402: Inside the Fight for Africa’s Minerals

In this episode of The International Risk Podcast, Dominic Bowen speaks with Sarah Logan about the global race to secure Africa’s critical minerals. The discussion examines how China, the US, and Europe are positioning themselves in this race, and whether African countries can move beyond simply hosting the competition. It also explores why refining is the real choke point in this race, and why China’s head start there now gives it a durable structural advantage.

The conversation explores:
-What critical minerals are, where they’re found, and why demand is only accelerating
-Why China is so far ahead, and why refining remains the West’s biggest challenge
-Whether African and European manufacturing ambitions can align
-Whether this rivalry actually benefits African countries

Sarah Logan is a lawyer and economist with over 15 years of experience in mining and energy policy across Africa. She is a Visiting Fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations and author of the African Extracts Substack.

The International Risk Podcast brings together global experts, frontline practitioners, and senior decision-makers to explore the forces transforming our world — from geopolitical instability and organised crime to cybersecurity threats and hybrid warfare. 

Dominic Bowen is the host of The International Risk Podcast and one of Europe’s leading experts on international risk and crisis management. He advises CEOs, boards, and senior executives across Europe on how to prepare for uncertainty, navigate crises, and build strategic resilience in an increasingly volatile world. 

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#Geopolitics #CriticalMinerals #Africa #China #UnitedStates #Europe #Mining #Cobalt #Lithium #PoliticalRisk #InternationalRisk #Strategy #EconomicSecurity

Transcript:

Dominic Bowen: Africa is becoming the battleground for the world’s next major economic competition. It holds around 30% of the world’s reserves of critical minerals, including cobalt, copper, lithium, and many others. These raw materials are essential for the clean energy transition that’s occurring right now. China, the USA, and Europe are all racing to secure access to these minerals. In today’s conversation, we’re discussing who’s actually winning this race, what winning actually means, and what it means for countries and businesses on the other end of the supply chain who are living and working in Africa.

I’m Dominic Bowen, host of The International Risk Podcast, where we unpack the topics that really matter. And our guest today is Sarah Logan. She’s a lawyer and an economist with over 15 years of experience in mining and energy policy across Africa. She’s a Visiting Fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, and she’s the author of the African Extracts Substack, which focuses on how African countries can capture more value from their mining resources.

Sarah, welcome to The International Risk Podcast.

Sarah Logan: Thank you so much, Dominic. Great to be here.

Dominic Bowen: So whereabouts are you joining from today, Sarah?

Sarah Logan: I’m joining from Dar es Salaam, in very sunny Tanzania.

Dominic Bowen: Very sunny Tanzania, fantastic. I hope you’ve got a good air conditioner running there, because I’m sure the temperatures are quite high.

Sarah Logan: Indeed, indeed.

Dominic Bowen: Well, Sarah, critical minerals have quietly become one of the really defining strategic risks for Western economies, and it’s something that regularly comes up when I’m working with governments and corporate actors right across Europe. The technologies underpinning this energy transition, advanced manufacturing, and increasing connections with national security really depend on some of these minerals, some of the ones we mentioned like graphite, rare earths, cobalt, and lithium. But many of the supply chains for those minerals remain highly concentrated, particularly in China, though there’s also some in Africa.

So maybe we could start by asking: when we talk about critical minerals, which ones matter most, where do we find them, and why are we even having this conversation about them?

Sarah Logan: Well, it’s a very good question. I think there’s a lot of conversation going on about “critical for who,” because there’s quite a different definition depending on what side of the stage you’re standing on. Essentially, it’s coming down to a set of minerals that are needed for the energy transition, so in renewable energy technologies, wind turbines, solar panels, and EV batteries very importantly. But they’re also very critical for defense applications, which in the current context of rising geopolitical tensions is also really key. So you’re talking about your fighter jets, your missiles, your interceptors, they all rely on critical minerals, and they all use different ones.

It really depends on what we’re focusing on. If we’re talking about renewable energy technologies, we have copper, cobalt (although cobalt less and less), graphite, rare earth elements necessary for magnets and wind turbines, and lithium, which is of increasing importance. There are many other very small but very important mineral markets, most of which fall under rare earths, which is 17 different minerals with quite strange names but very important applications.

