BUSINESS DAY
From high-end smartphones to electric cars, the demand for lithium is outstripping the ability to extract it from the earth. Nigeria’s large metal deposit provides an opportunity to cash in on the world’s hottest mineral.
Driven by battery demand, lithium increased by 10.81 per cent in the first half of this year, making it the best-performing commodity and one of only two that recorded a positive return — the other being gold, according to an analysis by U.S. Global Investors, Inc., a fund manager with millions of dollars in assets under management.
“Every other commodity that we follow lost ground during the six months as global manufacturing activity receded and China’s economy, historically a major demand engine, delivered a disappointing rebound after ending three years of pandemic lock-downs,” Frank Holmes, CEO of U.S. Global Investors, said in an investor note.
Nigeria can get into an industry still considered mainly on the ground floor. Discoveries of lithium deposits in Plateau, Oyo and Kaduna states allow the country to craft better policies than it did with other minerals like gold.
Before the announcement by Thor Explorations Ltd that initial drilling results from its search for lithium in Oyo State had returned significant potential, Kian Smith Trade & Co, a Nigerian mining company, in 2018 announced that it had discovered 15,000 tonnes of lithium ore – commercial quantities – in the country.
Last month, a Chinese firm, Landmark Lithium Mining Company, said it was building a lithium factory in Nasarawa State that would produce about 3000 tonnes of lithium per day at an estimated cost of $100 million.
Last year, The Nigerian government said high-grade lithium discovered in the country had been attracting foreign investors. Abdulrazaq Garba, director-general of the Nigerian Geological Survey Agency, told journalists in Abuja that a national mapping programme had yielded high-grade lithium.
“High grade in the sense that the standard worldwide for even exploration and mining starts from 0.4 per cent lithium oxide, but when we started exploration and mining, we saw one per cent up to 13 per cent lithium oxide content,” he said.
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