Originally published on LinkedIn on 22 October 2026. This work is AI-assisted - read about how I work.
Kisanfu Copper-Cobalt Mine, DRC: One deposit. Two different portfolio decisions. And 2024 cobalt output equivalent to over a quarter of the worlds cobalt mine production. (Mining is Human, Story 90)
In December 2020, CMOC and Freeport described the same asset in strikingly different terms.
CMOC called Kisanfu strategic. Freeport called it “a large, undeveloped cobalt and copper resource” that had been “no longer strategic” since it sold neighbouring Tenke Fungurume in 2016. That was a judgement about Kisanfu’s place in Freeport’s portfolio, not about whether the deposit itself was significant.
CMOC paid US$550m, including the special capital-gains tax payable to the DRC, for the two Freeport holding companies that owned 95% of the project company. The DRC government held the other 5%.
Four months later, CMOC agreed to sell 25% of KFM Holding to a company controlled by Chinese battery maker CATL for US$137.5m. That equated to 23.75% of the mine.
At acquisition, CMOC used Freeport’s database to estimate a 365 Mt resource at Kisanfu, grading 1.72% copper and 0.85% cobalt. Across the whole project, that contained about 6.28 Mt of copper and 3.10 Mt of cobalt. In contained-metal terms, that cobalt was equivalent to more than ten years of total world cobalt mine production at the 2024 rate. But that was an estimate of what was in the ground, not what could necessarily be mined, and more than half of it still needed further drilling to confirm its scale and grade.
Kisanfu sits in Lualaba Province, about 33 km southwest of Tenke Fungurume.
Construction stripping began in April 2021. In 2024, CMOC Kisanfu Mining reported 200,013 t of copper cathode and 85,917 t of cobalt contained in hydroxide. USGS put world cobalt mine output that year at 302,000 t. Kisanfu’s output was equivalent to 28.4% of that.
CMOC says Phase II is expected to start production in 2027, adding 7.26 Mt/y of ore-processing capacity and about 100,000 t/y of copper.
Freeport had already stepped away from Tenke Fungurume and no longer saw Kisanfu as strategic to its portfolio. CMOC made a different judgement. Four years later, Kisanfu was producing cobalt on a scale that mattered globally.
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Image: Kisanfu website