It’s quite a broad category, and you also see in the African context, for example, some African countries defining a different set of minerals as critical. We’ve seen this in South Africa, for example, where they’ve listed coal as a critical mineral, just because they see that as central to their own economy. I guess it’s a valid thing, critical to whom does depend on what you need that mineral for and how important it is.

Dominic Bowen: Yeah, that makes sense. And this isn’t just a mining story, which I think is really important. Supply chain resilience… I do a lot of crisis preparedness work with companies across Europe, and in the exercises we run, when I ask business leaders what crises concern them, they’re often talking about supply chain resilience, things like the geopolitical competition we’re seeing, industrial policy, of course, but also where companies will be able to source their materials from, where they’ll be able to manufacture, is that close to the source, or can they export the raw materials out, and where should they be investing over the next decade or so, because a lot of these decisions, as you know Sarah, are decades in the making, they’re not quick decisions that can be made.

So who’s ahead? We hear a lot about two-thirds of minerals being found in China, the Trump administration increasingly concerned about US access to these minerals, Europe largely seeming quite quiet on this topic. So when we look at the reserves, the long-term financing, the infrastructure, and the processing capacity, because all these things have to come together, who are the winners, who are the losers? Is it China, the USA, Europe? And then, of course, I’d like to talk about what this means for African communities as well.

Sarah Logan: Good question. I think it has been a very China-centric story. It’s a bit like a marathon race where China was 35 kilometers in before everyone else realized the starting gun had gone off. So there’s a very quick catch-up game going on, involving a lot of different actors, including Gulf countries increasingly. It’s quite a diverse playing field.

I think the challenging thing isn’t even necessarily the mining, which in some minerals is quite dominated by China in Africa. There’s quite strong domination of copper, cobalt, graphite, and lithium in Southern African countries in terms of Chinese investment, but it’s not necessarily representative of investment across the whole continent and all minerals. But for the key ones for the energy transition, China does have a very strong foothold in Southern Africa.

America is throwing quite a lot of money at trying to catch up. We see this in two critical places, both on the mining, but also very importantly on the refining, because it’s actually the refining and processing capacity where China has really developed a chokehold. Canadian mining companies, Australian mining companies, it doesn’t matter where they are or what they’re mining, they’re sending it to China for refining. So when it comes down to choke points, it’s really the refining that is the big challenge for Western countries.

Some progress is being made. We hear a lot about refineries trying to reopen in the US, rare earth refineries, copper even. But it’s going to be a very uphill battle to catch up to China, because this is a decades-long head start that they’ve had.

Dominic Bowen: And we know that democracy is not perfect, it’s just the best of a bad bunch of options. But one of the benefits of an autocratic system like China’s is, as you said, that stability and ability to plan decades in advance. Your analogy about the marathon race is great, we’re running a marathon race and many businesses operate on decades-long planning cycles, and I really appreciate your example that China started the marathon 35 km ahead of everyone else.

The obvious question someone asked me recently is: why? It’s not like the energy transition just happened in 2026. It’s not like the need for these magnets, for copper, for advanced technologies, just appeared in 2026. Why was Europe and America so slow to realize that these critical minerals really are so critical?

Sarah Logan: Well, I think it was a situation of convenience, where refining and mining itself became quite unpopular in the West, in Europe and the US. It’s a dirty sector, and it was very convenient that someone else wanted to host that, to take on that quite polluting step in the refining of minerals, so that basically the US, the EU, and others could move up the value chain and focus on more sophisticated products, and just buy the intermediary products coming in from China. It was more profitable to move up, and also cleaner.

Then suddenly it became a bit of a threat, when you realize you cannot make your more sophisticated products without relying on these intermediate inputs coming in from someone you no longer see as such a reliable ally as potentially in the past. Although that “ally” framing might have been strong at any point in time, certainly there wasn’t the fear of supply chain disruption that we’ve seen in more recent years. So I think it’s not that renewable energy wasn’t important, it was a growing industry. It’s just that it was very convenient to outsource those early steps to China until it became not so convenient anymore.

