Washington's African minerals push may be a decade too late to break China's refining monopoly
China spent twenty years building an integrated system from African mines to Chinese battery factories. America responded with a railway, scattered investments, and institutions designed to prevent the very concentration that mineral dominance requires. The refining gap may already be permanent.
A Railway, a Refinery, and a Twenty-Year Gap
In October 2023, a Chinese consortium quietly closed its acquisition of Botswana’s Khoemacau copper mine. Months later, another Chinese firm secured Mali’s Goulamina lithium deposit. By early 2025, Tanzania’s Ngualla rare earth mine had followed. Each deal closed faster than the US Development Finance Corporation can complete a single environmental review.
This is not a race. Races imply comparable starting positions. What is unfolding across Africa’s mineral belt resembles something closer to a pursuit — one contestant already operating the track while the other argues over which shoes to wear.
China has spent two decades constructing an integrated system for extracting, processing, and consuming Africa’s critical minerals. The United States has spent two years announcing its intention to compete. Washington’s toolbox — the Minerals Security Partnership, the Lobito Corridor, scattered DFC investments — is real but thin. The question is no longer whether America started late. It started late. What matters is whether the nature of its lateness is the kind that capital and urgency can overcome, or the kind baked into institutional architecture that no executive order can rewire.
What $42 Billion Built
Strip away the political rhetoric and China’s position in African minerals rests on three interlocking pillars: upstream ownership, midstream monopoly, and a financing model no Western institution can replicate.
Start with the mines. Chinese firms now control roughly 80% of the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s cobalt output. The Africa Center for Strategic Studies documents a rapid acceleration: $24.9 billion in Belt and Road-linked mining loans flowed in the first half of 2025 alone. China’s cumulative foreign direct investment stock across all African sectors reached $42.1 billion by end-2023, with $8–10 billion concentrated in critical minerals. These are not portfolio bets. They are operational stakes in functioning mines, connected to processing facilities, connected to Chinese battery factories.
The midstream chokepoint is where dominance hardens into lock-in. According to the IEA’s 2025 Global Critical Minerals Outlook, China is the dominant refiner for 19 of the 20 key minerals analysed, holding an average market share of around 70%. For cobalt, graphite, and rare earths, the top single supplier captured roughly 90% of all supply growth between 2020 and 2024. This is not a market share that erodes through competition. It is a structural position reinforced by every tonne of new capacity.
Then there is the financing architecture. China’s resource-backed lending model integrates energy infrastructure, mining operations, and debt repayment into a single package. Zambia received $3.1 billion in Chinese hydropower financing explicitly targeting mining operations. The loans repay through ore shipments. The power plants serve Chinese-operated mines. The mines feed Chinese refineries. Each element strengthens the others. No Western development institution operates this way — not because Western bankers lack imagination, but because their mandates forbid it.
The DFC, Washington’s primary tool, faces a 5% portfolio concentration cap per entity. Congressional appropriations cycles reset its risk appetite every fiscal year. Its diversification mandate — designed to prevent catastrophic single-bet losses — makes it structurally incapable of becoming the dominant financial partner in any individual African mining system. China Exim Bank faces no such constraint. When Beijing identifies a strategic mineral asset, it deploys capital at a scale and speed that treats due diligence as a phase, not a gate.
This asymmetry is not a bug in American institutions. It is their design.
Washington’s Toolkit, Disassembled
The US response arrived in pieces. The Minerals Security Partnership, launched in 2022, coordinates 14 partner nations and the EU around supply-chain diversification. The Lobito Corridor — an $800-million-plus rail project connecting the DRC and Zambia’s copper belt to Angola’s Atlantic coast — represents the most visible infrastructure commitment. Executive orders under the Trump administration invoked the Defense Production Act for domestic mineral processing. The CSIS has advocated attaching a Critical Minerals Agreement to the African Growth and Opportunity Act reauthorisation.
Each initiative addresses a real gap. Together, they do not constitute a system.
