Zambia’s Mopani Copper Mines (MCM) plans to resume cobalt production that was halted more than a decade ago after international prices collapsed. An executive at state-owned ZCCM-IH on Tuesday said the accelerating sales of electric vehicles have fueled a scramble for nickel, cobalt and lithium, propelling prices of the battery materials to multi-year highs. Brian Musonda, chief investment officer at ZCCM-IH, Zambia’s mining investment arm, said the rising prices were a strong economic reason to restart cobalt processing.
“Going into next year, Mopani will start to process concentrates for cobalt and our plan was to produce something between 4,000 and 5,000 tonnes per year,” Musonda told Reuters.
Musonda added that Mopani would later ramp up production of cobalt, which the company historically mined as a by-product of copper.
“We have some material sitting on the surface. It is mined already as part of the copper ores but it cannot be processed because the cobalt price was too low.’’ Copper production in Zambia dropped to 800,696 tonnes in 2021 from 837,996 tonnes the year before, data obtained from the nation’s statistics agency showed in March.
ZCCM-IH in 2021 agreed to buy Glencore’s majority stake in Mopani Copper Mines in a 1.5 billion dollars deal funded by debt and said it would seek a new investor.