Dominic Bowen: And I wonder about that convenience, because governments right across Africa want mineral processing. They want manufacturing, employment, industrialization. At the same time, European governments’ objectives are substantially focused around diversified mineral supplies, they want their relevant industries to grow and remain profitable, and they want to secure their national security objectives. So I’m wondering, Sarah, does Europe’s and Africa’s objectives align, or are they running in competition with each other?

Sarah Logan: As far as Europe is concerned specifically, I think there could be more alignment, in that African countries do want to take on more local processing. Realistically speaking, this won’t be the whole value chain in the near future, but they can start slowly moving step by step up the ladder. Europe is able to retain those more advanced stages of the ladder for now, and if they’re able to meet in the middle, where we integrate these supply chains, it does have the potential of working. It would need to be in countries where Europe feels that supply isn’t going to be interrupted, so there are security considerations.

I think we see a bit less alignment with the US, for example, where there’s a very strong focus on onshoring processing capabilities onto the US. There have been some political commitments from the US that they would support local processing in African countries, but that’s not what we’re seeing in practice. We’re seeing them very aggressively trying to onshore as much of the value chain as they can. We don’t see that with Europe. Europe seems to be genuinely a bit more open to a partnership where both could benefit. The US, I think, is a more dangerous partner in that context.

Dominic Bowen: Yeah, and I’d like to unpack that a little bit more, because we’ve talked about the companies doing the mining and investing on the ground. But that second group of companies, the manufacturers in the US and Europe, they don’t necessarily mine anything themselves but they depend on the supply chains, electric vehicle companies, defense contractors, battery producers, just to name a few. I think there can be some contradictions here, because European companies are being told by Brussels, by the European Union, about de-risking, that they need to de-risk from China. But at the same time, European regulation is very clear, financing requirements, ESG expectations, that makes moving into other markets quite difficult, and due diligence in many African states right now is still quite complicated.

What are the real-world de-risking considerations business leaders are having to weigh between China and countries based in Africa, when they’re looking at their supply chains and how they deal with this?

Sarah Logan: Yeah, so it’s quite a challenge, and I would say there’s not a single road that different companies are going down. I think the one thing in terms of the pressure European companies are getting politically to de-risk, it also kind of encompasses pressure to be purchasing from ESG-compliant supply chains, to be purchasing from diversified sources independent of China. The challenge is that these products cost more, they cost more than what companies have necessarily been paying Chinese suppliers for these same products.

From my conversations with European companies, they like the idea of ESG-compliant products, but they don’t like the idea of paying a premium for those ESG-compliant products. On the other hand, the supply chain disruptions we’ve seen in recent years, starting with the Russia-Ukraine crisis, but more recently the Strait of Hormuz and others, these disruptions are a real threat for businesses. So there is that incentive to start diversifying, including a willingness to pay a little bit more for a portion of your product coming from a different source, just to protect some degree of diversification and supply chain resilience.

Dominic Bowen: And obviously, President Trump and President Xi are meeting this week or next week, and there’s a lot on the agenda for them to discuss, a lot of conversation about how much will be around AI, tensions in the Indo-Pacific region. But I’m wondering, when it comes to critical minerals, it wasn’t that long ago when China imposed export restrictions on critical minerals in response to Donald Trump’s tariffs. Are you expecting anything to escalate further when it comes to disruptions to critical minerals? And if so, what’s that likely to do on the global stage, knowing that China has such a chokehold on these minerals?

Sarah Logan: I’m hoping there wouldn’t be further disruptions, but given the state of the world right now, I think one potential concern is this new Lindsey Graham sanctions act that’s being passed, where the US would be able to levy higher tariffs on countries purchasing fuel from Russia. The two big ones are China and India, but there are also many other buyers. If you start really raising the cost of business for China in that way, there may be repercussions from that.

But we’re hoping we’re not going to have more disruptions. I think I would love to see greater willingness to cooperate, it sounds extremely naive, but I think we’re seeing a lot of duplicative infrastructure being built out, duplicative refining efforts. We’re not making very clever decisions for a world that is facing climate change and really needs to use resources as efficiently as possible.

