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Almonty and Sandvik’s WBH sign Spanish tungsten supply deal

Under the terms of the deal, WBH will make a conditional one-time payment of $3m (€2.61m) for offtake rights to the tungsten material.

Shree Mishra September 18 2026

Almonty Industries has signed a multi-year, take-or-pay offtake agreement with Sandvik Group subsidiary Wolfram Bergbau und Hütten (WBH) to supply tungsten concentrate recovered from its tailings at the Los Santos Mine in western Spain.

The agreement stipulates a minimum delivery of 1,720t of contained tungsten trioxide, produced by reprocessing stockpiled tailings as the company prepares to restart operations at its processing plant.

Under the terms of the deal, WBH will make a conditional one-time payment of $3m for offtake rights to the tungsten material.

Located roughly 50km south of Salamanca, the open-pit scheelite skarn operation has been held under planned care and maintenance since February 2020.

This new arrangement serves as a foundational step towards resuming active production at the site.

Almonty stated that this offtake arrangement provides a secured route to market for tungsten concentrate from the Los Santos site before operations resume, supported by customer capital for reinstating the plant.

WBH gains access to EU-origin feedstock at a time when provenance is a growing consideration for supply chains in Western industries.

According to the company, the agreement offers a pathway to produce and deliver tungsten concentrate more quickly than traditional mining developments.

Almonty chairman, president and CEO Lewis Black said: “WBH is the only integrated tungsten smelter outside Asia and Russia, and recycling is central to how they operatem which makes them a natural fit for what Almonty is doing at Los Santos, where the restart is built around recovering tungsten from material that has already been mined and processed once.”

The Los Santos restart involves retreating existing tailings rather than new extraction, and Almonty reports improvements in tungsten trioxide recovery through ongoing testing.

WBH operates a refining and powder manufacturing facility in St. Martin im Sulmtal, Austria, processing both primary concentrate and recycled secondary tungsten materials.

The agreement precedes new US defence procurement regulations taking effect from 1 January 2027, which extend restrictions on certain tungsten materials of Chinese, Russian, North Korean or Iranian origin to include all feedstock sources.

In July 2026, Almonty started processing plant throughput operations at the Sangdong Mine in South Korea’s Gangwon Province.

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