Almonty Industries has entered into a long-term tungsten concentrate supply agreement with Wolfram Bergbau und Hütten AG (WBH), a subsidiary of the Sandvik Group, covering the retreatment of existing tailings at the Los Santos Mine in western Spain.
The agreement covers a minimum of approximately 1,720 t of contained WO₃ and is designed to provide an expedited source of tungsten concentrate, with the potential to bring material to market significantly faster than the development of a conventional mine, Almonty says.
Structured on a take-or-pay basis, the agreement includes a conditional $3 million upfront payment for the offtake rights and has been entered into in anticipation of the restart of production at Los Santos. The open-pit scheelite skarn operation, located approximately 50 km south of Salamanca, has been on planned care and maintenance since February 2020. Material supplied under the agreement will be produced through the retreatment of the mine’s existing tailings inventory.
For Almonty, the agreement provides a committed route to market for a European Union-based asset ahead of the planned restart, while also providing customer capital to support the reinstatement of the processing plant. For WBH, it provides access to a documented non-Chinese, EU-origin source of tungsten feed for its smelting operations, which supply the Western hard-metal and powder-metallurgy industries.
The agreement brings together two operations focused on recovering tungsten from material that has already been mined. At Los Santos, Almonty’s restart strategy centres on retreating the existing tailings inventory rather than undertaking new primary extraction. Through ongoing testing and trials, the company says it has significantly improved WO₃ recovery from the tailings.
WBH, part of the Sandvik Group since 2009, operates a refining and powder-manufacturing complex at St. Martin im Sulmtal in Austria. The facility processes scheelite concentrate from its Mittersill mine, concentrate purchased from international suppliers and recycled secondary tungsten materials. According to Almonty, the facility is the only integrated tungsten smelting plant outside Asia and Russia, while the wider Sandvik business unit also operates dedicated tungsten recycling capacity.
Almonty Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer Lewis Black said the agreement combines a take-or-pay commitment from a Sandvik Group company with index-linked pricing and a price floor, while sharing the financial requirements associated with reactivating Los Santos.
“This combination is what allows us to bring a European Union asset back into production with a defined route to market from the first shipment,” Black said.
He added that the agreement represents the first commercial application of the company’s tailings technology in the West, following its development since Los Santos was placed on care and maintenance in 2020 after depletion of its resource.
According to Black, the technology could provide a faster route to tungsten supply than developing a new mine and could subsequently be applied to tailings at Almonty’s Panasqueira operations in Portugal and other abandoned European mining sites.
The company is also assessing the use of mobile tailings processing plants, which Black said could significantly reduce permitting timelines while enabling the recovery of valuable material from existing mine waste.
The Los Santos agreement forms part of a broader programme being developed by Almonty to increase tungsten supply for industrial customers, alongside its recently announced small-scale miner collection programme in Rwanda.