IPNEWS: About 160km from Simandou, a Guinean iron ore mine whose $23bn price tag makes it the world’s biggest mining project, lies another reserve of even higher quality: Kon Kweni, a deposit owned by US company Ivanhoe Atlantic in the forested Nimba mountains of south-east Guinea. Ivanhoe Atlantic, founded by American-Canadian mining billionaire Robert Friedland, has positioned its mine and rail project as a Donald Trump-endorsed alternative to China-led Simandou, pledging to deliver high-grade iron ore into western supply chains. Bronwyn Barnes, president and chief executive of Ivanhoe Atlantic, said the $1.8bn project — which Ivanhoe has branded the “Liberty Corridor” — would “help counter China’s tightening grip over critical minerals”.
Ivanhoe intends to transport the ore — at 66.5 per cent purity, among the world’s finest — through neighbouring Liberia to avoid using the recently built 600km Chinese railway connecting Simandou to mainly Chinese mills via a Guinean port.
Every tonne we produce is reserved exclusively for US and allied supply chains,” Barnes said. “None will go to China.”
Ivanhoe’s attempt to wrap itself in the American flag shows the extent to which commercial deals in Africa have become embroiled in US-China rivalry. But it is a tricky thing to pull off when global capital is increasingly hard to disentangle and when African governments, wise to superpower sparring, are seeking to play off competing suitors to strike better deals. In recent days, Ivanhoe’s claims to be an America First project have run into problems both on the ground in west Africa and back at home in the US.
In Guinea, some officials have balked at an agreement, made by a previous government, to allow Ivanhoe to export its ore through Liberia. In Washington, a roughly 30 per cent Chinese stake in another Friedland-founded company, Canada’s Ivanhoe Mines, has made Ivanhoe Atlantic the object of political suspicion.
Ivanhoe says it is ready to start shipping ore in the first half of 2027, an ambition that inched closer this month after the lower house of Liberia’s House of Representative ratified an agreement to allow Ivanhoe to share a railway currently used exclusively by ArcelorMittal, the Luxembourg steelmaker.
Some Liberian officials still worry about upsetting ArcelorMittal, the country’s biggest investor. It is wary about the practicalities of sharing a railway that transports its own iron ore and in which it has invested $800mn. Paul Weigh, ArcelorMittal’s head of communications, told the Financial Times the railway was “available for others to use, providing they invest directly to develop additional capacity”.
One senior Liberian official, speaking on condition of anonymity, cast doubt on Trump’s backing for Ivanhoe Atlantic, saying that, when Liberia’s President Joseph Boakai met the US president in Washington in July, Trump appeared unfamiliar with the Liberty Corridor concept.
“They made it look as though it was something Trump wanted,” the official said, referring to Ivanhoe and backers of the project. “But when the president reached the US, he realised the Trump government was not really involved.”
Peter Pham, Ivanhoe’s chair and Trump’s former special envoy to the Great Lakes, said the US president supported the general thrust of the Liberty Corridor project, without necessarily being acquainted “with all the details”.
After a meeting in July attended by Bronwyn Barnes, Christopher Landau, Robert Friedland and Peter Pham, Ivanhoe Atlantic’s chair posted on X: ‘Grateful for support of #USA business from @POTUS admin, esp. @StateDept & @MCCgov.’ © Dr. J. Peter Pham/X But Pham, some say, has worked hard to cement the idea that Trump backs the Liberty Corridor to the hilt. After a meeting in July between Friedland, Pham and Christopher Landau, the US deputy secretary of state, Pham posted on X: “Grateful for support of #USA business from @POTUS admin, esp. @StateDept & @MCCgov.”
The latter referred to the Millennium Challenge Corporation, a US agency, which provides grants to developing countries. Three people with knowledge of meetings between the project’s backers and Liberia’s government said it had been suggested to Monrovia that it would not receive further MCC funds unless it ratified the rail legislation Ivanhoe needs.
A senior Trump administration official said: “Ivanhoe Atlantic is an American headquartered company. The administration has prioritised ensuring a secure supply chain of critical minerals, which is aided by American companies in the space.”
The State Department declined to comment. Guinea’s support is also crucial, if not guaranteed. While a previous government in 2019 signed an agreement to allow ore from Kon Kweni to be exported via Liberian rail, a senior Guinean mining official told the FT that the new government’s position had changed.
“Before the Simandou infrastructure was built, it was an option,” he said, adding that Guinea wanted to maximise income from its own resources.
“But now it is not an option.” Ivanhoe said it was confident that Guinea would stick to the 2019 agreement, which it described as a “legally binding document”. As if Ivanhoe’s hopes of getting its project over the line were not complicated enough, this month it came under attack from an unexpected quarter: a Republican member of US Congress. In a letter to US secretary of state Marco Rubio, John Moolenaar, chair of the House China committee, alleged that — far from being pro-American — Ivanhoe Atlantic was actually serving Chinese interests.
The company, he said, had “well documented ties to Chinese state-owned enterprises”. He cited, among other things, investments by China Citic and Zijin Mining in Toronto-listed copper and zinc producer Ivanhoe Mines, which Moolenaar called a “sister company” to Ivanhoe Atlantic.
Iron ore from the Simandou mine, one of the largest high-grade deposits, run by Rio Tinto and partners’ joint venture, SimFer, in Guinea © Luc Gnago/Reuters In a statement, Ivanhoe Atlantic described Moolenaar’s accusations as “grossly incorrect and misleading”.
He had confused Ivanhoe Atlantic with Ivanhoe Mines, it said, when in reality they were “separate entities with different assets, management teams and shareholders”.
The majority shareholder in Ivanhoe Atlantic is I-Pulse, a privately held company founded and chaired by Friedland. Ivanhoe Mines holds a 3.65 per cent stake in I-Pulse, making it an indirect shareholder — with roughly 1.97 per cent — in Ivanhoe Atlantic. Peter Mallin-Jones, mining analyst at Peel Hunt, said that multi-decade mining projects such as Ivanhoe’s suffered from fast-changing political winds in Washington.
“The US is really on the back foot in Africa, given the Chinese have invested in mines and infrastructure there over the last 15 years,” he said. Though Washington has increased funding for some mining-related infrastructure projects in Africa, notably the Lobito Corridor, which would link copper-producing regions in Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo to the Atlantic coast in Angola, Washington’s strategy has been less consistent than that of Beijing. US mining policy changed with each administration, Mallin-Jones said, adding that, in the Trump era, it felt like the “feudal court of the king, [in which] the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing”.
Barnes said Ivanhoe Atlantic was staying out of politics. It had received preliminary approval to float on the Australian Securities Exchange, which could proceed once Liberia ratified the rail agreement, she said.
The allegations over Ivanhoe Mines’ Chinese equity partners had come out of the blue, Barnes added. “Two years ago, this was not an issue.”
Additional reporting by Abigail Hauslohner in Washington
