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Tungsten Went 6X. I Went to See the Deposit Time Forgot | DD-on-the-GO! - Rackla Metals Inc

The Deep Dive Oct 5, 2026 20:46

Summary

Rackla Metals must twin 27 historic Union Carbide holes to prove a 44-year-old tungsten deposit still exists.

Tungsten, a hard heat-resistant metal used in cutting tools and defence, rose roughly sixfold in a year as China cut exports.

Scheelite, the mineral hosting tungsten, fluoresces under UV light, so crews can grade core on site instead of waiting for assays.

One central zone carries a historical envelope of 1.5 million tonnes at roughly 1.27% tungsten, but no compliant resource exists.

With no independent estimate and a $0.90-to-$0.10 crash behind it, the 2026 drill season settles the story.

Key points on Newmont

  • Named only at the end of a corporate succession chain: the host says Simon Ridgeway found two gold deposits in Central America in the 1990s that were sold to Glamis Gold, which became Goldcorp and then Newmont, using it as a track-record point rather than discussing the company itself.

Steve Hyland's takeaways

  • Top takeaway His central argument is that this story resolves in a single drill season: 27 holes deliberately drilled beside someone else's for the sole purpose of finding out whether 44-year-old paper can be trusted, producing a compliant resource by early next year or sending everything back to the beginning.
  • On supply, he argues China produces about 82% of the world's tungsten and has restricted exports, so Western buyers are actively looking to move off that reliance, but there is no queue of projects waiting to fill the gap; he uses antimony's export ban since October as the precedent and argues tungsten will not be different because no alternative tungsten projects exist globally.
  • He pushes back on the defence-demand framing, saying defence is the headline but is not the demand, and that what defence did was make governments look at where supply comes from while the price move did the actual work.
  • He is openly sceptical of the price itself, calling a roughly six-fold move over the 12 months to October 2026, from about 400-500 per MTU a year earlier to roughly 3,000 now, exactly the moment to get suspicious, while accepting the guest's view that an open-pit deposit of this type should stay economic.
  • He frames the Northwest Territories backdrop, with diamond mines running out and mining, oil and gas accounting for nearly a quarter of territory GDP as the region openly builds a critical-minerals replacement economy with tungsten near the top, but cautions that backdrops do not make mines.