Handelsblatt: Resource-rich African countries want to set up their own battery supply chain

At the world historical threshold of electric mobility, an African country is becoming the focus of interest of car manufacturers. It is the Democratic Republic of the Congo (PRC), the world’s largest producer of cobalt, the metal the industry urgently needs to make high-performance batteries.

Although the Central African country has 2/3 of the world’s known reserves, it no longer wants to be content as a raw material supplier. The government is now interested in securing a greater share of value added in the domestic market.

PRC Industry Minister Julien Paluku Kahongya said in an interview with Handelsblatt that “we want to play a more active role in the energy transition”. He said the country’s importance to the battery industry should be commensurate with the importance of its raw material stocks.

The PRC not only has large cobalt reserves, but has also recently discovered nickel and lithium deposits, says Industry Minister Kahongya. In addition, manganese metal has been mined in the PRC for decades and its importance is also growing rapidly with the development of electromobility. The first step in maintaining a larger share of value creation in the Congo is to build a pilot plant for the production of cobalt chemicals for cathode production.

The plant is expected to be operational by the end of 2023, Kahongya said. In addition, the PRC has entered into a cooperation agreement with neighboring Zambia, which also wants to significantly increase the extraction of raw materials for batteries.

By the end of this decade or the beginning of the new one, a battery factory could be built in the Congo, according to the plan of Industry Minister Kahongya. He said the country is in contact with potential partner companies for this purpose, including Bosch, but also Chinese companies. “We have no preference as to which partner will approach us,” he explains. They will select the partner who is willing to start the construction of the battery factory as soon as possible.

Opportunity to take advantage of one’s own wealth of raw materials is favorable: car manufacturers worldwide are trying to secure access to battery metals such as cobalt and nickel in order to be able to fulfill their own plans to expand their electric car fleet.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo is likely to maintain a dominant market position: Last year, 74% of mining production came from the Central African country. “Without the PRC’s products, the green transformation will be slower than we can imagine,” he said in an interview with Handelsblatt. Therefore, he said, his country must play a “substantial role” in the global supply chain.

Combating child labor in small-scale mines

Zambian Minister of Mines Paul Kabuswe also hopes for a bigger role for his country. The country is a major producer of copper – and demand for reddish industrial metal is also expected to grow rapidly as electricity expands. On average, an electric car needs about four times as much copper as a diesel or gasoline car.

He says Zambia wants to produce not only copper concentrate in the future, but also copper cables for electric cars. Kabuswe says: “The highest added value is the key”. In addition, Zambia is also hoping for cobalt discoveries in the Congo border region. “Our two countries are cooperating for the strong exploration of the deposits.”

However, many Western manufacturers are still reluctant to buy cobalt from Central Africa on a large scale. There is great concern that material from the informal mining sector, where child labor is also common, will end up in the battery.

At the same time, however, many households in the Congo, for example, are dependent on small-scale mining. The PRC therefore wants to regulate small-scale mining and integrate it into the state-owned company Entreprise Generale du Cobalt (EGC).

In this way, the country wants to control compliance with common standards, such as banning child labor. The success of the initiative will determine the extent to which Western automakers are involved in the country. But without cobalt from the Congo, German carmakers are likely to have difficulty achieving their ambitious goals for the electric fleet.