First floated in 2006, then-managing director Humphrey Hail initially targeted tungsten in New South Wales before shifting his focus to Devon, England.

The company picked up Hemerdon in 2007, with American-based AMAX previously working on it from the late 1970s to the early 1990s.

When the tungsten price fell over in the 90s, AMAX decided to cut its losses and move out, with Wolf eventually working to re-establish the resource and reserve, draw up a mine plan, and produce a bankable feasibility study.

After almost a decade of work, the company marked an official ground-breaking ceremony this month and contractors recently moved onsite to start construction.

The mine will have global significance for the tungsten industry, but will also be an important milestone for England, marking its first mining development in almost half a century.

Each step along the way has thrown its own hurdles but Wolf managing director Russell Clark told MiningNews.Net some of the biggest challenges boiled down to England's unfamiliarity with the mining sector.

Since England joined the European Union many of its mining regulations have remained virtually untested, with Hemerdon's environmental permit the first of its kind.

"We work through the environmental systems here, they can be laborious, but everyone knows what you have to do and you work your way through it," Clark said.

"Over there we found we were sometimes working with people who weren't experienced in the industry, because there isn't one.

"With an environmental permit they could look at from a professional perspective but converting that into a technical and a practical one was a bit challenging."

England's built-up landscape is also vastly different to some parts of Australia and while that means the company has to be conscious of its neighbours, it's helped remove many costly projects from the development.

"A lot of the reasons this project works in England is because we don't have to build a camp or airport or a power station or roads," Clark said.

"We also don't have to pay the wages that the Australian market has been demanding over the past few years."

Clark said outside those challenges the process had been reasonably straightforward and early land clearing and access roads were already underway.

Sketching out a rough timeline for the rest of the year's work, he said earthworks would start this month, and concrete would follow soon after.

Steelwork is set to go up in the middle of the year and if all goes well we should see construction finished early next year.

After a commissioning phase Wolf is scheduled to deliver into its first offtake requirement in the September-November quarter next year.

On the financial side the company this week completed a final $A182.7 million fundraising, finalising the funding requirement for the mine.

Wolf is using a local mining contractor for the operations; a move Clark said gave it space to focus on the processing plant.

"The make-or-break piece for us is the processing plant, that's the bit that we need to make sure runs properly," he said.

"It's better to have our focus on that and let the mining contractor get on with digging the hole."

The decision to use a contractor comes as more companies transition to an owner-operator model.

Clark said while he was not averse to that system, contractors allowed the company to focus its efforts and gave it the chance to take over certain processes and systems instead of developing them itself.

"I think sometimes corporates move to owner-operator because they see a margin they that think they will consume, and I don't think they do," he said.

"They might get some of it, but the reality is they're spreading their management over a broader area and become less focused."

As it stands the mine has a 10 year life, but there are a number of planned exploration works that could expand it further.

Work to steepen the walls of the pit could add an extra three to four years, and eventual drilling to test underground potential could add a further 10 or 15 years.

A longer-term vision could also see Wolf use the experience at Hemerdon to one day expand its footprint beyond the one project.

At this stage such expansions are a long way off, but current estimates have sketched out a solid cash generation for Hemerdon, and tungsten prices are forecast to rise over the coming years.

As it stands, the tungsten market is fairly disparate and once Hemerdon is running smoothly, Wolf could be on the prowl for further expansions.

"We will be one of the biggest tungsten miners in the western world, with all the intellectual property and knowledge and expertise that that brings," Clark said.