Eurobattery Minerals has completed basic engineering for its planned 20-tonne-per-hour San Juan tungsten processing plant in Galicia and begun manufacturing of several major equipment packages as the project moves from design towards execution.
Project company Tungsten San Juan has received the final basic-engineering report and placed orders for equipment covering the main crushing, grinding, and gravity-concentration stages. Eurobattery says the orders represent several million euros of investment and are covered by financing already available to the project.
The crushing package has been awarded to an international mining-equipment manufacturer, while grinding machinery will be manufactured in Galicia by a supplier specialising in heavy mining equipment. Shaking tables and concentration spirals have also been ordered for the gravity circuit.
Technical and commercial negotiations have been completed for much of the remaining process plant, including screens, hydrocyclones, thickeners, tanks, pumps, pump boxes, and auxiliary equipment. Final awards are intended to take account of performance, reliability, and safety.
The move into equipment manufacture is significant because mineral projects can spend lengthy periods progressing through exploration, testwork, resource definition, finance, permitting, and engineering without much physical production equipment being built. Starting manufacture does not remove construction risk, but it makes the project schedule rather more tangible.
San Juan’s proposed process route relies on conventional gravity concentration. Metallurgical testing reported by Eurobattery earlier in September produced a concentrate grading 63.1% tungsten trioxide during the cleaning stage using a gravity-based flowsheet without flotation or chemical separation reagents.
The principle exploits the high density of tungsten-bearing minerals relative to much of the surrounding rock. Once ore has been crushed and ground sufficiently to liberate the valuable mineral, spirals and shaking tables can separate material according to differences in density and particle behaviour.
Conventional equipment does not make the circuit simple. Crushing must deliver suitable feed without generating unnecessary fines; grinding needs to liberate tungsten minerals without wasting energy; classification equipment must maintain the required particle-size distribution; and the gravity stages have to balance concentrate grade against recovery.
Ore variability adds another layer. Test samples can establish a workable flowsheet, but continuous operation has to tolerate changes in hardness, mineralogy, moisture, feed size, and tungsten grade while maintaining throughput and product specification.
That puts less glamorous equipment such as pumps, screens, hydrocyclones, thickeners, pipework, water systems, instrumentation, and wear components at the centre of eventual plant availability. A mine cannot sell laboratory recovery figures; it has to move tonnes through the whole circuit consistently.
The planned 20-tonne-per-hour plant is small beside bulk-mining operations handling thousands of tonnes per hour, but tungsten is a high-value strategic material. Cemented carbides used in cutting and machining tools account for major demand, while the metal also has applications across aerospace, defence, energy, advanced manufacturing, and electronics.
Supply is highly concentrated outside Europe. Eurobattery cites Eurostat data showing China accounted for 68% of the value of EU ferrotungsten imports in 2025, followed by Vietnam at 21% and Kazakhstan at 8%. Together, those three sources represented 97% of external supply by value.
European production therefore attracts strategic interest disproportionate to the physical scale of an individual mine. A regional operation will not replace global tungsten trade, but it can diversify supply, shorten part of the logistics chain, and provide material produced under European regulatory requirements.
San Juan also has a long-term regulatory base. Its mining licence has been extended for 30 years to 2055, reducing one category of uncertainty while leaving the ordinary execution risks of building and commissioning the plant.
Those risks remain substantial. Equipment has to be completed and delivered, foundations and supporting infrastructure constructed, electrical and water systems commissioned, process packages integrated, operating staff prepared, and the plant brought through initial production without losing control of recovery or concentrate quality.
The current milestone is therefore narrower, but more useful, than another project intention. Basic engineering has been completed, purchase commitments have been made, and major equipment is entering manufacture. The next evidence will arrive in steel, concrete, installation progress, and eventually enough processed ore to show whether San Juan’s laboratory results can be reproduced continuously at industrial scale.