Dominic Bowen: And when we consider the opportunities for countries across Africa, I’m wondering if they have some leverage when it comes to this US-China rivalry, leverage that ultimately can be used to negotiate better deals, or is the power of African countries, even as a bloc, still stuck between these two much larger powers of the US and China? Do they have much say?

Sarah Logan: It has been an opportunity for African countries to at least not have only one bidder, which has been the case in the recent past with China. There are a diversity of actors coming in. I think every external actor has its own offer, some offers are better for African countries than others, those that offer local processing. Despite what is often said about China, China is the entity that has been doing the most local processing in Africa. It remains obviously within Chinese control, you would consider them Chinese supply chains, but they’re located in African countries and employing African labor.

I think we have seen countries improve their terms. We’ve seen the DRC change their fiscal terms quite a number of times in recent years, getting a better deal in terms of fiscal take, in terms of local content involvement. I think we are seeing some progress.

Dominic Bowen: And we spoke earlier, Sarah, about China as a country seeming prepared, acting much more strategically and over decades, and you’ve written about Chinese state-owned mines across Africa, and it’s not necessarily just the profitability of an individual project, but long-term access to resources that matters. I’m wondering how that compares to a European company operating under normal commercial return requirements, when they’re trying to compete against a state-backed competitor that might be willing to play a 20- or 30-year strategic game. Is it even possible for European and North American companies to actually compete on that playing field, when they’re aiming for different things?

Sarah Logan: The economics of competing against China is extremely difficult, and one reason is actually just the way Chinese companies are structured. They vertically integrate, so they’ll be mining, they’ll also be processing, they’ll be doing more advanced manufacturing too. They can offset losses in one step through gains in another step. That’s not what we see with Western companies, where they’re taking on a single step and it needs to be sufficiently profitable on its own.

Now, a lot of the processing is not that profitable. There’s a lot of state support, and that support comes in return for pushing companies to not only care about profits but to prioritize access, it’s more important that there’s reliability of supply than profitable operations. I think a lot of the documented support we’ve seen from the Chinese government is, for example, cheaper credit than a Western company could get. One statistic I saw was that for Sicomines in the DRC, the cost of capital is less than half of what the cost of capital for a US company would be for the same project.

I think the last thing that makes it even more difficult is that now China already has a market advantage, they can manipulate prices in that market to make it hard for any other competitors to survive, whether that’s purposefully flooding the market with a certain commodity, dropping the price, and a Western company isn’t able to survive that period of low prices.

I would say the aim of the US and the EU and others shouldn’t really be to compete with China on everything, it needs to be extremely strategic. What are the minerals you’re going to focus on, what are the stages in processing you’re going to try and build out?

Dominic Bowen: And I know there’s been coordination, or you might say pressure, between the US government, the European Union, mining companies, and other companies to have some sort of strategic response to this. Do you see a coordinated, sensible, multi-year approach from the West towards critical minerals, working with partners, not just reacting to China?

Sarah Logan: I think it is evolving, the approach is definitely maturing. The US is being quite selective in the minerals they’re going after, certainly in Africa they’re focusing on rare earths, graphite, a bit on copper and cobalt. They’re not taking on all minerals, it’s quite strategic. There’s quite a lot of financing going in, in return for offtake, so the product has to go either to the US for processing or to US buyers.

The EU, we’re not seeing that linked-up policy quite yet. We’re not seeing financial support from the EU in a very serious way. There are strategic projects that have been given labels, but that doesn’t come with guaranteed funding. It might help open some doors, but it’s not the easy approach we’re seeing with US financing. The EU hasn’t yet tied that support to actually ensuring the offtake goes into Europe, which is a very critical thing, otherwise what are you doing it for? So we’re seeing maturing approaches. I would say the US has caught up and become a lot more strategic faster than the EU has.

Dominic Bowen: And what does all of this mean for the communities living closest to the actual extraction? This geopolitical competition that we all read about in the news, how does this actually translate into, hopefully, better outcomes on the ground, or is it still a value that’s largely bypassing the people, the places, and the local communities where the minerals are coming from?

