This article is a sponsored feature from Mining.com.au partner Elementos. It is not financial advice. Talk to a registered financial expert before making investment decisions.
Most people go to Spain for tapas.
Elementos (ASX:ELT) Managing Director Joe David goes for mining permits.
“I do the industrial tour of Spain.”
With its flagship Oropesa Project, Elementos is chasing a rare opportunity that could prove very lucrative in the right market.
From story to permitting
“Oropesa is no longer a concept story. We have got a fully compliant definitive feasibility study and have submitted our two primary permits in Spain”, David says.
“What matters most this year is moving the permits forward, with a target of being fully permitted by year-end.”
“The EU currently has no primary tin supply, no tin mines.”
“It imports 84% of the tin it needs from overseas.”
Although tin doesn’t carry the headline status of gold or copper, it is hard to live without and essential to electronics. Tin-based solder connects components across everything from circuit boards to everyday devices. Demand is always strong.
Europe pays up for tin
The EU’s supply gap is evident in the price it is willing to pay to secure tin. The region typically pays about US$1,000 a tonne above the broader market to pull the metal into Europe. Elementos sees its Oropesa opportunity as more than mining ore. It is also a pathway to sell tin metal into the European Union.
The smelter move
“We announced a binding option late last year over 50% of a smelter, about 200km up the road”, David says.
“That’s a key step toward full vertical integration and selling tin metal, in the form of ingots, into the European Union.”
With Oropesa now in the permitting phase, Elementos is focusing on the company’s Tasmanian asset, which is starting to expose itself as a much bigger story.
Cleveland is Elementos’ brownfield underground project in northwest Tasmania. It was historically a tin mine, and it still has the tailings, the workings, and the kind of site footprint that can shorten the distance between idea and plan.
Deep drilling broadens the prize
After a period of stagnation at its Tasmanian site (and some primary research), in 2024 Elementos made the decision to drill a very deep hole.
“It was a 1,100-metre hole on a steep angle straight into the exploration target below what was a known tungsten resource”, David says.
From there, the results came quickly.
“We hit mineralisation basically the whole way down”, David says.
“We hit extra tin and copper before drilling down to around 600m of tungsten.”
The deeper the team looked, the more it revealed.
“A whole bunch of really interesting minerals popped up, co-mineralised all the way through the tungsten.”
A critical metal surprise
The attention grabber was a little-known, critical metal called rubidium.
“Rubidium currently trades somewhere between US$2 and US$6 million a ton, which is massive. It’s used in quantum computing, high-tech medical equipment, and other specialist applications”, David says.
“The Chinese completely control the market.
“It could be a game changer for us.”
Rubidium wasn’t the only surprise. The tungsten system also carries molybdenum, bismuth, and fluorite.
Historic holes, fresh assays, bigger tungsten
Buoyed by this success, Elementos went back to the Tasmanian government’s core library and tracked down 26 historic holes through the tungsten zone.
“We are assaying these holes for the additional minerals now on our radar and then folding that data into the new drilling and other historical datasets”, David says.
“We’ve gone from 4 million tons up to 8.5 million tons of inferred tungsten resource.”
Ore sorting upgrades sharpen the case
Cleveland’s tungsten sits at the bottom of the old mine decline, so there is already an underground pathway to the resource. After years of inactivity, the workings need dewatering and rectification, and with no processing plant on site, a new one will be required. Even so, ore sorting results point to real potential. Test work on drill core from the 2024 deep hole lifted the tungsten feed grade from about 0.4% to around 1%, a 4.1x upgrade. The timing helps too. Tungsten has become one of the stronger markets in mining, with prices around US$150,000 per tonne, and that has sharpened global interest in new, non-Chinese supply. With tungsten carbide used in everyday tools like drill bits, most of the demand still comes from industry.
“China controls about 90–95% of the tungsten market”, says David.
“With tungsten increasingly used in military hardware, the US and Europe are chasing up tungsten supplies like crazy. It is a bit of an arms race.”
With confidence in the site growing, Cleveland is no longer the ‘old tin mine’ in the background. Interest is coming in thick and fast from different directions.
“We’ve had a lot of inbounds… even other companies asking us what we are doing with the asset, saying ‘we might want to play a role’,” David says.
Next steps: Metallurgy first, then scoping
The next 6–12 months at Cleveland focus on proving the pathway, not just pointing at the upside. The company has about “three to four months” of work to lock in the key inputs, and the most important one is the metallurgical test work to confirm how the tungsten and co-mineralised minerals are processed and what products the project can realistically produce.
“Predominantly the metallurgical data is what we require”, David says.
“After that, we plan to push full force towards a scoping study, targeted by the end of Q3 this year.
“Additional datasets should also be ready for release over the next quarter.”
That scoping study is the decision-maker. It combines Cleveland’s tin and copper resource with the tungsten resource and answers the question: Does the project start with tin and copper, before transitioning into tungsten, or does tungsten come first and tin follows?
Elementos will continue its momentum at Cleveland, but management and shareholder focus remains on getting Spain into construction and operational. That opens up options like building more internal capacity or bringing in a joint venture partner to accelerate Cleveland.
“We’ll assess those options when we have the scoping study completed and the business case sitting around the asset.”
Cleveland is no longer a single-metal story. David says the likely base case is a simple gravity plant, with ore sorting up front. The tungsten upgrades well, and bismuth and molybdenum tend to travel with it because they’re heavy elements, which should make separation into concentrates relatively straightforward.
The rubidium wild card
“The missing question mark for us now is the rubidium”, David says.
“Very few people around the world do it. We plan to do significant test work to understand how to process it and what a base case might look like.”
While the lab work runs, Elementos is also scanning the underground mine in 3D.
“We’ll have full 3D scans of the top eight levels or so of the mine, which will assist us in our next phase of mine planning and scoping study.”
It is another reason why Cleveland’s momentum matters. This is not a big corporate shifting teams around. It is a small outfit watching a quiet project turn into an asset with urgency, without losing sight of the flagship.
“Whilst the company has had all its management and majority of its cash flow focused on Spain, we can’t look away from Tasmania.”
“It basically exposed itself and it will be getting more of our attention moving forward”, David concludes.
Spain remains the main act, but Cleveland is the surprise encore gathering pace.
For Elementos, 2026 is a year investors will be watching closely.
Write to Kate Ryan at Mining.com.au
Images: Elementos Limited
