US Aims to Boost Trade With Africa to Challenge China on Key Minerals

It’s unclear whether Donald Trump or Kamala Harris will triumph in the Nov. 5 presidential election, but one thing’s for sure: America’s next leader must ensure it doesn’t lose out in the competition to secure supplies of key minerals needed to produce clean energy.

More than a fifth of the world’s reserves for minerals essential to the green-energy transition — including cobalt, copper, nickel and lithium — are in Africa, and China has more operational mines on the continent to tap them than the US does. That makes the world’s biggest economy vulnerable to supply disruptions and surges in the prices of inputs used in technologies such as lithium-ion batteries, fuel cells and wind energy.