker 6: There is a huge debate that has sparked in the
Speaker 6: critical mineral space about whether floor prices are a good
Speaker 6: thing or not. Yeah, a lot of people will argue
Speaker 6: that if you have a floor price for something, then
Speaker 6: it operates as a giveaway to minors and it's going
Speaker 6: to encourage sort of uneconomic supply. But I think in
Speaker 6: the context of what we're talking about here, that's actually
Speaker 6: the point. The only economic supply of tungsten is in China.
Speaker 6: So if that is a problem for you, you actually
Speaker 6: need a you need a structure that's going to encourage
Speaker 6: the supply outside chair, and it's going to encourage it
Speaker 6: for a set period. Now there is a huge philosophical
Speaker 6: problem with this because you can't do that with every
Speaker 6: single material that could be deemed critical. I saw an
Speaker 6: article the other day talking about fears that China was
Speaker 6: going to lock down a supply of citric acid. You know,
Speaker 6: there's metallurgical coal has been put on the US Critical
Speaker 6: Minerals List. Copper is on the US Critical Minerals List.
Speaker 6: You can justify almost anything on this basis, And that's
Speaker 6: a real problem because the US, for instance, has set
Speaker 6: up this Project Vault, this twelve billion plan for some
Speaker 6: sort of a reserve of critical minerals, something similar to
Speaker 6: the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. But it's not very clear what
Speaker 6: the criteria will be for inclusion in Project Vault. And
Speaker 6: I think the risk is that Project Vault becomes a
Speaker 6: way of hedging price risk for fairly common commodities like copper,
Speaker 6: like nickel, like aluminum, like metallurgical coal.
Speaker 5: If the government is not very forceful. You don't actually
Speaker 5: end up getting.
Speaker 6: The minerals you want in that, you just end up
Speaker 6: with the minerals where industry wants government backed price security.
Speaker 6: What you actually want is a fairly small group of
Speaker 6: minerals where there's a real strategic issue. And I think
Speaker 6: tungsten's one, I think rare to another, things like gallium, germanium.
Speaker 6: These are some of the crucial ones. It'll be much cheaper,
Speaker 6: but you need to offer a medium term price security,
Speaker 6: long enough that miners can actually borrow against that price security.
Speaker 5: So three to five years.
Speaker 2: Evidently China controls sixty five to seventy of the world
Speaker 2: citric acid supply, and citric acid has certain niche applications.
Speaker 4: Secure your sour flavored fruit candies.
Speaker 7: Now, yeah, here's some pharmaceutical applications. Citric acid excels genderizer.
Speaker 7: I know that excels at chelating metal ions and removing
Speaker 7: mineral deposits, scale and corrosion from industrial equipment.
Speaker 2: To not know that, yeah, I didn't know that either.
Speaker 2: So if there's a citric acid expert out there, maybe
Speaker 2: that'll be an episode we want to do. You know, David,
Speaker 2: there was a piece you wrote, a very long time
Speaker 2: ago that is stuck with my head, maybe like coming
Speaker 2: on ten years now, I think, and I think it
Speaker 2: was in the context of some of the fantasies that
Speaker 2: tech people have had about asteroid mining, and I believe
Speaker 2: you made the point that Okay, yes, there may be
Speaker 2: asteroids out there that have extraordinary deposits of various minerals
Speaker 2: and metals of all sorts, but we also have a
Speaker 2: place here on Earth that also has extraordinary deposits of
Speaker 2: minerals and metals, and that is your country of Australia.
Speaker 2: And though there's a lot of stuff just sitting out there,
Speaker 2: but it's and it's a lot closer than space, but
Speaker 2: it's still too far to be worthwhile to mine, which
Speaker 2: I thought was really interesting. It's like it's right there,
Speaker 2: and yeah, it's just there's the infrastructure does existing. It's
Speaker 2: just not worth going out there. It's too much of
Speaker 2: a trek to get out to those parts of Australia.
Speaker 2: Can you talk a little bit broader about like the
Speaker 2: sort of Okay, we could say this is in the ground,
Speaker 2: but like we need, we want this, this is industrially
Speaker 2: used for it's in the ground. We know it is,
Speaker 2: we know it's rich, but it's just not worth making
Speaker 2: the long twelve hour flight or whatever it is to
Speaker 2: get out there. I know it's more than a flight,
Speaker 2: but yeah, to get out there.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I mean, I think that the world of mineral
Speaker 6: explanation is full of this, and here in Australia there's
Speaker 6: plenty of very small cap mining companies which are essentially
Speaker 6: like some of them are almost like a holiday program
Speaker 6: for a geologist if it funds a geologist's expedition around
Speaker 6: the world with his hammers and his reagents, because because
Speaker 6: some of them are really just they're just sort of
Speaker 6: wild exploration programs hoping to find something.
Speaker 5: We see this with Tongusten.
Speaker 6: This mine is an unw one that have been operating
Speaker 6: for about a century already, so there's an established resource there.
