In December, Anglo-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto announced that it was set to spend $6.2 billion on mining the rich, high-grade iron ore deposits of eastern Guinea’s Simandou Mountains, with production beginning in 2025. The eye-watering figure spoke to the project’s importance: after 25 years of stop-and-start progress, if it reaches Rio Tinto’s shipping target of 60 million metric tons per year, Simandou will be one of the largest iron mines on Earth. Rio Tinto Simfer, the miner’s joint venture with China’s Chalco Iron Ore Holdings and Guinea’s ruling military junta, is poised to reap a major windfall from the deposits, which have a rare purity grade of over 65%. That will make the ore suitable for so-called green hydrogen-based steelmaking, and ensures it will be in high demand from companies looking to move away from coal-based blast furnaces in order to reach their net-zero emissions targets. Down the road in the nearby Nimba mountain range, another long-delayed iron mining project is slowly kicking into gear, as the Société des Mines de Fer de Guinée (SMFG) a subsidiary of U.S.-based High Power Exploration (HPX) moves forward with feasibility studies. If they reach full production, the mines at the Simandou and Nimba ranges will turn Guinea into one of the world’s top exporters of high-quality iron ore. But conservationists say that along with the impacts on communities living near the mines, critically endangered western chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes verus) in Guinea may become a casualty of the renewed iron rush. At least…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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