What Does the Emerging China-Africa Minerals Consensus Mean for U.S. Initiatives?

The recently concluded Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) provided a revealing glimpse into the current state of the Africa-China relationship. On the one hand, the official imagery and language of the summit emphasized constancy — a vision of a stable South-South relationship stretching from the past into the future. On the other hand, the summit also projected a relationship that is being reshaped for a new decade.

Data released shortly before the summit showed that Chinese project financing in Africa is creeping back up after several years of decline due to elevated debt levels and China’s zero-COVID shutdown. At the October 2023 Belt and Road Forum, Beijing debuted a new emphasis on contained project timelines and budgets and a strong focus on green energy, data connectivity and a larger role for the Chinese private sector.

These developments build a shared space for Africa-China collaboration at a time when the United States and its allies and partners are also trying to work with Africa to secure access to supplies of critical minerals that are key to electric vehicle batteries, and other strategic and consumer technologies. U.S.-led initiatives are aimed at reversing Western actors’ evacuation of the space, which opened opportunities for Chinese companies. The question now becomes whether Africa will be able to wield both sets of relationships to its own benefit.

An Emerging Consensus

Official initiatives announced during FOCAC and commercial deals signed on its sidelines demonstrated that trends in China’s project financing in Africa are set to continue. The summit resulted in a commitment to 30 clean energy programs, 30 joint laboratories for green development, thousands of scholarships aimed at technological skills transfer, and broader pledges to fit these developments into African aims to expand industrialization via value addition to African critical mineral resources, partially through green energy expansion. In the Beijing Action Plan released after the summit, the central role of critical minerals and green energy in African industrialization, and this industrialization as a shared Africa-China project are made explicit:

The two sides will work together to maintain the stability of the mineral supply chain, promote mineral value addition in Africa by developing smelting technology, support the expansion of smelting, processing and other upstream and downstream sectors of mining industry as well as infrastructure construction, and explore mining deep processing projects in Africa […] with a view to transforming Africa’s resource endowments into advantages of economic development […] The two sides recognize that energy is a key sector for the continental economic and social development and an important part of China-Africa cooperation. New energy, as an emerging strategic industry, is crucial for industrial transformation and economic development in the future.

Dueling Ambitions

This overlap of African critical minerals and the global shift to green energy is a key driver of the Biden administration’s Lobito Corridor project. Part of the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (PGI) — an initiative developed by the Biden administration and its G7 partners and allies — the project is aimed at securing critical minerals supply chains, with minimal Chinese involvement, by refurbishing Angola’s preexisting Benguela rail line and to link it to a newly built 800-kilometer line to mining regions in the southern DRC and Zambia. This will be coupled with the development of a logistics and port corridor aimed at both facilitating raw mineral exports through the port of Lobito and boosting local economic development.

Shortly before the FOCAC summit, the U.S. government announced an agreement that would expand the Lobito Corridor to reach nickel deposits in Tanzania. This would widen U.S. access to African critical minerals, and potentially create the first east-west rail connection in Africa, an achievement the African Union has been pursuing for years.

However, this is somewhat complicated by a February agreement between Tanzania, Zambia and China Civil Engineering Construction Corp (CCECC), a subsidiary of the state-owned China Railway Construction Corp, to make $1 billion worth of upgrades to the TAZARA railway. Built in the 1970s to allow Zambia to bypass blockades by apartheid South Africa and export copper via Tanzania’s Dar es Salaam port, the railway is an icon of Africa-China relations. The new deal is aimed at bringing it back to its original intended capacity of 5 million metric tons of cargo per year.

The announcement of TAZARA’s refurbishment, in theory, puts these two rail lines in competition. A fully functional TAZARA line would significantly increase exports of African critical minerals to the Indian Ocean, both to China and the Middle East’s increasingly robust refining sector. Seen narrowly in terms of raw mineral exports, the resurrection of TAZARA could set up a direct East-West competition for mineral ore from Central Africa and could potentially boost China’s already strong refining sector.

Complicating the Competition Narrative

Two factors complicate assumptions of TAZARA-Lobito zero-sum competition. First, one of the most cost-effective ways of connecting the Lobito Corridor to Tanzania would be to link it to the TAZARA line. The currently planned expansion of the Benguela line would lengthen it to Chingola in the DRC’s Copperbelt. TAZARA links to Ndola, Zambia, which is about 115 kilometers away. Forging a link between the two lines would make the dream of an Atlantic-to-Indian Ocean link a reality much faster than simply expanding the Lobito Corridor.

