Tungsten - The Critical Metal Explained

Added: 2026-06-03

[00:00:00]Every critical metals list I have seen has tungsten and I think a big part of that is the use cases are very ubiquitous. People under appreciate how important it is and that's mainly because tungsten carbide as a cutting tool, you need to cut things, right? So even if a car doesn't actually have blocks of tungsten in it, to cut the chassis or to cut certain [music] engine parts, you need tungsten cutting tools effectively.

[00:00:24]Also, the criticality of the list is not just what the metal is used for, but what the level of supply chain vulnerability is. So for instance, [music] because China, Russia and North Korea combined for north of 90% of total global mine supply of the metal, because of that supply chain vulnerability, it really escalates and elevates how critical that metal is considered [music] across the various agencies and governments.

[00:00:50]Tungsten is a metal that has been used in the defense space for over 100 years >> [music] >> and what we're seeing right now is the irreplaceability of tungsten on full display, which is if you can't get access to that metal because of those physical properties, you can't [music] just replace it with copper or cobalt or nickel. They just don't have even close to comparable physical properties.