By Nyasha Chingono
(Reuters) – Zimbabwe’s state-owned Kuvimba Mining House has signed a $310 million deal with a consortium of British and Chinese investors for the construction of a lithium concentrator, the company announced on Thursday.
Kuvimba Mining House said in a statement it has signed a binding Build, Operate, and Transfer (BOT) agreement with the consortium for a 3 million metric ton per year ore processing plant at its Sandawana mine, where Rio Tinto mined emeralds for three decades until 1993.
A lithium concentrator, the first stage in processing the metal, crushes and leaches ore to produce saleable concentrates that are further refined into lithium carbonate or lithium hydroxide used in batteries. Zimbabwe currently does not refine lithium, but exports concentrates to China for further processing.
The company did not name the investors, only saying they were “leading foreign British and Chinese companies in the global lithium market”. Kuvimba said the build-operate-transfer arrangement would lapse after six years.
The plant is set to be commissioned within 18 months, producing 600,000 metric tons of lithium concentrate annually, Kuvimba said.
Zimbabwe, Africa’s top producer of lithium, which is used in electric vehicle batteries and to store renewable energy, has attracted more than $1 billion investment in lithium projects since 2021, mostly from Chinese battery metal firms, according to company filings.
Some of the Chinese firms with mines in Zimbabwe include Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt, Sinomine Resource Group, Chengxin Lithium Group, Canmax Technologies and Yahua Group.
(Reporting by Nyasha Chingono, writing by Nelson Banya; editing by Aurora Ellis)
