Washington Wants to Revive a Critical Minerals Mega-Railway Through Africa

As geopolitical tensions electrify the global scramble for critical minerals—the raw materials that underpin advanced defense systems and clean energy technologies—the United States and China have been racing to expand their influence over the mineral market in Africa. 

The world’s F-35 fighter jets, electric vehicle (EV) batteries, and wind turbines all rely on critical minerals, including rare earths, cobalt, and lithium—many of which are found in Africa. But the problem for U.S. policymakers is that China overwhelmingly dominates the global refining and processing of these materials. Beijing has also spent more than a decade deepening ties and inking infrastructure deals with African partners, giving it a major leg up in the global rush for the resources. 

Worried about strategic vulnerabilities, Washington is now ramping up efforts to carve out a stake in the critical minerals sector. In one of the most ambitious U.S. infrastructure bids in Africa yet, the Biden administration has pledged to lend hundreds of millions of dollars toward reviving the Lobito Corridor, a 1,200 mile-long railway that would transport critical minerals from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Zambia to the Angolan coast. The DRC is home to the world’s biggest cobalt reserves, while Zambia is rich in copper. 

“The Lobito Corridor is really a play out of Beijing’s own playbook,” said Cameron Hudson, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “It’s a chapter in the Belt and Road Initiative that Washington has, I think, finally gotten smart to the benefits of.”

Building upon previous investments with the Belt and Road Initiative, Chinese President Xi Jinping’s flagship foreign-policy initiative, China has spent the past two decades pouring at least $170 billion dollars into building ports, railroads, and other massive infrastructure projects across Africa. Even as those investments have come under scrutiny, they have also allowed Beijing and Chinese companies to develop long-standing partnerships over critical minerals—the same resources that have, in the years since, emerged as a central geopolitical flash point.

The administration of U.S. President Joe Biden may be eager to compete, but experts say that it is just at the beginning of what will likely be a long road ahead. Beyond the question of whether Washington can actually follow through on its pledges, it also faces the looming challenges of attracting private investment and accounting for political risk concerns.

“Washington has really played up this investment project, but it has yet to lay one inch of railway,” Hudson said. “We should all expect there to be a serious learning curve.”

The Lobito Corridor is emblematic of Washington’s broader ambitions of de-risking ties with China amid growing concerns over its critical mineral supply chain dominance. The push follows a long line of legislation aimed at boosting the domestic industry in the United States, perhaps most notably the Biden administration’s sweeping Inflation Reduction Act, which is aimed at accelerating the development of an American EV industry. Outside of the Inflation Reduction Act, Washington has attempted to strengthen supply chain security by strengthening ties with friendly partners, including Australia, Canada, Japan, South Korea, and the United Kingdom, through the Minerals Security Partnership. 

Last month, a group of bipartisan lawmakers in the U.S. Senate introduced the Critical Minerals Security Act, legislation that is designed to help Washington further cut its dependence on Beijing. The act “would help us better understand these complex supply chains so we can secure [the] United States’ access to critical minerals and counter Chinese dominance,” said Sen. Angus King, who introduced the bill. “Any continued reliance on China—and other bad actors—for these resources is downright dangerous.”

“All of those initiatives are part of the U.S. strategy to build its own China-free critical minerals supply chain,” said C. Géraud Neema Byamungu, an expert in China-Africa relations at the China Global South Project. 

The 122-year-old Lobito Corridor is one of the newest pillars in that strategy. While Belgium and Portugal originally built the railway more than a century ago, the infrastructure was decimated during the Angolan civil war, and in 2004, Chinese firms poured at least $2 billion into revamping the corridor. But in 2022, a U.S.-backed consortium won the rights to develop the railway, beating out Beijing’s bid. 

Eager to ensure the project’s success, top U.S. officials have intensified their diplomacy in the region, including by signing a memorandum of understanding with Angola, the DRC, Zambia, and the European Union. Biden hosted Angolan President João Lourenço last November, while U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken made Angola a key stop in his Africa tour in January. And earlier this month, Amos Hochstein, Biden’s special presidential coordinator for global infrastructure and energy security, also met with Zambian President Hakainde Hichilema and Samaila Zubairu, the president and CEO of the Africa Finance Corporation, to discuss the Lobito Corridor. 

“I had a chance today to see some of the dramatic progress that’s already been made in building out this corridor,” Blinken said in January. “It is moving faster and further I think that we might have imagined.”

Amid this flurry of diplomacy, China hasn’t been standing still, either. Just one day before Hochstein hosted Hichilema and Zubairu, Beijing unveiled a proposal to invest more than $1 billion into the Tazara railway, which links Zambia and Tanzania. 

The intensifying competition and entry of new players could offer African governments greater leverage in striking future deals and partnerships. Angola, for example, has been “more welcoming to U.S. and European investors in that space, wanting to balance the risk toward too much exposure to China,” said Byamungu of the China Global South Project. 

But as the demand for these minerals takes off, many African nations are also eager to build out their own industries and claim a bigger stake in the global market. 

“They want to be able to add value to their minerals and metals before export,” said Zainab Usman, the director of the Africa program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.“They don’t want to just export unprocessed minerals and metals and replicate patterns of extraction.”