A Chinese export control turned a tungsten project shelved for 13 years into a US$5 billion mine

The updated feasibility study for the Sisson project in Canada showed a net present value of US$5 billion — sixteen times higher than in 2013 — after China restricted tungsten exports and metal prices surged.

Northcliff Resources released an updated feasibility study for the Sisson project, an open-pit tungsten and molybdenum deposit in New Brunswick, Canada, that had been stalled since the original 2013 study. The new figures show an after-tax net present value of about US$5 billion (C$6.9 billion) at an 8% discount rate, initial capital of US$1.53 billion, an internal rate of return of 50% and a payback period of 1.6 years — against an NPV of just US$418 million, capital of US$579 million, a 16% IRR and a 4.5-year payback in the 2013 study. The project would process 30,000 tonnes per day over 27 years, producing an average of 598,000 metric tonne units of tungsten (mtu) and 4.2 million pounds of molybdenum a year — with the first five years, drawing on higher-grade ore, lifting tungsten output to 767,000 mtu annually.

Tungsten is the hardest industrial-scale metal after diamond — it's used in cutting tools, armor, armor-piercing ammunition and semiconductor components, which makes it both a common industrial input and an item of defense interest. China accounts for 79% of world production (67,000 of the 85,000 tonnes produced in 2025) and, in February 2025, imposed export controls on selected tungsten products — part of a broader strategy of using its dominance over critical minerals as a foreign policy tool, in the same vein as what it has already done with gallium, germanium and rare earths. The effect on prices was immediate and sustained: European tungsten concentrate reached US$2,400–2,600 per mtu by mid-August 2026, well above the new study's own conservative 2030 forecast of US$1,520 per mtu. It's that price movement — not any change to the deposit's geology, which remains exactly the same as in 2013 — that multiplied the project's NPV by sixteen and cut the payback period from 4.5 years to 1.6 years. The underlying lesson is to distinguish between two types of risk that get blended together when evaluating any mining project: geological risk, essentially fixed once the deposit is defined, and market risk, which is external, volatile and subject to other countries' policy decisions. Sisson spent thirteen years as a "shelved" project not because the ore got worse, but because the price didn't justify the capital — and it made sense again the moment that price equation changed.

For investors and mining portfolio managers, the Sisson case is a reminder that projects considered uneconomic today aren't necessarily worth writing off — they may simply be waiting for a market trigger, and keeping them on the radar as a strategic option has value even without immediate investment. For anyone tracking defense-linked critical mineral supply chains, the episode also exposes a side effect of Chinese export controls that gets little attention: by pushing global prices up, they make economically viable the very non-Chinese competing projects the policy was meant to neutralize — a counter-incentive that other dominant exporters of mineral commodities should weigh before reaching for the same tool.