Things are beginning to move in Zimbabwe in terms of the sustainable exploitation of raw materials. For example, 450,000 tonnes of lithium will be processed each year in this East African country rich in mineral deposits. Prospect Lithium Zimbabwe (PLZ) was recently granted government authorisation to do just that. The subsidiary of the Chinese company Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt has just inaugurated the new plant based in Harare.
At a cost of 300 million US dollars (108.5 million Zimbabwean dollars), work on this facility took nine months. It should speed up the positioning of the Zimbabwean capital in the global electric vehicle market, given that its lithium potential is increasingly being courted by carmakers. Such is the case of China’s Build Your Dreams (BYD), which has scoured six mines on the continent in 2022 with a view to manufacturing 27.7 million lithium-ion batteries by 2029 at its Shenzhen plant in China.
This is why Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa has banned exports of this metal from December 2022, in favour of local processing. And the measure is a promising one, since Georges Fang, CEO of Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt, has suggested that exports from the trial production of this new plant brought in 40 million US dollars, or 14.4 million Zimbabwean dollars.
Read also-ZIMBABWE: A $500m smart city 18km from Harare to be built
Zimbabwe thus joins Australia, Chile, Brazil and Argentina in the Top 8 of the world’s leading lithium producers. The competition promises to be tight for electric vehicle manufacturers, as the price of lithium has risen by 500%, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence.
Benoit-Ivan Wansi