US Rebuilds Tin Smelting After 37 Years With 3,600-Tonne Congo Deal

America hasn't smelted primary tin since 1989. That 37-year gap is about to close, fed by 3,600 tonnes of Congolese tin a year.

Nathan Trotter & Co. — founded in 1789 and the oldest metals manufacturer in the US — has signed a two-year supply agreement with Canadian-listed Alphamin Resources for up to 3,600 tonnes of contained tin annually from the Bisie mine in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Announced on November 9, the deal covers just under 20% of Bisie's targeted annual output and feeds a smelting plant now under construction in Henry County, Virginia.

The Virginia facility carries a price tag of roughly $65 million and is designed to process both mined tin concentrate and recycled material. First production is targeted for 2027. The Pentagon chipped in too: the Department of Defense awarded Nathan Trotter $19 million in 2024 to support domestic tin smelting, refining and recycling capacity.

For context on scale, Alphamin's Bisie mine produces around 20,000 tonnes of contained tin a year, which makes it one of the largest primary tin sources outside Asia. The US share of that output is meaningful but far from dominant.

What does this change for US supply chains?

Plenty, if you're in electronics or defence procurement. Tin goes into the solder on circuit boards, semiconductors, telecommunications equipment and defence systems. Per the US Geological Survey, the country relies almost entirely on imported refined tin — a position Washington has decided it no longer finds comfortable.

The deal fits squarely into the diversification push. It gives the US a new African sourcing channel as policymakers work to loosen dependence on Asian refiners, China chief among them, and to rebuild domestic processing muscle that atrophied decades ago.

For Nathan Trotter, the arithmetic is straightforward: a new smelter needs guaranteed feedstock before it fires up, and a two-year offtake covering a fifth of a major mine's output provides exactly that. For Alphamin, it adds a Western buyer at a moment when the miner has been actively hunting new customers.

That hunt has a corporate backdrop. Abu Dhabi-based International Resource Holding acquired a 56% stake in Alphamin in July 2025, and the diversification of its customer book has clearly accelerated since.

Is this a break from China? Not quite.

Here's the wrinkle worth noting. Alphamin chief executive Eoin O'Driscoll told Fastmarkets in October that about 70% of the company's concentrate sales go to Yunnan in China, where competitive processing charges keep pulling volume in. Most of Bisie's production is expected to keep flowing east.

So this is a diversification strategy, not a decoupling. The US gets a dedicated slice of African tin and a domestic smelter to process it; China keeps the bulk of Alphamin's concentrates. Everyone diversifies, nobody divorces.

The company frames the arrangement as support for Western refining capacity, noting it aligns with the US-led Pax Silica initiative — the push to build more secure supply chains for critical minerals and technologies.

The near-term trajectory is now fixed on Henry County. If the plant hits its 2027 start date, the US will smelt primary tin for the first time in nearly four decades, with Bisie concentrate anchoring the feed. Watch the DoD's follow-on commitments and whether Alphamin's US allocation grows after the initial two-year term — both will signal how far Washington intends to take its critical-minerals rebuild.