Atlantic Lithium is the company working towards building Ghana’s first lithium mine.
I have written quite a bit about why their investment plans should be made to align with the value addition provisions of Ghana’s Green Mining Policy before Parliament ratifies their lease.
When I saw them recently raising $6.7 million to “advance” the project closer to a “final investment decision“, it suddenly hit me that I haven’t actually ever gone to the “ground” to track their project footprint.
So this week I did.
I was unlucky, though. Let me explain by listing the short highlights of my trek.
1. Locals in Ewoyaa that we spoke to said that all activities seemed to have ceased since June of this year. Hence, rather sadly, there is nothing going on to video and photograph.
2. Notwithstanding my misfortune, I still found the trip quite useful in getting a deeper sense of how the whole lithium saga would play out. I never fully appreciated how small Ewoyaa is. I could barely count 50 houses. Press coverage suggesting that hundreds of locals will get jobs create the impression of a sizeable town.
3. The proper way of looking at things is that the mining is expected to happen in multiple sites in and around the Mfantseman municipal area and the named communities are merely those whose villages are closest. They have farms and common areas impacted by the mining. The main villages are Anokyi, Abonko, Krampakrom, Afrangua, Krofu, Ewoyaa, and Ansaadze. Naming the project, “Ewoyaa” is thus merely to adopt a convenient label.
4. We spent some time at one of the locations closest to Ewoyaa, where we saw the containers used in earlier exploratory campaigns sitting idle.
5. The physical presence of Atlantic Lithium is captured in a few non-descript residential-style bungalows in Bafikrom, closer to the main Mankessim township, about ten kilometers away from Ewoyaa. It is a setting perfectly suited to a startup. The general break in operations could be felt here too.
6. Being on the ground made me question whether Atlantic Lithium can actually deliver on its strategy, as disclosed in its definitive feasibility study, of having an outsourced operation at first whereby the contractors would deploy a modular plant to start operations until the main plant comes onstream. I don’t think the planned investment of less than $16 million would be realistic. Many of the sites are farther away from tarred roads and high-voltage transmission lines than is suggested in the feasibility study. The feasibility plan may have to be revised ahead of the final investment decision.
7. Living quarters for staff in the area, with attendant requirements for utilities etc., may be necessary since the villages closest to the operational areas don’t seem to have the requisite manpower. Workers would probably be coming from the Mankessim and Saltpond area. There are no simple public transport links. Shuttles might work, though.
8. It was curious seeing that some villages, like Ewoyaa, have the requisite Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) notices required for the public consultations displayed on boards, but others don’t. The very dispersed nature of the whole operation makes one wonder what the exact catchment area for the consultations was. The obvious approach would be to say that it covers the whole of Mfantseman but that would suggest a consultative process of much wider scope than is probably realistic. At any rate, the consultations that took place were rather localised.
On that last point, I did make an effort to get a sense of how locals thought about the project. For the most part, they seemed to have concluded that it is not imminent, that it is still far off in the future, and was thus not something to really bother with.
This is quite different from the impression created in Accra, not least by some chiefs from the area who show up once in a while in the capital, of hordes of indigenes baying for jobs in the mines and demanding them immediately.
Next year would be very interesting. The outgoing government refused to publicly engage Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) about the contents of the Green Mining Policy, which remains unpublished till date. Hopefully, the incoming administration would be more transparent and insist on greater policy consultations ahead of the lease’s ratification by Parliament.