Sarah Logan: I would say that with the proliferation of mining, we’re definitely seeing more and more communities being affected by mining, including in places that are not historical mining areas. So it’s triggering land issues, issues around pollution and compensation, on a level we haven’t necessarily seen in the past, particularly because most mining was in communities already quite familiar with mining, but that is starting to change with new areas being opened up.

I think the other issue is obviously the risk of more conflict around mineral resources, and I guess the more informal, artisanal small-scale mining offers both opportunities but also a lot of scope for loss of funds for that country, smuggling, and poor governance challenges.

I think the other challenge, and I guess this is mainly felt by governments but will also be felt by local communities, is just the diversity of actors coming in. These are new mining companies from new jurisdictions that tax authorities or environmental authorities haven’t ever had to deal with before, quite different ways of thinking, and less experienced mining companies. We’re seeing that as quite a big risk in some places, where companies with basically zero history of mining, particularly in a challenging context, are coming in. Whether they’re equipped to deal with accidents that happen in the best way, whether they’re equipped to make sure those accidents don’t happen in the first place, it really remains to be seen. But I think the inexperience of some of these mining companies, the unfamiliarity with these jurisdictions, is also going to be a real risk for host countries.

Dominic Bowen: Yeah, definitely, I think you’re totally right. And I’m wondering if we can do a little bit of crystal-balling, Sarah, looking at the future. As we discussed earlier, the West, Europe and North America, is very keen to escape mineral dependence on China, and at the same time Africa wants to escape dependence on exporting raw materials. What’s the conversation we’re going to be having in five to ten years’ time? Can both happen? Are we going to see a more diversified, more secure supply chain, and less economic dependence from African countries on just exporting all its raw minerals?

Sarah Logan: I think it will be interesting to see. I think we will see some degree of diversification in terms of who mining companies are selling to, some degree of resilience in Western supply chains. It’s not going to happen on that timescale, though, I don’t think, just in terms of building new mines or setting up refineries and all of that. It’s going to take a very long time to get some of these new efforts underway. I think reliance on China will remain a big issue, it might be chipped away slowly in some areas over time, but I think we’re probably not going to see a massive difference in the next five years.

Some change on the margins in terms of whether African countries benefit with industrialization or value addition… I mean, this is one of the challenging things, the fact that processing is actually not that profitable. It would be great if this was a silver bullet that could really kickstart industrialization in some countries, but energy costs are very high, often you’re quite far from markets. What’s a lot more important for processing is energy costs, location to ports, location to consumer markets, it’s not location to where the minerals are mined. So as things fall economically, the least economic place to process is unfortunately often the countries where it’s found.

I think we will see some investment in local processing, especially for bulky minerals, where you want to reduce logistics costs. How far we can take it in terms of sophistication of processing, I think, will be the challenge, and just making sure the benefits outweigh the costs for African countries will be a key challenge, that you’re getting more than what you’re giving up in terms of social and economic risks for some of these projects.

Dominic Bowen: Thanks for unpacking that. Sarah, one question we ask all guests who come on The International Risk Podcast: when you look around the world, when you watch the news at night, when you’re speaking with your friends and family, what are the international risks that concern you the most?

Sarah Logan: There’s quite a long list. I would say, not necessarily based only on mining, but I think the resource requirements of data centers and AI are going to be a huge concern. Electricity and water, and the knock-on impacts of that on our environments, but also, I guess, the social implications of job losses that might come.

Dominic Bowen: Yeah, definitely, I think that’s a very relevant risk, and we’ve had a couple of episodes on The International Risk Podcast recently that have discussed the risks of AI and data centers, and even the employment challenges for companies. Thanks very much for raising that, and thank you very much for coming on The International Risk Podcast today, Sarah.

Sarah Logan: Thank you so much, Dominic. It’s been great to be here.

Dominic Bowen: Well, that was a great conversation with Sarah Logan, and I really appreciated hearing her perspective on how the US-China rivalry over critical minerals is actually playing out for countries in Africa and the communities living near many of these mining projects. Sarah is a Visiting Fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. Today’s episode was produced and coordinated by Marine Christ. I’m Dominic Bowen, your host. Thanks very much for listening, and we’ll speak again in the next couple of days.