How U.S. lost key cobalt mines to China

America losing clean energy contest by not pursuing Congo metal

Tom Perriello saw it coming but could do nothing to stop it. André Kapanga, too. Despite urgent emails, phone calls and personal pleas, they watched helplessly as a company backed by the Chinese government took ownership from the Americans of one of the world’s largest cobalt mines.

It was 2016, and a deal had been struck by the Arizonabased mining giant Freeportmcmoran to sell the site, located in Congo, which figures prominently in China’s grip on the global cobalt supply. The metal has been among several essential raw materials needed for the production of electric car batteries — and is critical to retiring the combustion engine and weaning the world off climate-changing fossil fuels.

Perriello, a top U.S. diplomat in Africa at the time, sounded alarms in the State Department. Kapanga, then the mine’s Congolese general manager, all but begged the American ambassador in Congo to intercede.

“This is a mistake,” Kapanga recalled warning him, suggesting the Americans were squandering generations of relationship building in Congo, the source of more than two-thirds of the world’s cobalt.

Not only did the Chinese purchase of the mine, known as Tenke Fungurume, go through uninterrupted during the final months of the Obama administration, but four years later, during the twilight of the Trump presidency, so did the purchase of an even more impressive cobalt reserve that Freeport-mcmoran put on the market. The buyer was the same company, China Molybdenum.

China’s pursuit of Congo’s cobalt wealth is part of a disciplined playbook that has given it an enormous head start over the United States in the race to dominate the electrification of the auto industry.

But an investigation by The New York Times revealed a hidden history of the cobalt acquisitions in which the United States essentially surrendered the resources to China, failing to safeguard decades of diplomatic and financial investments in Congo.

Perriello, who has since left government, said he learned of the plan in 2016 to sell Tenke Fungurume not long after touring the mine. The owner had a tarnished reputation for its operations in other countries. But he was convinced that American ownership was good not only for the United States but for the people of Congo. Freeport-mcmoran got largely favorable reviews on the ground, was employing thousands of Congolese and had built schools and health care clinics and provided drinking water.

“What can we do?” Perriello recalled asking Linda Thomas greenfield — who was then an assistant secretary of state with responsibility for Africa and is now President Joe Biden’s ambassador to the United Nations — about keeping the mine under American control.

The only serious bidders were Chinese companies, leaving no doubt about the consequences of standing by. “They were able to move swiftly and quicker than anybody else could,” Kathleen L. Quirk, Freeport-mcmoran’s president, said. “So we got the deal done.”

Freeport-mcmoran had been determined to sell. The company, one of the world’s largest copper-mining outfits, had made a catastrophically bad bet on the oil and gas industry just before the world began to shift to renewable energy. With debt piling up, the company saw no option but to unload its Congo operations.

The American response was nothing because it was a straight financial transaction.

The crisis, exposing significant blind spots of U.S. leaders, was the kind of opportunity China excels at exploiting, according to previously unreported documents and emails and interviews with diplomats, mining executives, government officials and others in China, Congo and the United States.

Over the past year, as the clean energy transition has accelerated, the U.S. government and the private sector have moved rapidly to recover from mistakes, scouring the world for new cobalt supplies and deploying cobalt-free batteries in some shorter-range electric cars.

But all that falls far short of Chinese efforts to take over resources critical to a green future, including cobalt, lithium and others.