Global mining’s dangerous new reality: Guns, hostages, arrests
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Neil Warburton was finishing up his breakfast of porridge and local honey when the armed soldiers converged. The Australian veteran mining executive had flown to southern Ethiopia in 2023 to check on progress at his lithium mine.
One of the largest undeveloped lithium projects in the world, it was supposed to start production in late 2024, selling spodumene concentrate that would end up in batteries for electric vehicles and other products. That plan has gone seriously—and perhaps irreversibly—awry. The mine, with around $2 billion at stake, is among a number of projects around the world caught in an increasingly tense geopolitical struggle for valuable metals and minerals.
Two world superpowers—the U.S. and China—are bankrolling much of the investment to power their economies, which in turn is leading developing countries where the mines are located to push for a greater slice of the profits. At about 7:30 a.m.
on Oct. 16, 2023, Warburton was dining with the mine site manager and geologists when an army colonel arrived and ordered all expats off the site, citing a security issue. Warburton spied machine guns cradled in soldiers’ arms and mounted on white pickup trucks.
Dozens of soldiers flanked the dozen or so expats, then drove them away from the mine to a nearby town. “It was scary," said Warburton, executive chairman of an Abyssinian Group company. “They were army soldiers with automatic weapons.
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