The Lobito Corridor illustrates both the promise and the limitation. As a transport link, it could redirect mineral flows currently routed through Chinese-financed infrastructure to Dar es Salaam or Durban. But a railway without processing capacity at either end is a pipe, not a value chain. The corridor’s strategic value depends on whether refineries get built alongside it — and refinery construction in Africa confronts a reality the IEA quantifies bluntly: the continent lacks adequate electricity for 600 million of its people. Building energy-intensive mineral processing in a region that cannot reliably power its cities requires solving the infrastructure deficit that China spent two decades partially addressing, largely in service of its own mining operations.
The institutional fragmentation runs deeper than funding gaps. The DFC, EXIM Bank, the State Department’s minerals diplomacy, USAID’s governance programs, and the Pentagon’s strategic stockpile authorities answer to different committees, different budgets, different timelines. A Chinese mining loan clears one decision point. An equivalent American commitment navigates what one analyst called a “fragmented veto-player system” — Congressional appropriations, interagency review, environmental assessment, risk-mandate compliance — each capable of killing or delaying a deal independently.
Tariff policy adds another layer of incoherence. The same administration invoking the Defense Production Act for mineral security imposes tariffs that raise input costs for the domestic processing facilities those minerals are meant to supply. Every relationship is treated as a transaction to win, even when the counterparties are American manufacturers and African governments Washington needs as partners. The result: African leaders hear competing signals from the same capital.
The Refinery Gap No Railway Can Close
Zoom out far enough and the contest looks like a question of money — how many billions each side deploys. Zoom in and money turns out to be the dependent variable. The independent variable is processing infrastructure, and here China’s advantage borders on the thermodynamic.
Rare earth separation requires enormous energy inputs — roughly 10–15 kilowatt-hours per kilogram at industrial scale, under tightly controlled conditions of pH, temperature, and reagent concentration. China built this capacity over decades, absorbing environmental costs that Western regulators would not permit and that African nations could not finance. The result is a refining monopoly grounded not just in investment but in accumulated technical knowledge, trained workforces, and optimised supply chains.
Consider graphite. Africa holds vast deposits. But converting raw flake graphite into battery-grade spherical graphite — the form Tesla and CATL actually buy — requires purification processes that China dominates. Building an alternative processing pathway means replicating not just factories but the ecosystem of chemical suppliers, quality-control systems, and logistics networks that surround them. The IEA projects copper supply shortfalls of 30% and lithium deficits of 40% by 2035. These are not shortfalls that upstream mine ownership alone can address. Without midstream capacity, owning the mine means selling raw ore to the only buyer with refineries — which is China.
Washington grasps this intellectually. The gap between grasping and building remains a decade wide.
African Governments Hold Cards They Haven’t Played
The framing of this contest as US-versus-China obscures a third actor whose decisions will prove decisive. African governments are not spectators. They are increasingly assertive participants with leverage neither great power fully respects.
The African Mining Vision, adopted by the African Union, calls for beneficiation — processing minerals domestically before export. The ambition is continental. The implementation is national, uneven, and sometimes self-defeating. The DRC banned raw cobalt exports, then partially reversed the ban when revenues cratered. Zimbabwe restricted raw lithium exports in 2022. Tanzania overhauled its mining code to mandate state participation — then struggled to capitalise its state mining enterprise, STAMICO, at levels that would make participation meaningful.
Resource nationalism announces sovereignty. It does not guarantee capacity.
The paradox cuts deep. African leaders adopt export restrictions to capture more value domestically. Foreign investors interpret these restrictions as political risk, demanding shorter contract terms and higher returns. American capital, already constrained by DFC portfolio limits and Congressional risk aversion, retreats fastest. Chinese capital, structured through resource-backed loans with longer time horizons and fewer institutional veto points, stays. The nationalist policy designed to reduce dependence on any single partner ends up concentrating dependence on the one partner whose financing model tolerates political volatility.
Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger — three Sahel states now governed by military juntas that left ECOWAS in January 2025 — are simultaneously rewriting mining codes to demand higher state shares and signing new Chinese-backed mineral deals. The pattern is not contradictory. It is rational for leaders whose domestic legitimacy depends on demonstrating resource sovereignty while their operational needs require external capital. China offers both the rhetoric of South-South solidarity and the cash that keeps mines running.
The USIP’s senior study group estimates Africa holds 30% of the world’s proven critical mineral reserves — “likely an underestimate” given how little of the continent has been systematically surveyed. This geological endowment gives African governments leverage that grows as the energy transition accelerates global demand. The African Continental Free Trade Area could amplify that leverage if member states coordinated mineral trade policies at a continental scale rather than negotiating bilaterally with Beijing and Washington.
They have not. Zambia closes its border with the DRC over trade disputes while both nations court the same Lobito Corridor investment. The gap between the AfCFTA’s projected 50%-plus increase in intra-African trade and actual state behaviour — bilateral deal-making, border closures, competitive tax incentives — reveals a structural weakness. Leaders rationally discount future regional trade gains against immediate sovereign control over current rent distribution. China exploits this fragmentation bilaterally. Washington could too, but its institutional architecture defaults to multilateral frameworks that African governments sign and then quietly ignore.
What Breaks, and When
The default trajectory leads somewhere specific. Without a fundamental change in approach, the United States will have built a railway corridor and signed several critical-minerals agreements by 2030 while China will have expanded its refining monopoly, locked in another generation of resource-backed contracts, and captured the midstream processing of minerals the energy transition cannot function without.
The IEA’s projections make the timeline merciless. Demand for lithium will triple by 2030. Cobalt demand doubles. Graphite demand grows by 70%. Every year that passes without alternative processing capacity hardens Chinese market share into structural permanence. New mines take 8–15 years to develop from exploration to production. Refineries take 5–7 years. The window for competitive entry is not closing — for several minerals, it is functionally closed unless governments treat processing investment with the urgency currently reserved for defence procurement.
The secondary effects compound. African nations that fail to develop domestic processing will export raw materials at volatile commodity prices while importing finished batteries and EVs at stable manufactured-goods prices — replicating the colonial-era terms of trade with a green veneer. Youth populations — 60% of Africa’s people are under 25 — face a generation in which their continent’s minerals power the world’s energy transition while their own economies remain stuck at the extraction floor. The African Development Bank warns that without deliberate industrialisation, mineral wealth will repeat the resource-curse pattern that oil imposed on Nigeria and Angola.
America’s lateness, in other words, is not merely a competitive disadvantage for Washington. It is a development catastrophe for Africa.
Three Levers, Three Costs
Realism demands acknowledging that the US will not replicate China’s integrated state-capital model. It should not try. But three intervention points could shift trajectories if Washington accepts the trade-offs each requires.
First, build processing capacity before — or at least alongside — transport infrastructure. The Lobito Corridor gains strategic meaning only if refineries rise along its route. The DFC, EXIM Bank, and allied institutions (Japan’s JBIC, the EU’s Global Gateway, Korea’s resource agencies) should co-finance modular processing facilities in Zambia and the DRC, explicitly accepting higher financial risk than their mandates currently permit. The trade-off: Congress must raise or eliminate portfolio concentration caps, accepting that strategic minerals investment is more like defence spending than development finance. This is a political fight. The administration must wage it openly, not pretend executive orders can substitute for appropriations reform.
Second, pay for African electricity. Every conversation about African mineral processing dead-ends at power supply. The continent needs 250 gigawatts of new generation capacity by 2030 to sustain even modest industrialisation. Financing energy infrastructure for mineral-producing regions — solar, geothermal, gas — is not charity. It is supply-chain security with a 20-year payback. The trade-off: this requires patient capital at returns well below what private equity demands, and it means American taxpayers underwriting African grid expansion. Framing it as “energy security” rather than “foreign aid” is accurate but politically insufficient without sustained presidential advocacy.
