The United States is stepping up efforts to strengthen ties with key mineral-rich African countries to help secure supplies, an administration official said on 12 October, according to foreign media.
Speaking at a conference in Cape Town on Thursday, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Energy Kimberly Harrington said recent workshops in the Zambian capital of Lusaka and neighbouring Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo had attracted U.S. experts, with the ultimate goal of setting up battery manufacturing operations there.
"Key minerals are important to the technologies that are driving the global clean energy transition," she said late Wednesday. The dialogue I'm having here with partners in the private sector as well as governments is really driving these discussions."
Last month, the U.S. government approved $150 million in funding for a graphite mining project in Mozambique.
The U.S.-based International Development Finance Corp. provided the financing to Twigg Exploration and Mining Lda, which has a project in northeastern Mozambique that mines and processes the material for use in electric-vehicle batteries and nuclear reactors.Twigg is headquartered in subsidiary of Melbourne, Australia-based Syrah Resources Ltd. which is the largest graphite producer outside of China.
The loan is aimed at increasing graphite production and expanding the global graphite supply chain, the Mineral Security Partnership said in a 10 October statement.The MSP is a U.S. State Department initiative designed to help bring foreign investment and Western expertise to developing countries' mining industries, which help supply key raw materials such as lithium, manganese and cobalt.
Another focus of MSP is to link companies "with high ESG standards and the same labour rights" for local processing and refining, she said. "We feel that U.S. energy companies do pursue these values, and we want to work with like-minded companies, even if they're not U.S. companies."
Last December, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken signed a memorandum of understanding with Congo and Zambia to explore ways to support their plans to jointly develop an electric vehicle value chain. The two Central African countries are major producers of copper and cobalt, key metals for electric cars and batteries.
[Source - CKN].
