" Who is paying for your electric car?" 11 October 2023

As the demand for electric vehicles rises in the global North, large-scale mining operations are expanding rapidly, particularly in the global South. The processes to extract minerals like graphite and cobalt are no different from past mining of coal, copper or gold, with the same harmful social and environmental impacts, including pollution, dispossession of land, loss of livelihoods and cultures, criminalisation and silencing of local activists’ concerns.

This article is part of a series that explores the impacts of the corporate-led energy transition, particularly in the so-called decarbonisation of transport. We start with looking at graphite mining in Cabo Delgado, Mozambique. [...] With Mozambique standing to play a pivotal role in the global battery market, Australian mining company Syrah Resources owns a 95 per cent share in a large graphite mine complex in the Balama district in Cabo Delgado. This mining project involves two open-pit mines and is operated by Twigg Exploration and Resources, a subsidiary of Syrah. Syrah Resources is a public company listed on the Australian Stock Exchange and headquartered in Melbourne(opens in new window) . The company grew rapidly from being a low-profile exploration miner with a handful of mineral prospects in the Arab Peninsula and African countries to controlling what the company describes as the world’s largest graphite extractive project outside of China(opens in new window) .

Syrah is not the only multinational corporation extracting graphite from the impoverished and conflict-prone region of Cabo Delgado. Next to Syrah’s operations is the Balama Central Graphite Project(opens in new window) , a mining concession that Battery Minerals recently sold to the UK-Indian multinational Tirupati Graphite together with another graphite site in Montepuez district, a few dozen kilometres east of Balama.

Additionally, just about 10 kilometres north of Syrah’s mining site, another Australian company called Triton Minerals has a large-scale concession with an estimated 5.7 million tons of graphite(opens in new window) for at least 25 years. Triton also controls the graphite extraction Grafex project in the Ancuabe district, where insurgent attacks reportedly killed two security guards(opens in new window) in June 2022.

Next to this is the GK Ancuabe Graphite Mine, a mining company ultimately controlled by the Dutch multinational AMG Advanced Metallurgical Group through a German subsidiary. GK Ancuabe was the first multinational to start producing graphite in north Mozambique(opens in new window) , and did so with the financial support of a German development bank.

All of these companies and mine operations show the heavy interests at play in controlling the graphite that lies under Mozambique’s soil. It is worth noting that Chinese companies are also investing in the region(opens in new window) . The map below illustrates the shrinking of land and forests for small-scale farmers and rural families due to mine concessions. The impacts, especially the cumulative impacts, of these losses are seldom taken as seriously as they should be by the mining industry and its financiers. There is no replacement for lost livelihood options for most communities living around the extraction sites, as the mining industry rarely offers broad employment opportunities for local people. Likewise, there is no replacement for their cultures, as their lives are tightly intertwined with their lands and forests. The ‘local benefits’ the industry points to are often a reality for only a small number of business people and the few who gain employment.