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The project will link Angola and Zambia by rail for the first time and is part of the work of the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (PGI), Helaina Matza, acting special coordinator for the PGI, said in a recent interview.
“The project is designed to have shovels in the ground by 2026, and so far, we are moving according to that timeline. There has been a ton of work moving at a breakneck speed,” she added.
The work reflects a heightened focus by the US and its partners on securing diversified supply chains for critical minerals, such as copper, cobalt, nickel, lithium and rare earths, which are used in technologies ranging from electric vehicles to renewable energy and defense systems.
Listen to Matza discuss how the US is navigating critical mineral challenges in the global energy transition with Andrea Hotter on season one of Fast Forward podcast. You can listen to all episodes from season one here.
The Lobito Corridor is one of the central focuses of the PGI, a bipartisan initiative in partnership with the Group of Seven (G7) nations.
It involves the refurbishment of an existing section of the 1,739-km railway line stretching from Angola’s Atlantic Ocean port of Lobito to the copper belt of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and the construction of a new 800-km track through northwest Zambia. There are plans to eventually extend the new line to Indian Ocean ports in Tanzania.
“The Lobito Corridor, or at least portions of it, was not our idea. It was Angola, the DRC and Zambia’s idea, and we came in to help expand and realize the concept,” Matza said.
“Credit needs to go to Angola, Zambia and the DRC because they had to allow that speed to happen and create that space. It’s not easy to do a feasibility study for 800 km of greenfield rail,” she added.
The refurbished railway offers the shortest and most direct route to the port from the key copper belt mining district of Kolwezi in the DRC and is now in use.
Ivanhoe Mines has been sending copper concentrate via the railway, which passes within 5 km of the miner’s Kamoa-Kakula complex in the DRC to Lobito port.
The use of railway makes the journey time around eight days instead of 25 days by road to Durban port, South Africa.
Lobito Atlantic Railway (LAR), a consortium including commodities trading group Trafigura, has been awarded a 30-year concession for railway services and supports logistics on the Lobito Corridor.
According to LAR, at least two international freight trains are now traveling every week from the DRC to Lobito, along with around 50 domestic freight trains each month. After the planned investments have been made, it’s expected that six international freight trains will be in transit each day.
The new economic corridor is designed to be a game-changing regional investment. A US and EU-led consortium has committed at least $320 million of grant, equity and debt capital to finance the new rail section, while the Africa Finance Corporation (AFC), along with the African Development Bank, are also consortium partners.
“So often, these rail links or ports will help unlock transit routes and then make the whole set of sectors that utilize them – from agriculture to minerals to the movement of people and tourism – see new investment opportunities,” Matza said.
While the investment spans many sectors, the US and its partners are also assisting in the development of Africa’s critical minerals sector.
The continent has a wealth of minerals essential for the energy transition. Already, the DRC is the world’s largest cobalt producer, the continent’s biggest copper producer, and has significant reserves of untapped lithium. Zambia is a major copper producer; it also produces cobalt, nickel and manganese.
Matza was recently part of a US delegation visiting Angola with the Joe Biden administration, an event she described as “incredibly positive” and well-received by its constituent parties.
“The trip was a real endorsement of a model that works and recognition that a focused approach really does make a difference,” she said. “You really double down in a partnership model and ask, what is the critical infrastructure that unlocks industry? It shouldn’t be the only thing you do from a foreign policy perspective, but it can make a huge difference.”
During the trip, President Biden announced over $560 million in new funding – including commitments expected to generate at least $200 million in additional private sector capital – for infrastructure projects along the Lobito Corridor, bringing the total for US investments to more than $4 billion.
There have been other agreements, such as rail freight commitments from Zambian mining projects. This included Kobaloni Energy, which is planning to construct the first cobalt sulphate refinery on the African continent, and First Quantum Minerals, a major copper producer in Zambia.
KoBold Metals, a Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos-backed US company applying artificial intelligence to develop a critical minerals site in Zambia, has meanwhile committed to anchor the commercial viability of the Zambia-Lobito rail project with more than 300,000 tonnes of copper per year from its Mingomba mine.
Similarly, rare-earth specialist company Pensana PLC has received funding from the US International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) to help the firm develop one of the world’s largest and highest-grade magnet metal rare earth deposits in Angola.