Such a link is likely to receive significant support from the Southern African Development Community, the African Union and regional governments. However, it remains to be seen how U.S. and Chinese funders would view it. On the Chinese side, it would first depend on buy-in from CCECC. The construction and logistics giant has received a concession to run the railway after its refurbishment, at the request of the Tanzania-Zambia Railway Authority. It is unclear how CCECC would view connecting the two lines, and how it would affect freight rates, which is key to the public-private partnership underlying the refurbishment deal.

The thornier task though will be reconciling the reality that some of these projects emerged from the geopolitical desire to exclude the other.

More broadly, any connection would demand U.S.-China coordination and cooperation at a fundamental level — for example, harmonizing railway gauges. The thornier task though will be reconciling the reality that some of these projects emerged from the geopolitical desire to exclude the other. For example, some Chinese companies working in the DRC have reportedly expressed their own interest in exporting via Angola because it would allow them an alternative to exporting through the South African port of Durban, which necessitates transporting minerals through dysfunctional border crossings. However, ambiguity around PGI projects’ dual commercial role and their political imperative to “outcompete China on the world stage” — as put in a Biden administration fact sheet — raises questions about whether regular shipments to China are included in the calculations around its economic viability. Some of the early trial shipments reportedly went to China.

The second factor complicating the narrative of direct competition is the drive from African countries to locate more strategic mineral refining and related manufacturing in Africa. African critical mineral strategies, developed by continental bodies like the African Development Bank, emphasize local refining and value addition, an ambition now enjoying official Chinese support, as well as support from the U.S. through initiatives such as the Minerals Security Partnership among others. For example, the partners involved in the Lobito Corridor have similarly signed agreements with African countries to do more refining locally. These include EU agreements with Zambia and the DRC for mineral-driven value addition, and a trilateral agreement between Zambia, the DRC and the U.S. for domestic electric vehicle supply chain development.

While promising, U.S. and Western initiatives so far haven’t translated into the kinds of on-the-ground refining facilities built by Chinese companies in Zimbabwe. These responded to a Zimbabwean ban on the export of raw ore, and at least three Chinese-built refineries currently produce spodumene (an initial concentrate produced by separating minerals from rocks and mud). Despite pressure from the Zimbabwean government, it is difficult for these companies to move their products up the value chain because further refining demands both a more stable power supply and a production ecosystem providing industrial chemicals currently missing in Zimbabwe. The current level of refining was enabled by Chinese mining companies building closed-loop electricity generation capacity to power these refineries. The dream of refining minerals and manufacturing battery components in Zambia, Angola, Tanzania and the DRC faces similar constraints.

It is still too early to tell how Lobito and TAZARA will coexist or whether the dream of connecting them stands any chance. However, the momentum of the TAZARA refurbishment raises fresh questions about the commercial viability of Lobito’s plan to export to the Atlantic Ocean. While Asia offers a dense refining ecosystem, not only in China but increasingly also in the Middle East, Lobito’s off-take markets would initially be in the United States and Europe. The first shipment of copper that left Angola via the Benguela line went to refining facilities in Baltimore.

The viability of African plans for refining is one complication. Another is whether the U.S. and Europe will be able to rapidly expand their own domestic refining capacity. Of the world’s top 24 copper refineries, only four are accessible from the Atlantic. For nickel and cobalt, the situation is even starker. The U.S.’s first nickel-cobalt refinery using scrap material opened in Ohio in September, but despite Biden administration plans, refining raw cobalt ore is still in the planning stage. The rapid expansion of refining capacity it would take to handle large exports of African ore could, in turn, face environmental and community pushback in developed countries. A broader, but related, complication is the added scrutiny around possible child labor and environmental issues in cobalt extraction U.S. companies would face in the DRC.

FOCAC 2024 put these complications in stark relief because it highlighted an increased sense of synergy and coordination around green energy and critical mineral value addition in the China-Africa relationship. A similar focus is developing between the continent and its Western partners. The question now is whether the continent will be able to wield both sets of relationships to its own benefit, even as great-power tensions over critical minerals heat up.