Sometimes a mineral discovery is bigger than a mining story. And this may be one of those times…
Deep beneath Nevada’s Railroad Valley, a privately held American company called 3 Proton Lithium, or 3PL, says it’s identified what could be the largest tungsten deposit ever discovered in the United States.
The company’s current resource assessment puts the deposit at roughly 1.78 million metric tons of tungsten.
At recent prices, 3PL estimates the metal in the ground could be worth approximately $152 billion.
And if further work confirms that the resource can be economically mined, it would be more than five times larger than the next-largest known U.S. tungsten deposit.
Those are enormous numbers. But they’re not the most important part of this story.
The important part is where all that tungsten was found…
Here. In the United States.
Because America hasn’t commercially mined tungsten since 2015.
And during the decade that followed, tungsten became far more important to the American economy, far more important to the American military, and far harder for America to reliably obtain.
The Metal You Don’t Want an Enemy Controlling
Tungsten occupies a strange position in the modern economy…
Most people rarely hear about it. Yet modern industry would have an extremely difficult time functioning without it.
Tungsten has the highest melting point of any metal and is exceptionally dense, hard, and resistant to wear.
Mix it with carbon and you get tungsten carbide, one of the hardest commercially important materials on Earth.
That’s why tungsten turns up in cutting tools, drill bits, mining equipment, machine tools, industrial coatings, electronics, welding equipment, turbine components, and countless other products that keep a modern industrial economy running.
Then there’s defense…
Tungsten’s density and hardness make it extremely valuable in armor-piercing ammunition, penetrators, missile components, high-density alloys, and other military applications.
The problem is that America doesn’t produce the raw material it needs to manufacture those products…
China does.
You see, China controls roughly 80% of the global tungsten market…
And that gives Beijing extraordinary influence over the availability and pricing of a metal the U.S. military and American manufacturers can’t function without.
That’s an uncomfortable dependency during peacetime. But during a period of intensifying geopolitical competition, it’s downright dangerous.
The Choke Point Is Already Closing
We’ve been watching this problem develop in real time…
Beginning in 2025, China tightened controls on exports of tungsten and other critical materials.
Those restrictions helped reduce available Western supplies precisely as demand from defense, aerospace, and industrial users was increasing.
And the result has been an extraordinary move in tungsten prices…
Since early 2025, the tungsten market has risen by several hundred percent as buyers compete for increasingly scarce material.
And America’s vulnerability is no longer theoretical…
The wars in Ukraine and the Middle East have demonstrated just how quickly critical minerals can disappear when militaries begin consuming them at wartime rates.
Tungsten incorporated into machine tools can potentially be recycled, but tungsten fired inside a munition generally can’t be…
Once that weapon explodes, the material is gone. Forever.
So, all this recent fighting has created a particularly nasty supply equation…
Western countries are consuming tungsten faster for defense purposes at the same time China is making less tungsten available to the Western market.
And Washington clearly recognizes the problem.
Just days ago, the U.S. government announced new restrictions designed to keep American tungsten scrap inside the country.
Beginning August 27, U.S. sellers of tungsten waste and scrap will generally be required to allocate that material to domestic buyers rather than send it overseas.
Think about what that means…
The United States has become so concerned about its tungsten supply that we’re now trying to prevent the tungsten we already possess from leaving the country.
And now, almost simultaneously, we learn that one of the largest potential sources of tungsten in America may have been sitting beneath Nevada all along.
A Discovery at Exactly the Right Time
3PL’s Railroad Valley project was originally developed primarily around lithium…
The company controls more than 58 square miles, or roughly 37,350 acres, making its claim block one of the largest in Nevada.
But drilling revealed an enormous underground mineral system containing lithium along with boron, tungsten, potash, and other materials.
And the tungsten appears to be considerably more significant than previously understood.
Now, that could radically change the strategic importance of Railroad Valley.
This isn’t just about replacing some imports…
A resource approaching 1.8 million tons would potentially give the United States something it hasn’t possessed in years:
A large domestic primary source of tungsten.
And that would mean American ore feeding American processors and American manufacturers making products for American defense contractors, semiconductor manufacturers, aerospace companies, energy companies, and industrial customers.
That’s the kind of supply chain Washington has spent years trying to rebuild.
Despite that effort, the U.S. Geological Survey noted this year that America remains heavily dependent on imports for numerous critical minerals…
And that China remains a major supplier for many of the minerals on which the United States is most import-dependent.
Finding resources at home doesn’t instantly solve that problem. But it’s definitely where solving the problem starts.
Finding Tungsten Isn’t the Same as Mining It
There’s one important caveat…
The 1.78-million-ton figure is a resource estimate, not 1.78 million tons of finished tungsten ready to ship.
The deposit still has to be further explored, engineered, permitted, financed, mined, processed, and refined. And as you know, that could take years.
In fact, analysts quoted by the Financial Times cautioned that even under favorable circumstances, production could still be roughly five years away.
But there’s another complication…
NASA uses part of Railroad Valley’s unusually flat desert surface to calibrate satellite instruments.
And at NASA’s request, the Bureau of Land Management withdrew roughly 17 square miles of the region from mining and exploration for 20 years beginning in 2023.
About one-third of 3PL’s claim area is affected.
So, the company is now lobbying Washington to reconsider that restriction, arguing that circumstances have changed dramatically as America’s need for domestic critical minerals has intensified.
And that creates a fascinating policy question…
Satellite calibration is important. But so is maintaining the industrial base required to build satellites, missiles, aircraft, electronics, machine tools, and weapons.
America Is Rediscovering the Importance of the Ground Beneath Its Feet
For decades, the United States treated mining as something that could increasingly be outsourced…
Let somebody else dig the ore.
Let somebody else process it.
We’ll buy what we need when we need it.
That approach worked reasonably well when global trade was expanding and relations between the world’s largest economies were improving.
But that’s not the world we live in anymore…
Today, access to minerals is becoming a form of geopolitical power and China understands that.
That’s why its extraordinary control over tungsten, rare earths, gallium, germanium, graphite, and other materials has become such an important strategic advantage.
But America is beginning to understand it too…
We’re stockpiling materials. We’re restricting exports of critical scrap.
We’re financing new mining projects abroad. And we’re encouraging domestic exploration.
And companies are once again searching American soil for resources the country spent decades buying from somebody else.
Railroad Valley shows why that shift matters…
A decade after America’s last commercial tungsten mine stopped producing, a potential world-class tungsten resource has emerged beneath the Nevada desert.
It won’t solve our supply problem tomorrow. And it may not produce every ton currently estimated. But its discovery sends a powerful message…
America isn’t poor in the minerals its economy and military require.
In many cases, we’ve simply stopped looking for them, stopped mining them, or made it extraordinarily difficult to bring them to market.
Now our adversaries are reminding us why that was a mistake.
And 1.78 million tons of tungsten buried beneath Nevada could provide one very large opportunity to start correcting it.