MINERAL development companies operating in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) reckon the increase in the cobalt price will more than offset the impact of higher royalties imposed on exports of the metal by the central African country.
“We are comfortable with the high-level terms of this mining code,” Jason Brewer, a director of three Australia-based companies exploring for copper, cobalt, gold and lithium, said in an interview with Bloomberg News in Lubumbashi in southeast Congo. “It’s now just a question of getting the details associated with how you actually implement that.”
“We have to factor in the new code,” said Serge Ngandu, president of the Congolese subsidiary of London-based African Battery Metals, a company with a cobalt exploration permit. “It should be viable because the DRC has got almost 60% of the world’s cobalt resources and it is cobalt which is easy to process.”
The average cost of producing cobalt in Congo is 30% lower than the rest of the world, London-based research company CRU Group said in May. That provides “some leeway for miners to absorb additional higher royalty payments” introduced in the code, it said.
