On the one hand Katanga, deep Congo, the Democratic Republic, recite the geopolitical cards, on the other the Sulcis, deep southern Sardinia, a region that was once a Kingdom. Between Lubumbashi, the capital of the boundless African province, and Portovesme, the industrial capital of the Nuraghi Island, there are six thousand kilometers away. Until yesterday, nothing to share. On the one hand, life below the poverty line, borderless cobalt mining, with 80% of the world's extraction and children enslaved. On the other, industrial development, closed factories, lead and zinc mines abandoned for at least thirty years, deaths from respiratory diseases 50% higher than the regional average.
The "south" & the intelligence
In Katanga nobody knows anything about Sulcis and vice versa. Yet for months those opposite poles, those “south” of Congo and Sardinia, have been looking at each other through secret papers, quiet reflections, hidden projects. The news in December last year seemed surreal and without documentary evidence: according to an informant inside the industrial "intelligence" a group of technicians and engineers was working on a project by a Swiss multinational to build a production line for a "rare material" in Sulcis ". In reality, the information from the encrypted code was limited to an acronym: Co, or Cobalt. A mineral that jumped to the headlines when, on the threshold of 2020, the green era transformed from a green strategy for 2050 to the task of 2030. A raw material considered fundamental in the scenario of batteries for electrical storage, the necessary one to push “green” cars to zero emissions performance. In an instant, the cobalt race has become a war to grab fields in the most distant continents, perhaps to be exploited with cheap labor, at the risk of health and life.
Blown
The "tip" of a "Cobalto Sulcis" project, however, was still in its embryo, destined to wait for some jolt to be circumscribed and, with all caution, possibly disclosed. The tam tam of the industrial undergrowth linked to the international metallurgical lobbies has continued to record ever more insistent boatos, with an increasingly marked reference to a production line to be placed alongside the industrial productions of Sulcis.
The Swiss
The scenario did not have many variables: on the one hand the Swiss Glencore, a real world giant of primary metallurgy, the first world cobalt producer, at the head of the largest mines in Congo, engaged, in the plant that belonged to Eni, to produce lead and zinc, on the other hand a new Swiss company, Sider Alloys, fully financed by the Italian state to restart the primary aluminum plant that belonged to the American multinational Alcoa. The first to discover the cards, however, was Glencore, the multinational that manages the Portovesme Srl plant in Sulcis, the only production entity that remained standing until yesterday.
The clue to Rome
In the building that once belonged to Industry, in the capital of Rome, the company that extracts lead from the fumes of steel mills around the world reports that it has stopped. Energy costs too much. For an energy-intensive industry, the price is out of the market. That plant has always run with an electricity cost of less than 30 euros per megawatt / hour, the cost, according to the speculation market, in the era of the new Russia-Ukraine war, however, broke through the ceiling of 300 euro per megawatt / hour. The proposals made by the government to mitigate the energy cost have proved useless, ineffective, unable to give even the slightest response to the emergency. The Energy Release decree proposed by the Draghi government was, in short, yet another hole in the water.
Serrata for the lead
The Swiss do not get lost in chatter and confirm the lockout of the lead line. Devastating news in an area burned by unemployment, the closure of Alcoa for ten years and thirteen of Eurallumina. The news, however, is accompanied by a half "tip": Portovesme srl has started the study for the production of raw materials for the batteries of the future. In an instant the circle of the blow narrows. The combination is linked to two key elements: Glencore is the largest cobalt producer in the world and the European Union, as part of its green plan, is running a sea of money to produce the "raw materials rare ”for the production of batteries.
Elon Musk & the Sulcis
The prices of cobalt, therefore, put out of use the lead and zinc plants, to trigger a new economic war on rare materials. Glencore does not reveal its cards, but it certainly does not intend to leave the European game of cobalt to others, fundamental in the production of lithium batteries, ready to replace lead ones. The identity card of the Swiss multinational is eloquent: the world's leading producer of cobalt extracted mainly as a by-product of copper in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In this scenario, Glencore has already signed a strategic agreement with Elon Musk for the supply of cobalt for the batteries of Tesla cars to be produced in China and Germany. However, there are relevant issues at stake. The first: what does cobalt have to do with Sardinia? The second: what will the repercussions of its production be on the environment and human health in Sulcis? Never premature questions. After all, the history of Sulcis is an open lesson.