Out of the GRND's Podcast
Taylor Sulik - Mithril Mining
Taylor Sulik started Mithril Mining without a mining background, without a geology background, and without a project. What he did have was a US Coast Guard intelligence career and a fairly methodical way of working through a problem. In late 2023 he took the USGS critical minerals list and built a scoring framework around it. Had America produced this before? Was there defence demand and commercial demand? Were there unclaimed deposits? What land status were they on? Tungsten came out on top, so he worked down a list of the largest US tungsten deposits until he reached one nobody had claimed. That was Calvert, in Montana, the highest grade historical tungsten resource in the country. It produced between 1956 and 1962 and stopped when the US government stopped buying. It was drilled again in 1966 and 1971, then largely lost to history. US Tungsten Corp held it from 2012 and planned to drill, but never did. At one point the claims ended up being offered on eBay. In this episode Taylor walks through the historic resource, 128,000 tons at 1.1% beneath the open pit with a potential 218,000 tons deeper at the same grade, plus around 20,000 tons at 0.8% near surface to the northwest. He explains the unprocessed surface material at roughly 0.2% that could fund exploration without heavy dilution, the unfunded partnership with Utah State University, the processing facility at Phillipsburg and the letter of intent with Tungsten Parts Wyoming that closes the chain from mine to offtake. There's also the pressure sitting behind all of it. Tungsten has moved from about $330/MTU to about $3,200/MTU since he started, China still accounts for 83% of global production, and the TFARS deadline of 21 January 2027 is doing a lot of quiet work in the background. He quit his full time job in May 2026. He has turned down seven and eight figure offers for the property. The aim is the first US tungsten concentrate since 2015, then dewatering the pit, then eventually handing the site back as somewhere people can use. More on the company at mithrilmining.com
