South Africa-based investment holding firm Novare Holdings has announced it is partnering with the US’ ReElement Technologies to establish Africa’s first critical and rare earth element refining facilities.

The plants will deploy ReElement Technologies’ proprietary refining platform to produce high-purity lithium carbonate, rare earth oxides and other critical minerals through an environmentally sustainable process. The output is meant to meet growing demand in the battery and defence industries within both Africa and North America.

The first phase of the agreement signed in early February will see three facilities built near mines, with the first to be located in Gauteng in South Africa. Following this, another plant is planned to be developed in Zambia or Angola to leverage the Lobito trade corridor and the third could possibly be constructed in Lagos, Nigeria, to harness the country's lithium deposits.

The plants can be constructed by repurposing existing buildings due to the modular nature of ReElement Technologies’ platform. The refining technology can use minerals as feedstock as well as waste products such as old batteries, magnets and cellular phones.

ReElement Technologies aims to begin development of the refining facilities by the second half of 2025. The US firm will contribute its chromatographic separation and purification platform technology along with project management expertise.

Novare Holdings will provide the necessary capital investment, with initial funding of US$100 million, along with operational management. The collaboration will provide the initial financing to launch the project under an established Africa-based operating entity.

“Together with Novare, we are bringing innovative refining technology to the region, enabling nations to enhance and capture the value of their natural resources and catalyse industrial economic development on the continent,” said Ben Kincaid, CEO of ReElement Technologies’ African unit.

“… Novare will lead the way forward, modelling how African nations can and must serve as primary stakeholders in the global supply chain for critical minerals.”

According to ReElement Technologies, its platform is engineered to refine large volumes of rare earth and critical battery elements. A predictive model design enables the same processing technology to be used for natural mineral ores and recycled end-of-life materials, with the platform able to recover their rare earth elements and critical battery metals at purities ready for remanufacture.

The platform can be plugged into an existing processing site to meet the partner's refining needs and can be scaled according to the required volume specifications. The reduced space requirements mean the entire platform can be transported in a large shipping container and transferred directly to the project site for local and decentralised refining.

According to UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD), Africa is home to sizable reserves of the world’s critical energy transition minerals, holding 55% of cobalt reserves, 47.7% of manganese, 21.6% of natural graphite, 5.9% of copper, 5.6% of nickel, 1% of lithium and 0.6% of iron ore globally.

“Africa is very rich in minerals,” said Derrick Roper, managing director of Novare Holdings in a mid-February interview with news agency CNBC Africa. “However, historically, a lot of the minerals have been exported to other parts of the world where they have been refined and value added to those minerals.

“It's fantastic news that ReElement is very keen to partner with us and to actually bring their technology to the African continent, [which] will be able to [help] us to do the refining and beneficiation in Africa." 

Top photo: ReElement technology (Source: ReElement Technologies)