Political instability holds back potential of Zim lithium industry

Zimbabwe has the potential to become one of the world’s global lithium suppliers, but financing a project in the politically unstable country is proving difficult. With prospects of 32 million tons of lithium available at the Arcadia Lithium Projects on the outskirts of Harare alone, the country has some of the world’s biggest lithium deposits. According to Harry Greaves, CEO of Prospect Resources, owners

of Arcadia, they are rapidly progressing into production to take advantage of the current robust market opportunities, but he said securing the necessary financing was at present their biggest issue. With an off-take agreement in place to deliver 40 000 tonnes per annum of spodumene concentrate and 112 000 tonnes per annum of petalite concentrate to Hong Kong-listed Sinomine Resources

Exploration, and with all the other prep work completed, it was all systems go and production could start as soon as April or May this year. Greaves said the project required a capital investment of $165 million to develop the 2.4-milliontonne-a-year operation. He said Arcadia offered strong project economics driven by scale, the low cost of operations and its proximity to infrastructure. Whilst the road

infrastructure would require some upgrades, especially considering it would have to handle around 35 trucks a day when the mine became fully operational, he described Arcadia as a “slick operation” that was far advanced and with much potential. The mine is also situated only 20km from good railway transport to the Port of Beira some 450km away. “We are currently in the financing stage. It is a key problem for us raising capital, particularly into the

lithium carbonate plant,” said Greaves. With the key to success in the lithium industry closely tied to good offtake agreements, he was positive that the project would attract investors since it was one of only a handful of deposits in the world that could supply low iron lithium concentrates (Petalite) to the glass and ceramics industry and battery specification concentrates to the battery markets (Spodumene).