Speaker 6: But I mean to give another example, A crucial group
Speaker 6: of rare earths depends on these things called ionic absorption clothes,
Speaker 6: which when you get a very heavily weathered granite mountain,
Speaker 6: you end up with a lot of these clays which
Speaker 6: will capture some of the rare earth that we're most
Speaker 6: concerned about, things like thissprobium and urbium. And if you
Speaker 6: go back about five years people would say these can
Speaker 6: only be found in southern China. And one of the
Speaker 6: problems in the world is that there is no way
Speaker 6: that you will ever find ionic absorption clays anywhere except
Speaker 6: southern China.
Speaker 5: But of course, now we're in a world where China
Speaker 5: is putting controls on these things.
Speaker 6: It is stopping exports of a lot of these particular elements,
Speaker 6: and it's at the heart of the sort of rare Earth,
Speaker 6: sort of magnet supply chain concern. And believe it or not,
Speaker 6: all these ionic absorption clays are starting to turn up
Speaker 6: in other places. They're starting to find them in Brazil,
Speaker 6: They're starting to find them in Malaysia. Peple are starting
Speaker 6: to find them here in Australia and across parts of
Speaker 6: tropical Africa as well. People are suddenly realizing, okay, there
Speaker 6: are deposits there. They might not be as good as
Speaker 6: the Chinese deposits. There's a reason that Chinese deposits were
Speaker 6: the first to be explored. But if China becomes an
Speaker 6: unreliable resource, people are going to find them somewhere else.
Speaker 5: And I think that's I.
Speaker 6: Mean, there's two twin activities that happen in commodities and mining.
Speaker 6: One is the sort of substitution effect. Sometimes you're just
Speaker 6: going to say, we can't use this, it's become too scarce,
Speaker 6: we need an alternative.
Speaker 5: I mean.
Speaker 6: A good example of that, I think is if you
Speaker 6: look at electric vehicle batteries. Go back five seven, eight years,
Speaker 6: people were talking about the importance of having batteries dependent
Speaker 6: on cobalt. Cobalts very heavily exposed to one country, Democratic
Speaker 6: Republic of Congo. There's a lot of child labor in
Speaker 6: the mining industry there, and also it's in some ways
Speaker 6: not quite as good. So a lot of the Chinese
Speaker 6: battery producers started us using a different chemistry that doesn't
Speaker 6: use cobalt, lift them iron phosphate, and so so you've
Speaker 6: substituted away from that product and you don't need it anymore.
Speaker 6: And to go back to the analogy with asteroid mining,
Speaker 6: if a commodity is so scarce that you need to
Speaker 6: go to space to get it, you're probably going to
Speaker 6: substitute it for something else instead. However, if it's not
Speaker 6: quite as scarce as that, you're probably going to be
Speaker 6: able to send that geologists around the world and they're
Speaker 6: going to find it somewhere else, and if the established
Speaker 6: supply is insecure enough, then the alternative location is going
Speaker 6: to get more and more attractive.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think we should just substitute for gold.
Speaker 3: I mean it's going to say, if it's the same density.
Speaker 2: You just buy, you just start having gold based munitions.
Speaker 2: Those are sliced right through that tank as well. David
Speaker 2: Fickling is great chatting with you. I'm so glad we've
Speaker 2: made this happen. There's such a fascinating journey and great
Speaker 2: reporting that you did, so thank you so much for
Speaker 2: coming out of us.
Speaker 5: Thanks very much.
Speaker 2: It does seem so crazy to me that we have
Speaker 2: this huge the military industrial complex, et cetera, and then
Speaker 2: there's these few things that are like rounding errors.
Speaker 4: Right, the capital outlays for a tongusten mind, seems pretty
Speaker 4: small in the ground scheme of the.
Speaker 2: And yet no one was like, let's just yeah, sure
Speaker 2: it's on economical, but so is all defense spending, because
Speaker 2: you don't it's loss making because there's no market use
Speaker 2: for a lot of this stuff. But it's like, I
Speaker 2: don't know, it seems like you just allocate a few
Speaker 2: billion here and there and you could alleviate some of
Speaker 2: these potential stress points. Instead, you sell down the helium
Speaker 2: reserve over twenty years for a billion dollars or.
Speaker 5: Whatever I mean.
Speaker 4: To some extent, it does seem like a failure to
Speaker 4: predict the future, which is difficult. Right, people thought that
Speaker 4: war was going to evolve in different ways. We didn't
Speaker 4: think that we would be shooting this many cruise missiles,
Speaker 4: or that we would be shooting shrapnel at drones, or
Speaker 4: having drones shooting as much shrapnel, and so like, here
Speaker 4: we are with to some extent an unexpected need for tungsten,
Speaker 4: and the same for helium in some sense because we
Speaker 4: didn't know that we were going to have the semiconductor
Speaker 4: m and things like that. So hindsight is twenty twenty.
