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A mining company says it has discovered America’s largest deposit of tungsten, a crucial defence industry metal in severe shortage, but US space agency Nasa is blocking development on a large swath of its claims.
The tungsten discovery is detailed in a resource report seen by the FT following a recent drilling programme by critical minerals miner 3 Proton Lithium at its Railroad Valley Minerals Project, situated in a remote portion of the Great Basin Desert in eastern Nevada.
But Nasa says a third of the company’s claim covers a unique region used to track signals beamed to Earth by satellites in space, and that mining the site would threaten the operations.
“This is a metal the United States stopped mining a decade ago and now imports, while China controls and manipulates the global market,” said Kevin Moore, 3PL’s chair and chief financial officer. China’s embassy in Washington said Beijing was “committed to maintaining the stability of global supply chains”. It added that “applications for the export of tungsten that comply with relevant regulations will be granted licences”.
The size of the deposit, Moore said, “is not a mining story. It is a national security story.”
The privately held, Nevada-based company has assessed the resource at 1.78mn tonnes, which, if proved to be commercially viable to extract, would be more than five times larger than the next largest deposit of the metal in the US. 3PL has estimated its value at about $152bn based on current prices, which have skyrocketed amid a severe shortage.
The assessment of the size of their deposit does not include the area where drilling is currently blocked by Nasa.
The tungsten market has surged nearly 600 per cent since February 2025 because of strong demand from the aerospace, weapons and tools industries and declining supply resulting from export controls imposed by China, which holds 80 per cent of the global market.
The report said large deposits of lithium, boron and potash had also been measured in vast underground salt beds within a 58-square-mile area near the town of Ely, where 3PL holds leases and mining rights.
The Trump administration has prioritised critical minerals projects as it seeks to break Beijing’s grip over the strategically important sector and last year added 3PL’s Railroad Valley to FAST-41, a federal programme that aims to expedite approvals.
The global shortage of tungsten has captured the attention of the White House. As part of an accelerating race for resources, the US government is poised to provide up to $1.6bn for a planned tungsten mine in Kazakhstan — which is being developed by a group that plans to merge with a shell company backed by Donald Trump Jr and Eric Trump.
3PL, which has raised almost $50mn to pursue its project, is lobbying the Trump administration and Congress to overturn a 20-year federal prohibition imposed on mining and exploration on a 17-square-mile section of the area in 2023.
The limit was imposed by the Bureau of Land Management at the request of Nasa, which has used the flat, barren desert terrain for calibration testing of satellite instruments to ensure they produce accurate standardised data.
Moore said the 2023 decision was made with “incomplete information” because of a lack of engagement by Nasa and the company was “trying to work our way through the proper channels” to enable the potential resource to be extracted to the benefit of the US.
A Nasa spokesperson said the agency’s position had not changed.
Analysts said the discovery of such a large tungsten deposit in the US would generate a lot of interest because of tight supplies globally, but cautioned that developing the resource — even if the land rights issues could be resolved — was likely to be years away.
“When prices are this high, it’s easy to gin up interest in a project or a new find like this. You’ve probably got a couple dozen junior miners worldwide right now trying to get in on the run-up in prices,” said Timothy Puko, an analyst at research consultancy Eurasia Group.
“You’ve got to think development is about five years away at best, and a lot will change between now and then.”
Additional reporting by Demetri Sevastopulo in Washington
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