Max Bearak of the New York Times reports that a copper deposit in Zambia could make billions for Silicon Valley, provide minerals for the energy transition, and help the United States in its rivalry with China. He writes:
Peering into their computer screens in California last year, the data crunchers watched a subterranean fortune come into focus.
What they saw transported them 10,000 miles across the world, to Zambia, and then one more mile straight down into the Earth. A rich lode of copper, deep in the bedrock, appeared before them, its contours revealed by a complex A.I.-driven technology they’d been painstakingly building for years.
On Thursday, their company, KoBold Metals, informed its business partners that their find is likely the largest copper discovery in more than a decade. According to their estimates, reviewed by The New York Times, the mine would produce at least 300,000 tons of copper a year once fully operational. That corresponds to a value of billions of dollars a year, for decades. […]
For the United States government, the benefits are far more clear.
“We are the American beachhead in Africa,” said Jennifer Fendrick, KoBold’s director for government affairs. “And that’s how the government sees it.” Before joining KoBold, she was a senior State Department strategist on critical minerals.
While the U.S. government hasn’t directly invested in KoBold, it is partially underwriting a $2.3 billion railway to the Angolan coast from Copperbelt Province, enabling copper to be more easily shipped to the United States. It’s Washington’s single-biggest investment to catch up to Beijing in Africa’s battery-metal sweepstakes. […]
“We need 25 times as much cobalt as we currently mine,” said Jose W. Fernandez, the State Department’s top energy official, in an interview in New York recently, not to mention all the other metals and minerals reshaping the global economy. “We’ve got to get into the ring. We’ll be skewered if we fail.”
Read more here.