Speaker 4: But I don't know, it does seem like maybe we
Speaker 4: should restart that tungsten mind in California. Should we go
Speaker 4: check it out when we're we're in Yeah.
Speaker 2: We're gonna be in a listeners, We're going to be
Speaker 2: in LA in early September.
Speaker 3: Maybe we can find the guy who used to run it.
Speaker 2: We could go find Yeah, let's go check out that.
Speaker 2: I also, you know, I just think that what again,
Speaker 2: one of the things I always think about with respect
Speaker 2: to China specific league, is the fact that there's not
Speaker 2: really a business cycle there and they've never had They
Speaker 2: don't have these like they have secular busts like obviously
Speaker 2: real estate, et cetera. But you know, there's been this
Speaker 2: sort of like refusal to accept the premise that overall
Speaker 2: recessions are an inevitability and therefore you don't get these
Speaker 2: periods where it's like big industries that were once important
Speaker 2: hollow out and then it's like, oh, it's so costly
Speaker 2: to restart them.
Speaker 4: I mean, you do get some of that, and China's
Speaker 4: pig pork industry is a pretty good example of that,
Speaker 4: where there was a shortage and prices went up, and
Speaker 4: so the government provided a bunch of support. It over expanded,
Speaker 4: prices collapsed, and then a bunch of private operators went
Speaker 4: out of business. So there is some of that, But
Speaker 4: I do think in general China is more willing to
Speaker 4: accept just lower returns in general for some of these
Speaker 4: for some of these long.
Speaker 3: Term which also begs the question.
Speaker 4: If one of the big themes of our current period
Speaker 4: in time, as we've discussed on the podcast repeatedly now,
Speaker 4: is that everyone seems to be trying to build up
Speaker 4: their own supplies, their own responses to like certain choke
Speaker 4: holds in the global economy. And so one of the
Speaker 4: concerns that you see now and David talked about it, is, well,
Speaker 4: if everyone's trying to create their own supply of tungsten,
Speaker 4: even if it's a relative small supply, even if it
Speaker 4: doesn't actually take that much capital to create a new tongsten. Mind,
Speaker 4: if everyone's doing it all at once and then you
Speaker 4: don't have a definitive buyer of last store at the end,
Speaker 4: then like people are going to think that we're going
Speaker 4: to become oversupplied.
Speaker 2: But in the meantime, all of this expenditure is at
Speaker 2: the margins inflation area. Yeah, so you have the double
Speaker 2: whammy of more spending on non productive things because they're strategic,
Speaker 2: and the diminishment because of anxiety about security of free trade.
Speaker 2: So you get the double lots and lots of spending
Speaker 2: and replication of spending across multiple geographies in countries.
Speaker 4: The one other thing I would say is whenever we
Speaker 4: do these commodities episodes, and especially lately, given what happened
Speaker 4: with oil supply in Iran, I kind of I always
Speaker 4: marvel at the markets. I guess creativity or ingenuity when
Speaker 4: it comes to responding to some of these shocks. So
Speaker 4: Japan had its supply of a bunch of rare earths,
Speaker 4: including tungsten, cut off by China, which I'm sure at
Speaker 4: the time was thought to be an absolutely dire thing
Speaker 4: for a lot of Japanese industry, including car makers, but
Speaker 4: in the end it ended up dealing with it reasonably
Speaker 4: well by sourcing recycled supply and scrap tungsten and things
Speaker 4: like that.
Speaker 3: Now, again, if China.
Speaker 4: Stopped exporting tungsten to everyone in the world, would would
Speaker 4: there be enough scrap tungsten to replace that supply? Probably not,
Speaker 4: But for some of these supply shops it does seem
Speaker 4: like you can get pretty good response.
Speaker 2: As we talked about with Javier Bloss last year, we
Speaker 2: might have to go into a bunch of vacuum cleaners
Speaker 2: and pull out some of the magnets and stuff.
Speaker 4: Why don't you get into the scrap tungsten business, Joe,
Speaker 4: I can get you started with some like metal toolbits.
Speaker 4: I had one that split the other day, which was
Speaker 4: really weird an unusual.
Speaker 2: I'm done investing in tungsten, especially if I can't find
Speaker 2: this thing. I mean, I don't want to ever think
Speaker 2: about it again.
Speaker 4: All Right, No more tungsten. That's the opposite message of
Speaker 4: this entire podcast episode.
Speaker 2: Yeah, all right, all right, keep thinking about tungky, keep.
Speaker 3: Thinking about tungsten.
Speaker 6: All right.
Speaker 3: Shall we leave it there?
Speaker 2: Let's leave it there.
Speaker 4: This has been another episode of the Authoughts podcast. I'm
Speaker 4: Tracy Allaway. You can follow me at Tracy Allaway.
Speaker 2: And I'm Joe Wisenthal. You can follow me at the Stalwart.
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Speaker 5: In it