I hew select ground — having to extract tungsten form this? (9)

'i' is the definition.
Both the answer and definition are singular nouns.
Perhaps you can see a link between them that I don't see?

'hew select ground having to extract tungsten form this?' is the wordplay.
I cannot quite understand how this works, but
'select' could be 'elite' (I've seen this in another clue) and 'elite' is located in the answer.
This may be the basis of the clue (or it may be nonsense).

Can you help me to learn more?