With these announcements, along with PGI’s G7 partners and regional development banks, international investment in the Lobito Corridor has exceeded $6 billion.
According to Matza, much of PGI’s work surrounding the mining sector has been focused on empowering projects to move forward and create added-value beneficiation in Africa.
But this does not always mean infrastructure, she said.
“As we’re talking with Tanzania about how it may fit into this conversation, the first project that we’ve really focused on isn’t a transit route. It’s to help to develop a special economic zone for hopefully the Kabanga nickel project and other feedstock to ultimately utilize, with training facilities for local Tanzanians and designed to do some added-value work on the continent,” Matza told Fastmarkets.
The Kabanga project is owned by LifeZone Metals and is expected to be a mine-to-metal operation comprising the Kabanga mine and Kahama refinery, which will produce battery-grade nickel, copper and cobalt.
The PGI’s work is not just in Africa. Globally, the PGI aims to mobilize $600 billion by 2027 in high-impact global infrastructure investments, and it has already made significant progress in another corridor, located around Luzon Island, the Philippines’ biggest island.
The Luzon Economic Corridor encompasses ports such as Batangas and Manila, as well as the Subic and Clark economic zones.
“This second corridor is centered around another greenfield backbone rail that will connect Luzon Island to help support the decongestion in Manila ports, commercialize Subic Bay, and develop new industrial zones that are designed to assist energy and semiconductor deployment,” Matza said. “So once again, among other things, there is an important supply chain nexus to that work.”
The Philippines is one of the world’s most richly endowed countries with mineral resources; it has untapped copper, gold, nickel, zinc and silver reserves. Only a tiny portion of these reserves are being explored, and an even smaller portion are covered by mining contracts. Nickel in particular has been a growing focus for the country.
According to Matza, the US and its G7 partners have for many years been strong proponents of seeking investment and helping to create a race to the top in emerging markets around the world.
This, she said, is in part to ensure that countries have good standards in areas such as the environment, integrity and fiscal corporate management, as well as social responsibility, which ultimately allow them to be competitive.
“The development and supporting economic growth for our partner countries has always been a big part of our economic policy, but how we achieve that goal has evolved. Over the last several years, we’ve seen a much deeper understanding of supply constraints to critical technologies that we care about,” she said.
“Many of the technologies are related to electrifying our economy, but they also go into semiconductor chips used in consumer electronics and other industries that we previously didn’t have full visibility into. Increasingly, it has been demonstrated that there were real vulnerabilities to our supply chain from a foreign policy perspective,” she added.
The West has been seeking to reduce its reliance on China, which has deep roots in Africa, having for many years owned and operated multiple major copper and cobalt mining operations in its mineral-rich copper belt region.
China has been actively investing in Africa since the 1960s, targeting natural resources as well as construction, manufacturing and infrastructure links.
The PGI initiative also comes as trade tensions between the US and China heat up, with key critical minerals being weaponized in the form of tariffs.
Trade tensions are increasingly influencing the list of strategic and critical minerals being targeted in supply chains, and the selection of products will continue to evolve, Matza said.
“The world tells us what the list should look like as it evolves. The US critical minerals list is long, and a lot of our conversations have focused on electrification in the battery supply chain, which I believe is always going to be important due to demand growth in the numerous applications for lithium-ion batteries,” she said.
“But the world has reacted to some of our policies, both from a trade and a diplomatic perspective, and so other materials are getting a closer look. What we were seeing in action on graphite, gallium and germanium brings to the forefront how important it is to understand how these supply chains work — and what that means for applications in these high-tech sectors that we feel very strong in and want to continue to grow domestically, but with resiliency on a global scale,” she added.
China is already crimping supplies to the US of critical minerals on which the latter relies for defense and semi-conductors, such as gallium, germanium, antimony and graphite.
“You don’t want any actors to be able to flip a switch and turn off the market, and we know that, in some cases, around these supply chains, that is possible,” Matza said. “Some of our partners have learned that the hard way over the years.”
In Hotter Commodities, special correspondent Andrea Hotter covers some of the biggest stories impacting the natural resources sector. Read more coverage on our dedicated Hotter Commodities page here.