Third, negotiate continental rather than bilateral. The AfCFTA’s mineral-trade provisions, if activated, would give African governments collective bargaining power against both China and the West. Washington should support AU-level mineral coordination even when it produces outcomes — higher royalties, stricter beneficiation requirements — that raise costs for American firms. The trade-off: genuine African agency means Africa sometimes says no. A continental minerals framework modelled on OPEC’s logic would constrain American access alongside Chinese access. Washington must decide whether it prefers a competitive market it partially loses or a fragmented landscape China wins by default.
The most likely outcome? None of these in full. The first partially, through piecemeal co-financing that falls short of the required scale. The second barely, because “foreign energy infrastructure” tests the limits of any American political coalition. The third not at all, because Washington’s instinct for bilateral leverage overrides its strategic interest in African multilateralism.
China, meanwhile, writes another cheque.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: How much has China invested in African critical minerals? A: China’s cumulative foreign direct investment across all African sectors reached $42.1 billion by end-2023, with $8–10 billion concentrated specifically in critical mineral projects. In the first half of 2025 alone, Chinese policy banks issued $24.9 billion in Belt and Road-linked mining loans, signalling a sharp acceleration.
Q: What is the Lobito Corridor and why does it matter for critical minerals? A: The Lobito Corridor is a US-backed rail and infrastructure project connecting the copper-cobalt belt of the DRC and Zambia to Angola’s Atlantic port of Lobito. It aims to create an alternative export route for critical minerals that currently flow through Chinese-financed infrastructure to East African ports. Its strategic value depends on whether processing capacity develops alongside the transport link.
Q: Which critical minerals does Africa supply, and how much of global reserves does it hold? A: Africa holds an estimated 30% of the world’s proven critical mineral reserves — a figure experts consider an underestimate given limited geological surveying. The continent is a dominant source of cobalt (DRC), platinum group metals (South Africa), graphite (Mozambique, Madagascar), lithium (Zimbabwe, DRC), manganese (South Africa, Gabon), and rare earth elements (Tanzania, Burundi).
Q: Can the US catch up to China in African mineral supply chains? A: At the mining level, competition remains possible — new deposits exist, and American-backed firms can acquire stakes. At the refining and processing level, China’s 70% average market share across key minerals reflects decades of infrastructure and technical accumulation that cannot be replicated in less than a decade. The US must build processing capacity, not just secure mines, to meaningfully alter the balance.
The Cheque That Clears
Two decades from now, historians will mark the 2020s as the period when the architecture of the post-carbon economy was decided — not by climate summits or technology breakthroughs but by who financed the refineries. China understood this before anyone else, treating African minerals not as commodities to be traded but as inputs to be controlled from pit to cathode. Washington understood it too, eventually, then built institutions designed to prevent the concentrated bets that control requires.
Africa holds the geology. China holds the processing. America holds the convening power and the chequebook — but a chequebook governed by rules written for a world where mineral supply chains were someone else’s problem.
The rules can change. Whether they will change fast enough is a question whose answer compounds daily, like interest on a loan Africa did not choose to take.
Sources & Further Reading
The analysis in this article draws on research and reporting from:
- Stimson Center, “Competing for Africa’s Resources” — Comprehensive data on Chinese and US FDI in African critical minerals
- IEA, Global Critical Minerals Outlook 2025 — Authoritative global supply-demand projections and refining concentration data
- Africa Center for Strategic Studies, “China’s Critical Minerals Strategy in Africa” — Documents China’s recent African mining acquisitions and BRI lending surge
- USIP, “Critical Minerals in Africa” Senior Study Group Report — Bipartisan US policy recommendations on African minerals engagement
- CSIS, “Adding a Critical Minerals Agreement to the AGOA Reauthorization” — Analysis of trade-policy tools for US-Africa minerals partnerships
- African Development Bank, “Critical Minerals for Africa’s Inclusive Growth” — African institutional perspective on beneficiation and industrialisation
- Lobito Corridor Project Analysis — Strategic assessment of the corridor’s role in minerals competition
- WFW, “Key Trends in African Critical Mineral Projects” — ESG and regulatory trends shaping investment decisions
