Former Alphavillain Joseph Cotterill now living the foreign correspondent high-life in South Africa and environs, dateline Uis Namibia and Harry Dempsey in London team up for a Financial Times Big Read, April 2:
The country already dominates processing of the metal for use in
electric vehicle batteries and is now investing heavily in mines,
leaving western operators scrambling to keep up
The settlement of Uis in a remote part of Namibia seems an unlikely hotspot for a mineral cold war over the future of electric vehicles.
Uis lies in the arid hills of Erongo, a large and sparsely populated province of the south-west African country. For decades the only signs of its mineral wealth were the gemstones sold to tourists by artisanal miners, who scrabbled a living in the shadow of a disused tin mine.
But soon the site of that mine will be part of a global race for lithium, the alkali metal that is a key raw material for automotive batteries. Securing reliable lithium supply is one of the biggest challenges facing carmakers striving to produce more electric vehicles.
A pilot plant being built by Andrada, a London-listed miner, should produce its first batch of concentrated lithium by the end of June, using ore mined from the resurrected and expanded tin operation.
The facility will conveniently lie less than 300km from Walvis Bay, a major regional port. Anthony Viljoen, Andrada’s chief executive, believes the region will be “globally significant” not just for lithium but other metals critical to the energy transition, such as tin and tantalum.But it has competition. Last month, Africa’s first Chinese-owned lithium concentrate plant started up trial production at Arcadia, in Zimbabwe. That mine was bought by Huayou Cobalt in 2021 for $422mn, part of a recent billion-dollar wave of Chinese lithium deals in a country where many western investors fear to tread.
“The first wave of Chinese investments has taken place and that has led to a rude awakening for western companies,” Viljoen tells the Financial Times after a tour of the site of Andrada’s plant.
More than just lithium is at stake. From Brussels to London to Washington, concern over access to critical minerals is at an all-time high after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and amid escalating tensions between the west and China. The People’s Republic has built a dominant position in many of the minerals that are crucial for the energy transition, including cobalt, lithium and rare earth metals. The west is preparing to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to try to catch up....
....MUCH MORE, it really is the Big Read
