US government commits $450m to Elmet tungsten supply chain

A US Department of War grant to The Elmet Group signals Washington's push to onshore tungsten, a critical mineral for defence and advanced manufacturing.

By Rowen Brooks Thu, 24 September 2026 AI level 2 of 5

AI level 2 of 5: drafted by our AI editorial assistant from source material our editor chose; fact-checked, edited and signed off by Mark Walker, Editorial Director. What the levels mean

Two silver and black pens, one uncapped, lie on a closed blue journal secured with a white elastic band, on a polished wooden table in a brightly lit room.

The US Department of War has announced a US$450 million investment in The Elmet Group, a domestic tungsten processor, to expand American production capacity and reduce dependence on imported supply. The commitment is one of the largest single government outlays directed at the tungsten sector and reflects a broader acceleration in US critical-mineral industrial policy.

GoldHaven Resources Corp., a Canadian junior exploration company, highlighted the announcement in a release timed to its own ongoing drill programme at the Kuhn tungsten system in northern British Columbia. GoldHaven is not a recipient of the funding and has no commercial relationship with The Elmet Group.

The Elmet investment

Tungsten is a dense, high-melting-point metal used in cutting tools, armour-piercing munitions, aerospace components and semiconductor manufacturing. China accounts for the large majority of global tungsten mining and processing, a concentration that has made the metal a recurring subject of US and EU supply-chain reviews. The Elmet Group is one of a small number of Western processors capable of producing tungsten carbide and powder at scale, making it a logical anchor for a government-led onshoring effort.

The Department of War did not publish detailed terms in GoldHaven's release, and it is not clear from the available text whether the $450 million takes the form of a grant, a loan guarantee, or a combination of instruments. Nor were any capacity expansion targets or timelines publicly specified. Readers seeking the primary source should refer to the Department of War's official release.

GoldHaven's Kuhn programme

GoldHaven used the announcement as a market-context backdrop for its own Magno Project, where it has drilled more than 800 metres at the Kuhn tungsten skarn system in the Cassiar District. The company has not yet received laboratory assays from the current programme; all results to date are visual core descriptions. Historical intercepts cited in the release, including 13.0 metres grading 0.55% WO3 and an estimated 616,500 tonnes at 0.48% WO3 across four modelled lenses, pre-date Canada's NI 43-101 resource-reporting standard and have not been independently verified. GoldHaven explicitly cautions that the historical estimate should not be treated as a current mineral resource.

Rob Birmingham, president and chief executive of GoldHaven, said the Washington commitment arrives "at an exciting time" for the company as it advances drilling at Kuhn, and described tungsten as "one of the world's most strategically important critical minerals."

Market and policy context

The US government's tungsten move fits within a wider pattern of critical-mineral industrial policy that has accelerated since the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act and the subsequent executive actions on supply-chain security. Parallel initiatives in the EU, through the Critical Raw Materials Act, and in Canada, through the Critical Minerals Strategy, are directing public capital toward domestic extraction and processing of materials deemed essential to defence, clean energy and semiconductor manufacturing. Tungsten sits on the critical-minerals lists of the US, EU, UK and Canada.

For junior explorers such as GoldHaven, government investment in downstream processors can improve the commercial case for upstream projects by signalling long-term demand from allied-jurisdiction buyers. Whether that translates into project financing or offtake agreements depends on assay results, resource estimates and the broader capital environment for junior mining, which has remained constrained through 2025 and into 2026. GoldHaven's assay results from the current Kuhn programme will be the next material data point.